pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Linguistic knowledge for specialized text production
Authors: Miriam Buend{\'\i}a-Castro, Beatriz S{\'a}nchez-C{\'a}rdenas
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper outlines a proposal for encoding and describing verb phrase constructions in the knowledge base on the environment EcoLexicon, with the objective of helping translators in specialized text production. In order to be able to propose our own template, the characteristics and limitations of the most representative terminographic resources that include phraseological information were analyzed, along with the theoretical background that underlies the verb meaning argument structure in EcoLexicon. Our description provides evidence of the fact that this kind of entry structure can be easily encoded in other languages.
The IMAGACT Cross-linguistic Ontology of Action. A new infrastructure for natural language disambiguation
Authors: Massimo Moneglia, Monica Monachini, Omar Calabrese, Aless Panunzi, ro, Francesca Frontini, Gloria Gagliardi, Irene Russo
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation

Action verbs, which are highly frequent in speech, cause disambiguation problems that are relevant to Language Technologies. This is a consequence of the peculiar way each natural language categorizes Action i.e. it is a consequence of semantic factors. Action verbs are frequently general, since they extend productively to actions belonging to different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes action in its own way and therefore the cross-linguistic reference to everyday activities is puzzling. This paper briefly sketches the IMAGACT project, which aims at setting up a cross-linguistic Ontology of Action for grounding disambiguation tasks in this crucial area of the lexicon. The project derives information on the actual variation of action verbs in English and Italian from spontaneous speech corpora, where references to action are high in frequency. Crucially it makes use of the universal language of images to identify action types, avoiding the underdeterminacy of semantic definitions. Action concept entries are implemented as prototypic scenes; this will make it easier to extend the Ontology to other languages.
HamleDT: To Parse or Not to Parse?
Authors: Daniel Zeman, David Mare{\v{c}}ek, Martin Popel, Loganathan Ramasamy, Jan {\v{S}}t{\v{e}}p{\'a}nek, Zden{\v{e}}k {\v{Z}}abokrtsk{\'y}, Jan Haji{\v{c}}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

We propose HamleDT â€• HArmonized Multi-LanguagE Dependency Treebank. HamleDT is a compilation of existing dependency treebanks (or dependency conversions of other treebanks), transformed so that they all conform to the same annotation style. While the license terms prevent us from directly redistributing the corpora, most of them are easily acquirable for research purposes. What we provide instead is the software that normalizes tree structures in the data obtained by the user from their original providers.
FreeLing 3.0: Towards Wider Multilinguality
Authors: Llu{\'\i}s Padr{\'o}, Evgeny Stanilovsky
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Morphological Analysis

FreeLing is an open-source multilingual language processing library providing a wide range of analyzers for several languages. It offers text processing and language annotation facilities to NLP application developers, lowering the cost of building those applications. FreeLing is customizable, extensible, and has a strong orientation to real-world applications in terms of speed and robustness. Developers can use the default linguistic resources (dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, etc.), extend/adapt them to specific domains, or --since the library is open source-- develop new ones for specific languages or special application needs. This paper describes the general architecture of the library, presents the major changes and improvements included in FreeLing version 3.0, and summarizes some relevant industrial projects in which it has been used.
Evaluating Appropriateness Of System Responses In A Spoken CALL Game
Authors: Manny Rayner, Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Speech Recognition

We describe an experiment carried out using a French version of CALL-SLT, a web-enabled CALL game in which students at each turn are prompted to give a semi-free spoken response which the system then either accepts or rejects. The central question we investigate is whether the response is appropriate; we do this by extracting pairs of utterances where both members of the pair are responses by the same student to the same prompt, and where one response is accepted and one rejected. When the two spoken responses are presented in random order, native speakers show a reasonable degree of agreement in judging that the accepted utterance is better than the rejected one. We discuss the significance of the results and also present a small study supporting the claim that native speakers are nearly always recognised by the system, while non-native speakers are rejected a significant proportion of the time.
A Scalable Architecture For Web Deployment of Spoken Dialogue Systems
Authors: Matthew Fuchs, Nikos Tsourakis, Manny Rayner
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Dialogue Systems, Translation

