pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On the Non-canonical Valency Filling
Authors: Igor Boguslavsky
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Position, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Valency slot filling is a semantic glue, which brings together the meanings of words. As regards the position of an argument in the dependency structure with respect to its predicate, there exist three types of valency filling: active (canonical), passive, and discontinuous. Of these, the first type is studied much better than the other two. As a rule, canonical actants are unambiguously marked in the syntactic structure, and each actant corresponds to a unique syntactic position. Linguistic information on which syntactic function an actant might have (subject, direct or indirect object), what its morphological form should be and which prepositions or conjunctions it requires, can be given in the lexicon in the form of government patterns, subcategorization frames, or similar data structures. We concentrate on non-canonical cases of valency filling in Russian, which are characteristic of non-verbal parts of speech, such as adverbs, adjectives, and particles, in the first place. They are more difficult to handle than canonical ones, because the position of the actant in the tree is governed by more complicated rules. A valency may be filled by expressions occupying different syntactic positions, and a syntactic position may accept expressions filling different valencies of the same word. We show how these phenomena can be processed in a semantic analyzer.
Improvement of VerbNet-like resources by frame typing
Authors: Laurence Danlos, Matthieu Constant, Lucie Barque
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering, Stock Market Prediction, Translation

Verbenet is a French lexicon developed by {``}translation{''} of its English counterpart {---} VerbNet (Kipper-Schuler, 2005){---}and treatment of the specificities of French syntax (Pradet et al., 2014; Danlos et al., 2016). One difficulty encountered in its development springs from the fact that the list of (potentially numerous) frames has no internal organization. This paper proposes a type system for frames that shows whether two frames are variants of a given alternation. Frame typing facilitates coherence checking of the resource in a {``}virtuous circle{''}. We present the principles underlying a program we developed and used to automatically type frames in VerbeNet. We also show that our system is portable to other languages.
Enriching a Valency Lexicon by Deverbative Nouns
Authors: Eva Fu{\v{c}}{\'\i}kov{\'a}, Jan Haji{\v{c}}, Zde{\v{n}}ka Ure{\v{s}}ov{\'a}
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

We present an attempt to automatically identify Czech deverbative nouns using several methods that use large corpora as well as existing lexical resources. The motivation for the task is to extend a verbal valency (i.e., predicate-argument) lexicon by adding nouns that share the valency properties with the base verb, assuming their properties can be derived (even if not trivially) from the underlying verb by deterministic grammatical rules. At the same time, even in inflective languages, not all deverbatives are simply created from their underlying base verb by regular lexical derivation processes. We have thus developed hybrid techniques that use both large parallel corpora and several standard lexical resources. Thanks to the use of parallel corpora, the resulting sets contain also synonyms, which the lexical derivation rules cannot get. For evaluation, we have manually created a small, 100-verb gold data since no such dataset was initially available for Czech.
The Grammar of English Deverbal Compounds and their Meaning
Authors: Gianina Iord{\u{a}}chioaia, Lonneke van der Plas, Glorianna Jagfeld
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

We present an interdisciplinary study on the interaction between the interpretation of noun-noun deverbal compounds (DCs; e.g., task assignment) and the morphosyntactic properties of their deverbal heads in English. Underlying hypotheses from theoretical linguistics are tested with tools and resources from computational linguistics. We start with Grimshaw{'}s (1990) insight that deverbal nouns are ambiguous between argument-supporting nominal (ASN) readings, which inherit verbal arguments (e.g., the assignment of the tasks), and the less verbal and more lexicalized Result Nominal and Simple Event readings (e.g., a two-page assignment). Following Grimshaw, our hypothesis is that the former will realize object arguments in DCs, while the latter will receive a wider range of interpretations like root compounds headed by non-derived nouns (e.g., chocolate box). Evidence from a large corpus assisted by machine learning techniques confirms this hypothesis, by showing that, besides other features, the realization of internal arguments by deverbal heads outside compounds (i.e., the most distinctive ASN-property in Grimshaw 1990) is a good predictor for an object interpretation of non-heads in DCs.
Encoding a syntactic dictionary into a super granular unification grammar
Authors: Sylvain Kahane, Fran{\c{c}}ois Lareau
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

