pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
To Pay or to Get Paid: Enriching a Valency Lexicon with Diatheses
Authors: Anna Vernerov{\'a}, V{\'a}clava Kettnerov{\'a}, Mark{\'e}ta Lopatkov{\'a}
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

Valency lexicons typically describe only unmarked usages of verbs (the active form); however, verbs prototypically enter different surface structures. In this paper, we focus on the so-called diatheses, i.e., the relations between different surface syntactic manifestations of verbs that are brought about by changes in the morphological category of voice, e.g., the passive diathesis. The change in voice of a verb is prototypically associated with shifts of some of its valency complementations in the surface structure. These shifts are implied by changes in morphemic forms of the involved valency complementations and are regular enough to be captured by syntactic rules. However, as diatheses are lexically conditioned, their applicability to an individual lexical unit of a verb is not predictable from its valency frame alone. In this work, we propose a representation of this linguistic phenomenon in a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX, with the aim to enhance this lexicon with the information on individual types of Czech diatheses. In order to reduce the amount of necessary manual annotation, a semi-automatic method is developed. This method draws evidence from a large morphologically annotated corpus, relying on grammatical constraints on the applicability of individual types of diatheses.
UM-Corpus: A Large English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation
Authors: Liang Tian, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao, Paulo Quaresma, Francisco Oliveira, Yi Lu, Shuo Li, Yiming Wang, Long-Yue Wang
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Domain Adaptation, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Retrieval, Translation

Parallel corpus is a valuable resource for cross-language information retrieval and data-driven natural language processing systems, especially for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). However, most existing parallel corpora to Chinese are subject to in-house use, while others are domain specific and limited in size. To a certain degree, this limits the SMT research. This paper describes the acquisition of a large scale and high quality parallel corpora for English and Chinese. The corpora constructed in this paper contain about 15 million English-Chinese (E-C) parallel sentences, and more than 2 million training data and 5,000 testing sentences are made publicly available. Different from previous work, the corpus is designed to embrace eight different domains. Some of them are further categorized into different topics. The corpus will be released to the research community, which is available at the NLP2CT website.
IXA pipeline: Efficient and Ready to Use Multilingual NLP tools
Authors: Rodrigo Agerri, Josu Bermudez, German Rigau
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Coreference Resolution, Multilingual NLP, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part-Of-Speech Tagging

IXA pipeline is a modular set of Natural Language Processing tools (or pipes) which provide easy access to NLP technology. It offers robust and efficient linguistic annotation to both researchers and non-NLP experts with the aim of lowering the barriers of using NLP technology either for research purposes or for small industrial developers and SMEs. IXA pipeline can be used {``}as is{''} or exploit its modularity to pick and change different components. Given its open-source nature, it can also be modified and extended for it to work with other languages. This paper describes the general data-centric architecture of IXA pipeline and presents competitive results in several NLP annotations for English and Spanish.
Annotating the Focus of Negation in Japanese Text
Authors: Suguru Matsuyoshi, Ryo Otsuki, Fumiyo Fukumoto
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Negation, Opinion Mining, Question Answering, Sentence

This paper proposes an annotation scheme for the focus of negation in Japanese text. Negation has its scope and the focus within the scope. The scope of negation is the part of the sentence that is negated; the focus is the part of the scope that is most prominently or explicitly negated. In natural language processing, correct interpretation of negated statements requires precise detection of the focus of negation in the statements. As a foundation for developing a negation focus detector for Japanese, we have annotated textdata of {``}Rakuten Travel: User review data{''} and the newspaper subcorpus of the {``}Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese{''} with labels proposed in our annotation scheme. We report 1,327 negation cues and the foci in the corpora, and present classification of these foci based on syntactic types and semantic types. We also propose a system for detecting the focus of negation in Japanese using 16 heuristic rules and report the performance of the system.
NIF4OGGD - NLP Interchange Format for Open German Governmental Data
Authors: Mohamed Sherif, S Coelho, ro, Ricardo Usbeck, Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Martin Br{\"u}mmer, Andreas Both
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Decision Making

In the last couple of years the amount of structured open government data has increased significantly. Already now, citizens are able to leverage the advantages of open data through increased transparency and better opportunities to take part in governmental decision making processes. Our approach increases the interoperability of existing but distributed open governmental datasets by converting them to the RDF-based NLP Interchange Format (NIF). Furthermore, we integrate the converted data into a geodata store and present a user interface for querying this data via a keyword-based search. The language resource generated in this project is publicly available for download and also via a dedicated SPARQL endpoint.
A Gold Standard for CLIR evaluation in the Organic Agriculture Domain
Authors: Alessio Bosca, Matteo Casu, Matteo Dragoni, Nikolaos Marianos
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