We describe a scalable architecture, particularly well-suited to cloud-based computing, which can be used for Web-deployment of spoken dialogue systems. In common with similar platforms, like WAMI and the Nuance Mobile Developer Platform, we use a client/server approach in which speech recognition is carried out on the server side; our architecture, however, differs from these systems in offering considerably more elaborate server-side functionality, based on large-scale grammar-based language processing and generic dialogue management. We describe two substantial applications, built using our framework, which we argue would have been hard to construct in WAMI or NMDP. Finally, we present a series of evaluations carried out using CALL-SLT, a speech translation game, where we contrast performance in Web and desktop versions. Task Error Rate in the Web version is only slightly inferior that in the desktop one, and the average additional latency is under half a second. The software is generally available for research purposes.
Semantic metadata mapping in practice: the Virtual Language Observatory
Authors: Dieter Van Uytvanck, Herman Stehouwer, Lari Lampen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper we present the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO), a metadata-based portal for language resources. It is completely based on the Component Metadata (CMDI) and ISOcat standards. This approach allows for the use of heterogeneous metadata schemas while maintaining the semantic compatibility. We describe the metadata harvesting process, based on OAI-PMH, and the conversion from several formats (OLAC, IMDI and the CLARIN LRT inventory) to their CMDI counterpart profiles. Then we focus on some post-processing steps to polish the harvested records. Next, the ingestion of the CMDI files into the VLO facet browser is described. We also include an overview of the changes since the first version of the VLO, based on user feedback from the CLARIN community. Finally there is an overview of additional ideas and improvements for future versions of the VLO.
The Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC)
Authors: Eir{\'\i}kur R{\"o}gnvaldsson, Anton Karl Ingason, Einar Freyr Sigur{\dh}sson, Joel Wallenberg
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We describe the background for and building of IcePaHC, a one million word parsed historical corpus of Icelandic which has just been finished. This corpus which is completely free and open contains fragments of 60 texts ranging from the late 12th century to the present. We describe the text selection and text collecting process and discuss the quality of the texts and their conversion to modern Icelandic spelling. We explain why we choose to use a phrase structure Penn style annotation scheme and briefly describe the syntactic anno-tation process. We also describe a spin-off project which is only in its beginning stages: a parsed historical corpus of Faroese. Finally, we advocate the importance of an open source policy as regards language resources.
Empty Argument Insertion in the Hindi PropBank
Authors: Ashwini Vaidya, Jinho D. Choi, Martha Palmer, Bhuvana Narasimhan
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling

This paper examines both linguistic behavior and practical implication of empty argument insertion in the Hindi PropBank. The Hindi PropBank is annotated on the Hindi Dependency Treebank, which contains some empty categories but not the empty arguments of verbs. In this paper, we analyze four kinds of empty arguments, *PRO*, *REL*, *GAP*, *pro*, and suggest effective ways of annotating these arguments. Empty arguments such as *PRO* and *REL* can be inserted deterministically; we present linguistically motivated rules that automatically insert these arguments with high accuracy. On the other hand, it is difficult to find deterministic rules to insert *GAP* and *pro*; for these arguments, we introduce a new annotation scheme that concurrently handles both semantic role labeling and empty category insertion, producing fast and high quality annotation. In addition, we present algorithms for finding antecedents of *REL* and *PRO*, and discuss why finding antecedents for some types of *PRO* is difficult.
A Rough Set Formalization of Quantitative Evaluation with Ambiguity
Authors: Patrick Paroubek, Xavier Tannier
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we present the founding elements of a formal model of the evaluation paradigm in natural language processing. We propose an abstract model of objective quantitative evaluation based on rough sets, as well as the notion of potential performance space for describing the performance variations corresponding to the ambiguity present in hypothesis data produced by a computer program, when comparing it to the reference data created by humans. A formal model of the evaluation paradigm will be useful for comparing evaluations protocols, investigating evaluation constraint relaxation and getting a better understanding of the evaluation paradigm, provided it is general enough to be able to represent any natural language processing task.
A Richly Annotated, Multilingual Parallel Corpus for Hybrid Machine Translation
Authors: Eleftherios Avramidis, Marta R. Costa-juss{\`a}, Christian Federmann, Josef van Genabith, Maite Melero, Pavel Pecina
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In recent years, machine translation (MT) research has focused on investigating how hybrid machine translation as well as system combination approaches can be designed so that the resulting hybrid translations show an improvement over the individual component translations. As a first step towards achieving this objective we have developed a parallel corpus with source text and the corresponding translation output from a number of machine translation engines, annotated with metadata information, capturing aspects of the translation process performed by the different MT systems. This corpus aims to serve as a basic resource for further research on whether hybrid machine translation algorithms and system combination techniques can benefit from additional (linguistically motivated, decoding, and runtime) information provided by the different systems involved. In this paper, we describe the annotated corpus we have created. We provide an overview on the component MT systems and the XLIFF-based annotation format we have developed. We also report on first experiments with the ML4HMT corpus data.
The goo300k corpus of historical Slovene
Authors: Toma{\v{z}} Erjavec
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: LEMMA, Lemmatization, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The paper presents a gold-standard reference corpus of historical Slovene containing 1,000 sampled pages from over 80 texts, which were, for the most part, written between 1750-1900. Each page of the transcription has an associated facsimile and the words in the texts have been manually annotated with their modern-day equivalent, lemma and part-of-speech. The paper presents the structure of the text collection, the sampling procedure, annotation process and encoding of the corpus. The corpus is meant to facilitate HLT research and enable corpus based diachronic studies for historical Slovene. The corpus is encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI P5), is available via a concordancer and for download from http://nl.ijs.si/imp/ under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Inforex -- a web-based tool for text corpus management and semantic annotation
Authors: Micha{\l} Marci{\'n}czuk, Jan Koco{\'n}, Bartosz Broda
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentence, Sentence segmentation, text annotation, Text Segmentation, Word Sense Disambiguation