We show how to turn a large-scale syntactic dictionary into a dependency-based unification grammar where each piece of lexical information calls a separate rule, yielding a super granular grammar. Subcategorization, raising and control verbs, auxiliaries and copula, passivization, and tough-movement are discussed. We focus on the semantics-syntax interface and offer a new perspective on syntactic structure.
Identification of Flexible Multiword Expressions with the Help of Dependency Structure Annotation
Authors: Ayaka Morimoto, Akifumi Yoshimoto, Akihiko Kato, Hiroyuki Shindo, Yuji Matsumoto
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

This paper presents our ongoing work on compilation of English multi-word expression (MWE) lexicon. We are especially interested in collecting flexible MWEs, in which some other components can intervene the expression such as {``}a number of{''} vs {``}a large number of{''} where a modifier of {``}number{''} can be placed in the expression and inherit the original meaning. We fiest collect possible candidates of flexible English MWEs from the web, and annotate all of their occurrences in the Wall Street Journal portion of Ontonotes corpus. We make use of word dependency strcuture information of the sentences converted from the phrase structure annotation. This process enables semi-automatic annotation of MWEs in the corpus and simultanaously produces the internal and external dependency representation of flexible MWEs.
A new look at possessive reflexivization: A comparative study between Czech and Russian
Authors: Anna Nedoluzhko
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

The paper presents a contrastive description of reflexive possessive pronouns {``}sv{\r{u}}j{''} in Czech and {``}svoj{''} in Russian. The research concerns syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. With our analysis, we shed a new light on the already investigated issue, which comes from a detailed comparison of the phenomenon of possessive reflexivization in two typologically and genetically similar languages. We show that whereas in Czech, the possessive reflexivization is mostly limited to syntactic functions and does not go beyond the grammar, in Russian it gets additional semantic meanings and moves substan-tially towards the lexicon. The obtained knowledge allows us to explain heretofore unclear marginal uses of reflexives in each language.
Modeling non-standard language
Authors: Alex Rosen, R
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

A specific language as used by different speakers and in different situations has a number of more or less distant varieties. Extending the notion of non-standard language to varieties that do not fit an explicitly or implicitly assumed norm or pattern, we look for methods and tools that could be applied to this domain. The needs start from the theoretical side: categories usable for the analysis of non-standard language are not readily available, and continue to methods and tools required for its detection and diagnostics. A general discussion of issues related to non-standard language is followed by two case studies. The first study presents a taxonomy of morphosyntactic categories as an attempt to analyse non-standard forms produced by non-native learners of Czech. The second study focusses on the role of a rule-based grammar and lexicon in the process of building and using a parsebank.
Processing non-canonical or noisy text: fortuitous data to the rescue
Authors: Barbara Plank
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Sentence

Real world data differs radically from the benchmark corpora we use in NLP, resulting in large performance drops. The reason for this problem is obvious: NLP models are trained on limited samples from canonical varieties considered standard. However, there are many dimensions, e.g., sociodemographic, language, genre, sentence type, etc. on which texts can differ from the standard. The solution is not obvious: we cannot control for all factors, and it is not clear how to best go beyond the current practice of training on homogeneous data from a single domain and language. In this talk, I review the notion of canonicity, and how it shapes our community{'}s approach to language. I argue for the use of fortuitous data. Fortuitous data is data out there that just waits to be harvested. It includes data which is in plain sight, but is often neglected, and more distant sources like behavioral data, which first need to be refined. They provide additional contexts and a myriad of opportunities to build more adaptive language technology, some of which I will explore in this talk.
From Entity Linking to Question Answering -- Recent Progress on Semantic Grounding Tasks
Authors: Ming-Wei Chang
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: document understanding, Entity Linking, Knowledge Base Question Answering, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

Entity linking and semantic parsing have been shown to be crucial to important applications such as question answering and document understanding. These tasks often require structured learning models, which make predictions on multiple interdependent variables. In this talk, I argue that carefully designed structured learning algorithms play a central role in entity linking and semantic parsing tasks. In particular, I will present several new structured learning models for entity linking, which jointly detect mentions and disambiguate entities as well as capture non-textual information. I will then show how to use a staged search procedure to building a state-of-the-art knowledge base question answering system. Finally, if time permits, I will discuss different supervision protocols for training semantic parsers and the value of labeling semantic parses.
DISAANA and D-SUMM: Large-scale Real Time NLP Systems for Analyzing Disaster Related Reports in Tweets
Authors: Kentaro Torisawa
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