We present a gold standard for the evaluation of Cross Language Information Retrieval systems in the domain of Organic Agriculture and AgroEcology. The presented resource is free to use for research purposes and it includes a collection of multilingual documents annotated with respect to a domain ontology, the ontology used for annotating the resources, a set of 48 queries in 12 languages and a gold standard with the correct resources for the proposed queries. The goal of this work consists in contributing to the research community with a resource for evaluating multilingual retrieval algorithms, with particular focus on domain adaptation strategies for general purpose multilingual information retrieval systems and on the effective exploitation of semantic annotations. Domain adaptation is in fact an important activity for tuning the retrieval system, reducing the ambiguities and improving the precision of information retrieval. Domain ontologies constitute a diffuse practice for defining the conceptual space of a corpus and mapping resources to specific topics and in our lab we propose as well to investigate and evaluate the impact of this information in enhancing the retrieval of contents. An initial experiment is described, giving a baseline for further research with the proposed gold standard.
Heuristic Hyper-minimization of Finite State Lexicons
Authors: Senka Drobac, Krister Lind{\'e}n, Tommi Pirinen, Miikka Silfverberg
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

Flag diacritics, which are special multi-character symbols executed at runtime, enable optimising finite-state networks by combining identical sub-graphs of its transition graph. Traditionally, the feature has required linguists to devise the optimisations to the graph by hand alongside the morphological description. In this paper, we present a novel method for discovering flag positions in morphological lexicons automatically, based on the morpheme structure implicit in the language description. With this approach, we have gained significant decrease in the size of finite-state networks while maintaining reasonable application speed. The algorithm can be applied to any language description, where the biggest achievements are expected in large and complex morphologies. The most noticeable reduction in size we got with a morphological transducer for Greenlandic, whose original size is on average about 15 times larger than other morphologies. With the presented hyper-minimization method, the transducer is reduced to 10,1{\%} of the original size, with lookup speed decreased only by 9,5{\%}.
META-SHARE: One year after
Authors: Stelios Piperidis, Harris Papageorgiou, Christian Spurk, Georg Rehm, Khalid Choukri, Olivier Hamon, Nicoletta Calzolari, Riccardo Del Gratta, Bernardo Magnini, Christian Girardi
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

This paper presents META-SHARE (www.meta-share.eu), an open language resource infrastructure, and its usage since its Europe-wide deployment in early 2013. META-SHARE is a network of repositories that store language resources (data, tools and processing services) documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inventories allowing for uniform search and access. META-SHARE was developed by META-NET (www.meta-net.eu) and aims to serve as an important component of a language technology marketplace for researchers, developers, professionals and industrial players, catering for the full development cycle of language technology, from research through to innovative products and services. The observed usage in its initial steps, the steadily increasing number of network nodes, resources, users, queries, views and downloads are all encouraging and considered as supportive of the choices made so far. In tandem, take-up activities like direct linking and processing of datasets by language processing services as well as metadata transformation to RDF are expected to open new avenues for data and resources linking and boost the organic growth of the infrastructure while facilitating language technology deployment by much wider research communities and industrial sectors.
Using a Serious Game to Collect a Child Learner Speech Corpus
Authors: Claudia Baur, Manny Rayner, Nikos Tsourakis
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Speech Recognition

We present an English-L2 child learner speech corpus, produced by 14 year old Swiss German-L1 students in their third year of learning English, which is currently in the process of being collected. The collection method uses a web-enabled multimodal language game implemented using the CALL-SLT platform, in which subjects hold prompted conversations with an animated agent. Prompts consist of a short animated Engligh-language video clip together with a German-language piece of text indicating the semantic content of the requested response. Grammar-based speech understanding is used to decide whether responses are accepted or rejected, and dialogue flow is controlled using a simple XML-based scripting language; the scripts are written to allow multiple dialogue paths, the choice being made randomly. The system is gamified using a score-and-badge framework with four levels of badges. We describe the application, the data collection and annotation procedures, and the initial tranche of data. The full corpus, when complete, should contain at least 5,000 annotated utterances.
The LRE Map disclosed
Authors: Riccardo Del Gratta, Gabriella Pardelli, Sara Goggi
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