The aim of this paper is to present a system for semantic text annotation called Inforex. Inforex is a web-based system designed for managing and annotating text corpora on the semantic level including annotation of Named Entities (NE), anaphora, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and relations between named entities. The system also supports manual text clean-up and automatic text pre-processing including text segmentation, morphosyntactic analysis and word selection for word sense annotation. Inforex can be accessed from any standard-compliant web browser supporting JavaScript. The user interface has a form of dynamic HTML pages using the AJAX technology. The server part of the system is written in PHP and the data is stored in MySQL database. The system make use of some external tools that are installed on the server or can be accessed via web services. The documents are stored in the database in the original format â€• either plain text, XML or HTML. Tokenization and sentence segmentation is optional and is stored in a separate table. Tokens are stored as pairs of values representing indexes of first and last character of the tokens and sets of features representing the morpho-syntactic information.
A new semantically annotated corpus with syntactic-semantic and cross-lingual senses
Authors: Myriam Rakho, {\'E}ric Laporte, Matthieu Constant
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this article, we describe a new sense-tagged corpus for Word Sense Disambiguation. The corpus is constituted of instances of 20 French polysemous verbs. Each verb instance is annotated with three sense labels: (1) the actual translation of the verb in the english version of this instance in a parallel corpus, (2) an entry of the verb in a computational dictionary of French (the Lexicon-Grammar tables) and (3) a fine-grained sense label resulting from the concatenation of the translation and the Lexicon-Grammar entry.
Recent Developments in CLARIN-NL
Authors: Jan Odijk
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper we describe recent developments in the CLARIN-NL project with the goal of sharing information on and experiences in this project with the community outside of the Netherlands. We discuss a variety of subprojects to actually implement the infrastructure, to provide functionality for search in metadata and the actual data, resource curation and demonstration projects, the Data Curation Service, actions to improve semantic interoperability and coordinate work on it, involvement of CLARIN Data Providers, education and training, outreach activities, and cooperation with other projects. Based on these experiences, we provide some recommendations for related projects. The recommendations concern a variety of topics including the organisation of an infrastructure project as a function of the types of tasks that have to be carried out, involvement of the targeted users, metadata, semantic interoperability and the role of registries, measures to maximally ensure sustainability, and cooperation with similar projects in other countries.
Unsupervised acquisition of concatenative morphology
Authors: Lionel Nicolas, Jacques Farr{\'e}, C{\'e}cile Darme
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Morphological Inflection