This talk presents two NLP systems that were developed for helping disaster victims and rescue workers in the aftermath of large-scale disasters. DISAANA provides answers to questions such as {``}What is in short supply in Tokyo?{''} and displays locations related to each answer on a map. D-SUMM automatically summarizes a large number of disaster related reports concerning a specified area and helps rescue workers to understand disaster situations from a macro perspective. Both systems are publicly available as Web services. In the aftermath of the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake (M7.0), the Japanese government actually used DISAANA to analyze the situation.
Private or Corporate? Predicting User Types on Twitter
Authors: Nikola Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Darja Fi{\v{s}}er
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

In this paper we present a series of experiments on discriminating between private and corporate accounts on Twitter. We define features based on Twitter metadata, morphosyntactic tags and surface forms, showing that the simple bag-of-words model achieves single best results that can, however, be improved by building a weighted soft ensemble of classifiers based on each feature type. Investigating the time and language dependence of each feature type delivers quite unexpecting results showing that features based on metadata are neither time- nor language-insensitive as the way the two user groups use the social network varies heavily through time and space.
From Noisy Questions to Minecraft Texts: Annotation Challenges in Extreme Syntax Scenario
Authors: H{\'e}ctor Mart{\'\i}nez Alonso, Djam{\'e} Seddah, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Minecraft

User-generated content presents many challenges for its automatic processing. While many of them do come from out-of-vocabulary effects, others spawn from different linguistic phenomena such as unusual syntax. In this work we present a French three-domain data set made up of question headlines from a cooking forum, game chat logs and associated forums from two popular online games (MINECRAFT {\&} LEAGUE OF LEGENDS). We chose these domains because they encompass different degrees of lexical and syntactic compliance with canonical language. We conduct an automatic and manual evaluation of the difficulties of processing these domains for part-of-speech prediction, and introduce a pilot study to determine whether dependency analysis lends itself well to annotate these data. We also discuss the development cost of our data set.
Disaster Analysis using User-Generated Weather Report
Authors: Yasunobu Asakura, Masatsugu Hangyo, Mamoru Komachi
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12

Information extraction from user-generated text has gained much attention with the growth of the Web.Disaster analysis using information from social media provides valuable, real-time, geolocation information for helping people caught up these in disasters. However, it is not convenient to analyze texts posted on social media because disaster keywords match any texts that contain words. For collecting posts about a disaster from social media, we need to develop a classifier to filter posts irrelevant to disasters. Moreover, because of the nature of social media, we can take advantage of posts that come with GPS information. However, a post does not always refer to an event occurring at the place where it has been posted. Therefore, we propose a new task of classifying whether a flood disaster occurred, in addition to predicting the geolocation of events from user-generated text. We report the annotation of the flood disaster corpus and develop a classifier to demonstrate the use of this corpus for disaster analysis.
A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Arabizi-to-English Statistical Machine Translation
Authors: Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza, Christof Monz
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Transliteration

A major challenge for statistical machine translation (SMT) of Arabic-to-English user-generated text is the prevalence of text written in Arabizi, or Romanized Arabic. When facing such texts, a translation system trained on conventional Arabic-English data will suffer from extremely low model coverage. In addition, Arabizi is not regulated by any official standardization and therefore highly ambiguous, which prevents rule-based approaches from achieving good translation results. In this paper, we improve Arabizi-to-English machine translation by presenting a simple but effective Arabizi-to-Arabic transliteration pipeline that does not require knowledge by experts or native Arabic speakers. We incorporate this pipeline into a phrase-based SMT system, and show that translation quality after automatically transliterating Arabizi to Arabic yields results that are comparable to those achieved after human transliteration.
Name Variation in Community Question Answering Systems
Authors: Anietie Andy, Satoshi Sekine, Mugizi Rwebangira, Mark Dredze
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Community Question Answering, Entity Linking, Question Answering

