pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reconstructing the Diachronic Morphology of Romanian from Dictionary Citations
Authors: Dan Cristea, Radu Simionescu, Gabriela Haja
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This work represents a first step in the direction of reconstructing a diachronic morphology for Romanian. The main resource used in this task is the digital version of Romanian Language Dictionary (eDTLR). This resource offers various usage examples for its entries, citations extracted from popular Romanian texts, which often present diachronic and inflected forms of the word they are provided for. The concept of word deformation is introduced and classified into more categories. The research conducted aims at detecting one type of such deformations occurring in the citations ― changes only in the stem of the current word, without the migration to another paradigm. An algorithm is presented which automatically infers old stem forms. This uses a paradigmatic data model of the current Romanian morphology. Having the inferred roots and the paradigms that they are part of, old flexion forms of the words can be deduced. Even more, by considering the years in which the citations were published, the inferred old word forms can be framed in certain periods of time, creating a great resource for research in the evolution of the Romanian language.
Latvian and Lithuanian Named Entity Recognition with TildeNER
Authors: M{\=a}rcis Pinnis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

In this paper the author presents TildeNER â€• an open source freely available named entity recognition toolkit and the first multi-class named entity recognition system for Latvian and Lithuanian languages. The system is built upon a supervised conditional random field classifier and features heuristic and statistical refinement methods that improve supervised classification, thus boosting the overall system's performance. The toolkit provides means for named entity recognition model bootstrapping, plaintext document and also pre-processed (morpho-syntactically tagged) tab-separated document named entity tagging and evaluation on test data. The paper presents the design of the system, describes the most important data formats and briefly discusses extension possibilities to different languages. It also gives evaluation on human annotated gold standard test corpora for Latvian and Lithuanian languages as well as comparative performance analysis to a state-of-the art English named entity recognition system using parallel and strongly comparable corpora. The author gives analysis of the Latvian and Lithuanian named entity tagged corpora annotation process and the created named entity annotated corpora.
Collecting humorous expressions from a community-based question-answering-service corpus
Authors: Masashi Inoue, Toshiki Akagi
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Question Answering

We proposed a method of collecting humorous expressions from an online community-based question-answering (CQA) corpus where some users post a variety of questions and other users post relevant answers. Although the service is created for the purpose of knowledge exchange, there are users who enjoy posting humorous responses. Therefore, the corpus contains many interesting humour communication examples that might be useful in understanding the nature of online communications and variations in humour. Considering the size of 3; 116; 009 topics, it is necessary to introduce automation in the collection process. However, due to the context dependency of humour expressions, it is hard to collect them automatically by using keywords or key phrases. Our method uses natural language processing based on dissimilarity criteria between answer texts. By using this method, we can collect humour expressions more efficiently than by manual exploration: 30 times more examples per hour.
RELcat: a Relation Registry for ISOcat data categories
Authors: Menzo Windhouwer
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Relation

The ISOcat Data Category Registry contains basically a flat and easily extensible list of data category specifications. To foster reuse and standardization only very shallow relationships among data categories are stored in the registry. However, to assist crosswalks, possibly based on personal views, between various (application) domains and to overcome possible proliferation of data categories more types of ontological relationships need to be specified. RELcat is a first prototype of a Relation Registry, which allows storing arbitrary relationships. These relationships can reflect the personal view of one linguist or a larger community. The basis of the registry is a relation type taxonomy that can easily be extended. This allows on one hand to load existing sets of relations specified in, for example, an OWL (2) ontology or SKOS taxonomy. And on the other hand allows algorithms that query the registry to traverse the stored semantic network to remain ignorant of the original source vocabulary. This paper describes first experiences with RELcat and explains some initial design decisions.
The Political Speech Corpus of Bulgarian
Authors: Petya Osenova, Kiril Simov
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, Morphological Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

The paper introduces the Political Speech Corpus of Bulgarian. First, its current state has been discussed with respect to its size, coverage, genre specification and related online services. Then, the focus goes to the annotation details. On the one hand, the layers of linguistic annotation are presented. On the other hand, the compatibility with CLARIN technical Infrastructure is explained. Also, some user-based scenarios are mentioned to demonstrate the corpus services and applicability.
LG-Eval: A Toolkit for Creating Online Language Evaluation Experiments
Authors: Eric Kow, Anja Belz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Text Generation