This paper describes a serialization of the LRE Map database according to the RDF model. Due to the peculiar nature of the LRE Map, many ontologies are necessary to model the map in RDF, including newly created and reused ontologies. The importance of having the LRE Map in RDF and its connections to other open resources is also addressed.
The Development of the Multilingual LUNA Corpus for Spoken Language System Porting
Authors: Evgeny Stepanov, Giuseppe Riccardi, Ali Orkan Bayer
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Speech Synthesis, Spoken Language Understanding, Translation

The development of annotated corpora is a critical process in the development of speech applications for multiple target languages. While the technology to develop a monolingual speech application has reached satisfactory results (in terms of performance and effort), porting an existing application from a source language to a target language is still a very expensive task. In this paper we address the problem of creating multilingual aligned corpora and its evaluation in the context of a spoken language understanding (SLU) porting task. We discuss the challenges of the manual creation of multilingual corpora, as well as present the algorithms for the creation of multilingual SLU via Statistical Machine Translation (SMT).
Verbs of Saying with a Textual Connecting Function in the Prague Discourse Treebank
Authors: Magdal{\'e}na Rysov{\'a}
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The paper tries to contribute to the general discussion on discourse connectives, concretely to the question whether it is meaningful to distinguish two separate groups of connectives ― i.e. {``}classical{''} connectives limited to few predefined classes like conjunctions or adverbs (e.g. {``}but{''}) vs. alternative lexicalizations of connectives (i.e. unrestricted expressions and phrases like {``}the reason is{''}, {``}he added{''}, {``}the condition was{''} etc.). In this respect, the paper focuses on one group of these broader connectives in Czech ― the selected verbs of saying {``}doplnit/dopl{\v{n}}ovat{''} ({``}to complement{''}), {``}up{\v{r}}esnit/up{\v{r}}es{\v{n}}ovat{''} ({``}to specify{''}), {``}dodat/dod{\'a}vat{''} ({``}to add{''}), {``}pokra{\v{c}}ovat{''} ({``}to continue{''}) ― and analyses their occurrence and function in texts from the Prague Discourse Treebank. The paper demonstrates that these verbs of saying have a special place within the other connectives, as they contain two items ― e.g. {``}he added{''} means {``}and he said{''} so the verb {``}to add{''} contains an information about the relation to the previous context ({``}and{''}) plus the verb of saying ({``}to say{''}). This information led us to a more general observation, i.e. discourse connectives in broader sense do not necessarily connect two pieces of a text but some of them carry the second argument right in their semantics, which {``}classical{''} connectives can never do.
Ranking Job Offers for Candidates: learning hidden knowledge from Big Data
Authors: Marc Poch, N{\'u}ria Bel, Sergio Espeja, Felipe Nav{\'\i}o
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Clustering, Implicit Relations

This paper presents a system for suggesting a ranked list of appropriate vacancy descriptions to job seekers in a job board web site. In particular our work has explored the use of supervised classifiers with the objective of learning implicit relations which cannot be found with similarity or pattern based search methods that rely only on explicit information. Skills, names of professions and degrees, among other examples, are expressed in different languages, showing high variation and the use of ad-hoc resources to trace the relations is very costly. This implicit information is unveiled when a candidate applies for a job and therefore it is information that can be used for learning a model to predict new cases. The results of our experiments, which combine different clustering, classification and ranking methods, show the validity of the approach.
An Open-Source Heavily Multilingual Translation Graph Extracted from Wiktionaries and Parallel Corpora
Authors: Val{\'e}rie Hanoka, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Translation

This paper describes YaMTG (Yet another Multilingual Translation Graph), a new open-source heavily multilingual translation database (over 664 languages represented) built using several sources, namely various wiktionaries and the OPUS parallel corpora (Tiedemann, 2009). We detail the translation extraction process for 21 wiktionary language editions, and provide an evaluation of the translations contained in YaMTG.
Crowd-sourcing evaluation of automatically acquired, morphologically related word groupings
Authors: Claudia Borg, Albert Gatt
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Clustering