Name Variation in Community Question Answering Systems Abstract Community question answering systems are forums where users can ask and answer questions in various categories. Examples are Yahoo! Answers, Quora, and Stack Overflow. A common challenge with such systems is that a significant percentage of asked questions are left unanswered. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to reduce the number of unanswered questions in Yahoo! Answers by reusing the answer to the most similar past resolved question to the unanswered question, from the site. Semantically similar questions could be worded differently, thereby making it difficult to find questions that have shared needs. For example, {``}Who is the best player for the Reds?{''} and {``}Who is currently the biggest star at Manchester United?{''} have a shared need but are worded differently; also, {``}Reds{''} and {``}Manchester United{''} are used to refer to the soccer team Manchester United football club. In this research, we focus on question categories that contain a large number of named entities and entity name variations. We show that in these categories, entity linking can be used to identify relevant past resolved questions with shared needs as a given question by disambiguating named entities and matching these questions based on the disambiguated entities, identified entities, and knowledge base information related to these entities. We evaluated our algorithm on a new dataset constructed from Yahoo! Answers. The dataset contains annotated question pairs, (Qgiven, [Qpast, Answer]). We carried out experiments on several question categories and show that an entity-based approach gives good performance when searching for similar questions in entity rich categories.
Whose Nickname is This? Recognizing Politicians from Their Aliases
Authors: Wei-Chung Wang, Hung-Chen Chen, Zhi-Kai Ji, Hui-I Hsiao, Yu-Shian Chiu, Lun-Wei Ku
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Entity Linking, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Transliteration

Using aliases to refer to public figures is one way to make fun of people, to express sarcasm, or even to sidestep legal issues when expressing opinions on social media. However, linking an alias back to the real name is difficult, as it entails phonemic, graphemic, and semantic challenges. In this paper, we propose a phonemic-based approach and inject semantic information to align aliases with politicians{'} Chinese formal names. The proposed approach creates an HMM model for each name to model its phonemes and takes into account document-level pairwise mutual information to capture the semantic relations to the alias. In this work we also introduce two new datasets consisting of 167 phonemic pairs and 279 mixed pairs of aliases and formal names. Experimental results show that the proposed approach models both phonemic and semantic information and outperforms previous work on both the phonemic and mixed datasets with the best top-1 accuracies of 0.78 and 0.59 respectively.
Towards Accurate Event Detection in Social Media: A Weakly Supervised Approach for Learning Implicit Event Indicators
Authors: Ajit Jain, Girish Kasiviswanathan, Ruihong Huang
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Event Detection

Accurate event detection in social media is very challenging because user generated contents are extremely noisy and sparse in content. Event indicators are generally words or phrases that act as a trigger that help us understand the semantics of the context they occur in. We present a weakly supervised approach that relies on using a single strong event indicator phrase as a seed to acquire a variety of additional event cues. We propose to leverage various types of implicit event indicators, such as props, actors and precursor events, to achieve precise event detection. We experimented with civil unrest events and show that the automatically learnt event indicators are effective in identifying specific types of events.
Unsupervised Stemmer for Arabic Tweets
Authors: Fahad Albogamy, Allan Ramsay
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Translation

Stemming is an essential processing step in a wide range of high level text processing applications such as information extraction, machine translation and sentiment analysis. It is used to reduce words to their stems. Many stemming algorithms have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Although Arabic tweets and MSA are closely related and share many characteristics, there are substantial differences between them in lexicon and syntax. In this paper, we introduce a light Arabic stemmer for Arabic tweets. Our results show improvements over the performance of a number of well-known stemmers for Arabic.
Analysis of Twitter Data for Postmarketing Surveillance in Pharmacovigilance
Authors: Julie Pain, Jessie Levacher, Adam Quinquenel, Anja Belz
Date: 2016-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2016 12
Tasks: Language Identification, Pharmacovigilance, Sentiment Analysis

Postmarketing surveillance (PMS) has the vital aim to monitor effects of drugs after release for use by the general population, but suffers from under-reporting and limited coverage. Automatic methods for detecting drug effect reports, especially for social media, could vastly increase the scope of PMS. Very few automatic PMS methods are currently available, in particular for the messy text types encountered on Twitter. In this paper we describe first results for developing PMS methods specifically for tweets. We describe the corpus of 125,669 tweets we have created and annotated to train and test the tools. We find that generic tools perform well for tweet-level language identification and tweet-level sentiment analysis (both 0.94 F1-Score). For detection of effect mentions we are able to achieve 0.87 F1-Score, while effect-level adverse-vs.-beneficial analysis proves harder with an F1-Score of 0.64. Among other things, our results indicate that MetaMap semantic types provide a very promising basis for identifying drug effect mentions in tweets.