In this paper we describe the LG-Eval toolkit for creating online language evaluation experiments. LG-Eval is the direct result of our work setting up and carrying out the human evaluation experiments in several of the Generation Challenges shared tasks. It provides tools for creating experiments with different kinds of rating tools, allocating items to evaluators, and collecting the evaluation scores.
A Database of Attribution Relations
Authors: Silvia Pareti
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis

The importance of attribution is becoming evident due to its relevance in particular for Opinion Analysis and Information Extraction applications. Attribution would allow to identify different perspectives on a given topic or retrieve the statements of a specific source of interest, but also to select more relevant and reliable information. However, the scarce and partial resources available to date to conduct attribution studies have determined that only a portion of attribution structures has been identified and addressed. This paper presents the collection and further annotation of a database of over 9800 attributions relations from the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB). The aim is to build a large and complete resource that fills a key gap in the field and enables the training and testing of robust attribution extraction systems.
Collaborative Development and Evaluation of Text-processing Workflows in a UIMA-supported Web-based Workbench
Authors: Rafal Rak, Andrew Rowley, Sophia Ananiadou
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management

Challenges in creating comprehensive text-processing worklows include a lack of the interoperability of individual components coming from different providers and/or a requirement imposed on the end users to know programming techniques to compose such workflows. In this paper we demonstrate Argo, a web-based system that addresses these issues in several ways. It supports the widely adopted Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which handles the problem of interoperability; it provides a web browser-based interface for developing workflows by drawing diagrams composed of a selection of available processing components; and it provides novel user-interactive analytics such as the annotation editor which constitutes a bridge between automatic processing and manual correction. These features extend the target audience of Argo to users with a limited or no technical background. Here, we focus specifically on the construction of advanced workflows, involving multiple branching and merging points, to facilitate various comparative evalutions. Together with the use of user-collaboration capabilities supported in Argo, we demonstrate several use cases including visual inspections, comparisions of multiple processing segments or complete solutions against a reference standard, inter-annotator agreement, and shared task mass evaluations. Ultimetely, Argo emerges as a one-stop workbench for defining, processing, editing and evaluating text processing tasks.
A Mandarin-English Code-Switching Corpus
Authors: Ying Li, Yue Yu, Pascale Fung
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Language Identification, POS, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Generally the existing monolingual corpora are not suitable for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) of code-switching speech. The motivation of this paper is to study the rules and constraints code-switching follows and design a corpus for code-switching LVCSR task. This paper presents the development of a Mandarin-English code-switching corpus. This corpus consists of four parts: 1) conversational meeting speech and its data; 2) project meeting speech data; 3) student interviews speech; 4) text data of on-line news. The speech was transcribed by an annotator and verified by Mandarin-English bilingual speakers manually. We propose an approach for automatically downloading from the web text data that contains code-switching. The corpus includes both intra-sentential code-switching (switch in the middle of a sentence) and inter-sentential code-switching (switch at the end of the sentence). The distribution of part-of-speech (POS) tags and code-switching reasons are reported.
KPWr: Towards a Free Corpus of Polish
Authors: Bartosz Broda, Micha{\l} Marci{\'n}czuk, Marek Maziarz, Adam Radziszewski, Adam Wardy{\'n}ski
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper presents our efforts aimed at collecting and annotating a free Polish corpus. The corpus will serve for us as training and testing material for experiments with Machine Learning algorithms. As others may also benefit from the resource, we are going to release it under a Creative Commons licence, which is hoped to remove unnecessary usage restrictions, but also to facilitate reproduction of our experimental results. The corpus is being annotated with various types of linguistic entities: chunks and named entities, selected syntactic and semantic relations, word senses and anaphora. We report on the current state of the project as well as our ultimate goals.
A Fast, Memory Efficient, Scalable and Multilingual Dictionary Retriever
Authors: Fern, Paulo es, Lucelene Lopes, Carlos A. Prolo, Afonso Sales, Renata Vieira
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Morphological Analysis, Retrieval