The automatic discovery and clustering of morphologically related words is an important problem with several practical applications. This paper describes the evaluation of word clusters carried out through crowd-sourcing techniques for the Maltese language. The hybrid (Semitic-Romance) nature of Maltese morphology, together with the fact that no large-scale lexical resources are available for Maltese, make this an interesting and challenging problem.
An Innovative World Language Centre : Challenges for the Use of Language Technology
Authors: Au{\dh}ur Hauksd{\'o}ttir
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The Vigdis International Centre of Multilingualism and Intercultural Understanding at the University of Iceland will work under the auspices of UNESCO. The main objective of the Centre is to promote linguistic diversity and to raise awareness of the importance of multilingualism. The focus will be on research on translations, foreign language learning, language policy and language planning. The centre will also serve as a platform for promoting collaborative activities on languages and cultures, in particular, organizing exhibitions and other events aimed at both the academic community and the general public. The Centre will work in close collaboration with the national and international research community. The Centre aims to create state-of-the-art infrastructure, using Language Technology resources in research and academic studies, in particular in translations and language learning (Computer-Assisted Language Learning). In addition, the centre will provide scholars with a means to conduct corpus-based research for synchronic investigations and for comparative studies. The Centre will also function as a repository for language data corpora. Facilities will be provided so that these corpora can be used by the research community on site and online. Computer technology resources will also be exploited in creating tools and exhibitions for the general audience.
A language-independent and fully unsupervised approach to lexicon induction and part-of-speech tagging for closely related languages
Authors: Yves Scherrer, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, Translation

In this paper, we describe our generic approach for transferring part-of-speech annotations from a resourced language towards an etymologically closely related non-resourced language, without using any bilingual (i.e., parallel) data. We first induce a translation lexicon from monolingual corpora, based on cognate detection followed by cross-lingual contextual similarity. Second, POS information is transferred from the resourced language along translation pairs to the non-resourced language and used for tagging the corpus. We evaluate our methods on three language families, consisting of five Romance languages, three Germanic languages and five Slavic languages. We obtain tagging accuracies of up to 91.6{\%}.
New bilingual speech databases for audio diarization
Authors: David Tavarez, Eva Navas, Daniel Erro, Ibon Saratxaga, Inma Hernaez
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, Speaker Recognition

This paper describes the process of collecting and recording two new bilingual speech databases in Spanish and Basque. They are designed primarily for speaker diarization in two different application domains: broadcast news audio and recorded meetings. First, both databases have been manually segmented. Next, several diarization experiments have been carried out in order to evaluate them. Our baseline speaker diarization system has been applied to both databases with around 30{\%} of DER for broadcast news audio and 40{\%} of DER for recorded meetings. Also, the behavior of the system when different languages are used by the same speaker has been tested.
A LDA-Based Topic Classification Approach From Highly Imperfect Automatic Transcriptions
Authors: Mohamed Morchid, Richard Dufour, Georges Linar{\`e}s
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: General Classification, Information Retrieval, Speech Recognition, Topic Classification

Although the current transcription systems could achieve high recognition performance, they still have a lot of difficulties to transcribe speech in very noisy environments. The transcription quality has a direct impact on classification tasks using text features. In this paper, we propose to identify themes of telephone conversation services with the classical Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency using Gini purity criteria (TF-IDF-Gini) method and with a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. These approaches are coupled with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification to resolve theme identification problem. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed LDA-based method compared to the classical TF-IDF-Gini approach in the context of highly imperfect automatic transcriptions. Finally, we discuss the impact of discriminative and non-discriminative words extracted by both methods in terms of transcription accuracy.
An open source part-of-speech tagger for Norwegian: Building on existing language resources
Authors: Cristina S{\'a}nchez Marco
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Machine Translation, Morphological Analysis, Morphological Tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

This paper presents an open source part-of-speech tagger for the Norwegian language. It describes how an existing language processing library (FreeLing) was used to build a new part-of-speech tagger for this language. This part-of-speech tagger has been built on already available resources, in particular a Norwegian dictionary and gold standard corpus, which were partly customized for the purposes of this paper. The results of a careful evaluation show that this tagger yields an accuracy close to state-of-the-art taggers for other languages.
Bilingual dictionaries for all EU languages
Authors: Ahmet Aker, Monica Paramita, M{\=a}rcis Pinnis, Robert Gaizauskas
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: All, Machine Translation, Translation, Transliteration

Bilingual dictionaries can be automatically generated using the GIZA++ tool. However, these dictionaries contain a lot of noise, because of which the quality of outputs of tools relying on the dictionaries are negatively affected. In this work we present three different methods for cleaning noise from automatically generated bilingual dictionaries: LLR, pivot and translation based approach. We have applied these approaches on the GIZA++ dictionaries -- dictionaries covering official EU languages -- in order to remove noise. Our evaluation showed that all methods help to reduce noise. However, the best performance is achieved using the transliteration based approach. We provide all bilingual dictionaries (the original GIZA++ dictionaries and the cleaned ones) free for download. We also provide the cleaning tools and scripts for free download.