Among the linguistic resources formalizing a language, morphological rules are among those that can be achieved in a reasonable time. Nevertheless, since the construction of such resource can require linguistic expertise, morphological rules are still lacking for many languages. The automatized acquisition of morphology is thus an open topic of interest within the NLP field. We present an approach that allows to automatically compute, from raw corpora, a data-representative description of the concatenative mechanisms of a morphology. Our approach takes advantage of phenomena that are observable for all languages using morphological inflection and derivation but are more easy to exploit when dealing with concatenative mechanisms. Since it has been developed toward the objective of being used on as many languages as possible, applying this approach to a varied set of languages needs very few expert work. The results obtained for our first participation in the 2010 edition of MorphoChallenge have confirmed both the practical interest and the potential of the method.
Massively Increasing TIMEX3 Resources: A Transduction Approach
Authors: Leon Derczynski, H{\'e}ctor Llorens, Estela Saquete
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Automatic annotation of temporal expressions is a research challenge of great interest in the field of information extraction. Gold standard temporally-annotated resources are limited in size, which makes research using them difficult. Standards have also evolved over the past decade, so not all temporally annotated data is in the same format. We vastly increase available human-annotated temporal expression resources by converting older format resources to TimeML/TIMEX3. This task is difficult due to differing annotation methods. We present a robust conversion tool and a new, large temporal expression resource. Using this, we evaluate our conversion process by using it as training data for an existing TimeML annotation tool, achieving a 0.87 F1 measure - better than any system in the TempEval-2 timex recognition exercise.
Constructing Large Proposition Databases
Authors: Peter Exner, Pierre Nugues
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Semantic Dependency Parsing, Semantic Parsing

With the advent of massive online encyclopedic corpora such as Wikipedia, it has become possible to apply a systematic analysis to a wide range of documents covering a significant part of human knowledge. Using semantic parsers, it has become possible to extract such knowledge in the form of propositions (predicateâ€•argument structures) and build large proposition databases from these documents. This paper describes the creation of multilingual proposition databases using generic semantic dependency parsing. Using Wikipedia, we extracted, processed, clustered, and evaluated a large number of propositions. We built an architecture to provide a complete pipeline dealing with the input of text, extraction of knowledge, storage, and presentation of the resulting propositions.
Visualizing Sentiment Analysis on a User Forum
Authors: Rasmus Sundberg, Anders Eriksson, Johan Bini, Pierre Nugues
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Question Answering, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is the process of extracting sentiment from documents or sentences, where the expressed sentiment is typically categorized as positive, negative, or neutral. Many different techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we report the reimplementation of nine algorithms and their evaluation across four corpora to assess the sentiment at the sentence level. We extracted the named entities from each sentence and we associated them with the sentence sentiment. We built a graphical module based on the Qlikview software suite to visualize the sentiments attached to named entities mentioned in Internet forums and follow opinion changes over time.
Towards Automatic Gesture Stroke Detection
Authors: Binyam Gebrekidan Gebre, Peter Wittenburg, Przemyslaw Lenkiewicz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Diversity

Automatic annotation of gesture strokes is important for many gesture and sign language researchers. The unpredictable diversity of human gestures and video recording conditions require that we adopt a more adaptive case-by-case annotation model. In this paper, we present a work-in progress annotation model that allows a user to a) track hands/face b) extract features c) distinguish strokes from non-strokes. The hands/face tracking is done with color matching algorithms and is initialized by the user. The initialization process is supported with immediate visual feedback. Sliders are also provided to support a user-friendly adjustment of skin color ranges. After successful initialization, features related to positions, orientations and speeds of tracked hands/face are extracted using unique identifiable features (corners) from a window of frames and are used for training a learning algorithm. Our preliminary results for stroke detection under non-ideal video conditions are promising and show the potential applicability of our methodology.
Semantic Role Labeling with the Swedish FrameNet
Authors: Richard Johansson, Karin Friberg Heppin, Dimitrios Kokkinakis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling

We present the first results on semantic role labeling using the Swedish FrameNet, which is a lexical resource currently in development. Several aspects of the task are investigated, including the {\%}design and selection of machine learning features, the effect of choice of syntactic parser, and the ability of the system to generalize to new frames and new genres. In addition, we evaluate two methods to make the role label classifier more robust: cross-frame generalization and cluster-based features. Although the small amount of training data limits the performance achievable at the moment, we reach promising results. In particular, the classifier that extracts the boundaries of arguments works well for new frames, which suggests that it already at this stage can be useful in a semi-automatic setting.
Prague Dependency Style Treebank for Tamil
Authors: Loganathan Ramasamy, Zden{\v{e}}k {\v{Z}}abokrtsk{\'y}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

Annotated corpora such as treebanks are important for the development of parsers, language applications as well as understanding of the language itself. Only very few languages possess these scarce resources. In this paper, we describe our efforts in syntactically annotating a small corpora (600 sentences) of Tamil language. Our annotation is similar to Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and consists of annotation at 2 levels or layers: (i) morphological layer (m-layer) and (ii) analytical layer (a-layer). For both the layers, we introduce annotation schemes i.e. positional tagging for m-layer and dependency relations for a-layers. Finally, we discuss some of the issues in treebank development for Tamil.