This paper presents a novel approach to deal with dictionary retrieval. This new approach is based on a very efficient and scalable theoretical structure called Multi-Terminal Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MTMDD). Such tool allows the definition of very large, even multilingual, dictionaries without significant increase in memory demands, and also with virtually no additional processing cost. Besides the general idea of the novel approach, this paper presents a description of the technologies involved, and their implementation in a software package called WAGGER. Finally, we also present some examples of usage and possible applications of this dictionary retriever.
Structural alignment of plain text books
Authors: Andr{\'e} Santos, Jos{\'e} Jo{\~a}o Almeida, Nuno Carvalho
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Text alignment is one of the main processes for obtaining parallel corpora. When aligning two versions of a book, results are often affected by unpaired sections â€• sections which only exist in one of the versions of the book. We developed Text::Perfide::BookSync, a Perl module which performs books synchronization (structural alignment based on section delimitation), provided they have been previously annotated by Text::Perfide::BookCleaner. We discuss the need for such a tool and several implementation decisions. The main functions are described, and examples of input and output are presented. Text::Perfide::PartialAlign is an extension of the partialAlign.py tool bundled with hunalign which proposes an alternative methods for splitting bitexts.
Turkish Paraphrase Corpus
Authors: Seniz Demir, {\.I}lknur Durgar El-Kahlout, Erdem Unal, Hamza Kaya
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering, Text Generation, Text Summarization, Translation

Paraphrases are alternative syntactic forms in the same language expressing the same semantic content. Speakers of all languages are inherently familiar with paraphrases at different levels of granularity (lexical, phrasal, and sentential). For quite some time, the concept of paraphrasing is getting a growing attention by the research community and its potential use in several natural language processing applications (such as text summarization and machine translation) is being investigated. In this paper, we present, what is to our best knowledge, the first Turkish paraphrase corpus. The corpus is gleaned from four different sources and currently contains 1270 paraphrase pairs. All paraphrase pairs are carefully annotated by native Turkish speakers with the identified semantic correspondences between paraphrases. The work for expanding the corpus is still under way.
International Multicultural Name Matching Competition: Design, Execution, Results, and Lessons Learned
Authors: Keith J. Miller, Elizabeth Schroeder Richerson, Sarah McLeod, James Finley, Aaron Schein
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Transliteration

This paper describes different aspects of an open competition to evaluate multicultural name matching software, including the contest design, development of the test data, different phases of the competition, behavior of the participating teams, results of the competition, and lessons learned throughout. The competition, known as The MITRE Challenge{\^a}Â„{\textcent}, was informally announced at LREC 2010 and was recently concluded. Contest participants used the competition website (http://mitrechallenge.mitre.org) to download the competition data set and guidelines, upload results, and to view accuracy metrics for each result set submitted. Participants were allowed to submit unlimited result sets, with their top-scoring set determining their overall ranking. The competition website featured a leader board that displayed the top score for each participant, ranked according to the principal contest metric - mean average precision (MAP). MAP and other metrics were calculated in near-real time on a remote server, based on ground truth developed for the competition data set. Additional measures were taken to guard against gaming the competition metric or overfitting to the competition data set. Lessons learned during running this first MITRE Challenge will be valuable to others considering running similar evaluation campaigns.
Measuring the Divergence of Dependency Structures Cross-Linguistically to Improve Syntactic Projection Algorithms
Authors: Ryan Georgi, Fei Xia, William Lewis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Syntactic parses can provide valuable information for many NLP tasks, such as machine translation, semantic analysis, etc. However, most of the world's languages do not have large amounts of syntactically annotated corpora available for building parsers. Syntactic projection techniques attempt to address this issue by using parallel corpora between resource-poor and resource-rich languages, bootstrapping the resource-poor language with the syntactic analysis of the resource-rich language. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using small, parallel, annotated corpora to automatically detect divergent structural patterns between two languages. These patterns can then be used to improve structural projection algorithms, allowing for better performing NLP tools for resource-poor languages, in particular those that may not have large amounts of annotated data necessary for traditional, fully-supervised methods. While this detection process is not exhaustive, we demonstrate that important instances of divergence are picked up with minimal prior knowledge of a given language pair.
Using a Goodness Measurement for Domain Adaptation: A Case Study on Chinese Word Segmentation
Authors: Yan Song, Fei Xia
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Chinese Word Segmentation, Domain Adaptation, Segmentation

Domain adaptation is an important topic for natural language processing. There has been extensive research on the topic and various methods have been explored, including training data selection, model combination, semi-supervised learning. In this study, we propose to use a goodness measure, namely, description length gain (DLG), for domain adaptation for Chinese word segmentation. We demonstrate that DLG can help domain adaptation in two ways: as additional features for supervised segmenters to improve system performance, and also as a similarity measure for selecting training data to better match a test set. We evaluated our systems on the Chinese Penn Treebank version 7.0, which has 1.2 million words from five different genres, and the Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff-3 data.
Rapidly Testing the Interaction Model of a Pronunciation Training System via Wizard-of-Oz
Authors: Joao Paulo Cabral, Mark Kane, Zeeshan Ahmed, Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, {\'E}va Sz{\'e}kely, Amalia Zahra, Kalu Ogbureke, Peter Cahill, Julie Carson-Berndsen, Stephan Schl{\"o}gl
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Recognition

This paper describes a prototype of a computer-assisted pronunciation training system called MySpeech. The interface of the MySpeech system is web-based and it currently enables users to practice pronunciation by listening to speech spoken by native speakers and tuning their speech production to correct any mispronunciations detected by the system. This practice exercise is facilitated in different topics and difficulty levels. An experiment was conducted in this work that combines the MySpeech service with the WebWOZ Wizard-of-Oz platform (http://www.webwoz.com), in order to improve the human-computer interaction (HCI) of the service and the feedback that it provides to the user. The employed Wizard-of-Oz method enables a human (who acts as a wizard) to give feedback to the practising user, while the user is not aware that there is another person involved in the communication. This experiment permitted to quickly test an HCI model before its implementation on the MySpeech system. It also allowed to collect input data from the wizard that can be used to improve the proposed model. Another outcome of the experiment was the preliminary evaluation of the pronunciation learning service in terms of user satisfaction, which would be difficult to conduct before integrating the HCI part.
An implementation of a Latvian resource grammar in Grammatical Framework
Authors: P{\=e}teris Paikens, Normunds Gr{\=u}z{\=\i}tis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Semantic Parsing, Text Generation, Translation

This paper describes an open-source Latvian resource grammar implemented in Grammatical Framework (GF), a programming language for multilingual grammar applications. GF differentiates between concrete grammars and abstract grammars: translation among concrete languages is provided via abstract syntax trees. Thus the same concrete grammar is effectively used for both language analysis and language generation. Furthermore, GF differentiates between general-purpose resource grammars and domain-specific application grammars that are built on top of the resource grammars. The GF resource grammar library (RGL) currently supports more than 20 languages that implement a common API. Latvian is the 13th official European Union language that is made available in the RGL. We briefly describe the grammatical features of Latvian and illustrate how they are handled in the multilingual framework of GF. We also illustrate some application areas of the Latvian resource grammar, and briefly discuss the limitations of the RGL and potential long-term improvements using frame semantics.
Resource Evaluation for Usable Speech Interfaces: Utilizing Human-Human Dialogue
Authors: Pepi Stavropoulou, Dimitris Spiliotopoulos, Georgios Kouroupetroglou
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Language Modelling, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Dialogue Systems, Text Generation

Human-human spoken dialogues are considered an important tool for effective speech interface design and are often used for stochastic model training in speech based applications. However, the less restricted nature of human-human interaction compared to human-system interaction may undermine the usefulness of such corpora for creating effective and usable interfaces. In this respect, this work examines the differences between corpora collected from human-human interaction and corpora collected from actual system use, in order to formally assess the appropriateness of the former for both the design and implementation of spoken dialogue systems. Comparison results show that there are significant differences with respect to vocabulary, sentence structure and speech recognition success rate among others. Nevertheless, compared to other available tools and techniques, human-human dialogues may still be used as a temporary at least solution for building more effective working systems. Accordingly, ways to better utilize such resources are presented.
GATEtoGerManC: A GATE-based Annotation Pipeline for Historical German
Authors: Silke Scheible, Richard J. Whitt, Martin Durrell, Paul Bennett
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: POS, POS Tagging, Sentence

We describe a new GATE-based linguistic annotation pipeline for Early Modern German, which can be used to annotate historical texts with word tokens, sentence boundaries, lemmas, and POS tags. The pipeline is based on a customisation of the freely available ANNIE system for English (Cunningham et al., 2002), in combination with a version of the TreeTagger (Schmid, 1994) trained on gold standard Early Modern German data. The POS-tagging and lemmatisation components of the pipeline achieve an average accuracy of 89.44{\%} and 83.16{\%}, respectively, on unseen historical data from various genres and publication dates within the Early Modern period. We show that normalisation of spelling variation can further improve these results. With no specialised tools available for processing this particular stage of the language, this pipeline will be of particular interest to smaller, humanities-based projects wishing to add linguistic annotations to their historical data but which lack the means or resources to develop such tools themselves.