pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Statistical Evaluation of Pronunciation Encoding
Authors: Iris Merkus, Florian Schiel
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis

In this study we investigate the idea to automatically evaluate newly created pronunciation encodings for being correct or containing a potential error. Using a cascaded triphone detector and phonotactical n-gram modeling with an optimal Bayesian threshold we classify unknown pronunciation transcripts into the classes 'probably faulty' or 'probably correct'. Transcripts tagged 'probably faulty' are forwarded to a manual inspection performed by an expert, while encodings tagged 'probably correct' are passed without further inspection. An evaluation of the new method on the German PHONOLEX lexical resource shows that with a tolerable error margin of approximately 3{\%} faulty transcriptions a major reduction in work effort during the production of a new lexical resource can be achieved.
Improving corpus annotation productivity: a method and experiment with interactive tagging
Authors: Atro Voutilainen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modelling

Corpus linguistic and language technological research needs empirical corpus data with nearly correct annotation and high volume to enable advances in language modelling and theorising. Recent work on improving corpus annotation accuracy presents semiautomatic methods to correct some of the analysis errors in available annotated corpora, while leaving the remaining errors undetected in the annotated corpus. We review recent advances in linguistics-based partial tagging and parsing, and regard the achieved analysis performance as sufficient for reconsidering a previously proposed method: combining nearly correct but partial automatic analysis with a minimal amount of human postediting (disambiguation) to achieve nearly correct corpus annotation accuracy at a competitive annotation speed. We report a pilot experiment with morphological (part-of-speech) annotation using a partial linguistic tagger of a kind previously reported with a very attractive precision-recall ratio, and observe that a desired level of annotation accuracy can be reached by using human disambiguation for less than 10{\textbackslash}{\%} of the words in the corpus.
Semantic Relations Established by Specialized Processes Expressed by Nouns and Verbs: Identification in a Corpus by means of Syntactico-semantic Annotation
Authors: Nava Maroto, Marie-Claude L{'}Homme, Amparo Alcina
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This article presents the methodology and results of the analysis of terms referring to processes expressed by verbs or nouns in a corpus of specialized texts dealing with ceramics. Both noun and verb terms are explored in context in order to identify and represent the semantic roles held by their participants (arguments and circumstants), and therefore explore some of the relations established by these terms. We present a methodology for the identification of related terms that take part in the development of specialized processes and the annotation of the semantic roles expressed in these contexts. The analysis has allowed us to identify participants in the process, some of which were already present in our previous work, but also some new ones. This method is useful in the distinction of different meanings of the same verb. Contexts in which processes are expressed by verbs have proved to be very informative, even if they are less frequent in the corpus. This work is viewed as a first step in the implementation ― in ontologies ― of conceptual relations in which activities are involved.
The Language Library: supporting community effort for collective resource production
Authors: Riccardo Del Gratta, Francesca Frontini, Francesco Rubino, Irene Russo, Nicoletta Calzolari
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation

Relations among phenomena at different linguistic levels are at the essence of language properties but today we focus mostly on one specific linguistic layer at a time, without (having the possibility of) paying attention to the relations among the different layers. At the same time our efforts are too much scattered without much possibility of exploiting other people's achievements. To address the complexities hidden in multilayer interrelations even small amounts of processed data can be useful, improving the performance of complex systems. Exploiting the current trend towards sharing we want to initiate a collective movement that works towards creating synergies and harmonisation among different annotation efforts that are now dispersed. In this paper we present the general architecture of the Language Library, an initiative which is conceived as a facility for gathering and making available through simple functionalities the linguistic knowledge the field is able to produce, putting in place new ways of collaboration within the LRT community. In order to reach this goal, a first population round of the Language Library has started around a core of parallel/comparable texts that have been annotated by several contributors submitting a paper for LREC2012. The Language Library has also an ancillary aim related to language documentation and archiving and it is conceived as a theory-neutral space which allows for several language processing philosophies to coexist.
MISTRAL+: A Melody Intonation Speaker Tonal Range semi-automatic Analysis using variable Levels
Authors: Beno{\^\i}t Weber, Genevi{\`e}ve Caelen-Haumont, Binh Hai Pham, Do-Dat Tran
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper presents MISTRAL+, the upgraded version of an automatic tool created in 2004 named INTSMEL then MELISM. Since MELISM, the entire process has been modified in order to simplify and enhance the study of languages. MISTRAL+ is a combinaison of two modules: a Praat plugin MISTRAL{\_}Praat, and MISTRAL{\_}xls. For specific corpora, it performs phonological annotation based on the F0 variation in prominent words, but also in any chunk of speech, prominent or not. So this tool while being specialized can also be used as a generic one. Now among others, new functionalities allow to use API symbols while labeling, and to provide a semi-automatic melodic annotation in the frame of tonal languages. The program contains several functions which compute target points (or significant points) to model F0 contour, perform automatic annotation of different shapes and export all data in an xls file. In a first part of this paper, the MISTRAL+ functionalities will be described, and in a second part, an example of application will be presented about a study of the Mo Piu endangered language in the frame of the MICA Au Co Project.
German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars
Authors: Miriam Kaeshammer, Vera Demberg
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modelling, TAG

We present a treebank and lexicon for German and English, which have been developed for PLTAG parsing. PLTAG is a psycholinguistically motivated, incremental version of tree-adjoining grammar (TAG). The resources are however also applicable to parsing with other variants of TAG. The German PLTAG resources are based on the TIGER corpus and, to the best of our knowledge, constitute the first scalable German TAG grammar. The English PLTAG resources go beyond existing resources in that they include the NP annotation by (Vadas and Curran, 2007), and include the prediction lexicon necessary for PLTAG.
Annotating a corpus of human interaction with prosodic profiles --- focusing on Mandarin repair/disfluency
Authors: Helen Kai-yun Chen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: TAG

This study describes the construction of a manually annotated speech corpus that focuses on the sound profiles of repair/disfluency in Mandarin conversational interaction. Specifically, the paper focuses on how the tag set of prosodic profiles of the recycling repair culled from both audio-tapped and video-tapped, face-to-face Mandarin interaction are decided. By the methodology of both acoustic records and impressionistic judgements, 260 instances of Mandarin recycling repair are annotated with sound profiles including: pitch, duration, loudness, silence, and other observable prosodic cues (i.e. sound stretch and cut-offs). The study further introduces some possible applications of the current corpus, such as the implementation of the annotated data for analyzing the correlation between sound profiles of Mandarin repair and the interactional function of the repair. The goal of constructing the corpus is to facilitate an interdisciplinary study that concentrates on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by simultaneously paying close attention to the sound profiles emerged from interaction.
The Australian National Corpus: National Infrastructure for Language Resources
Authors: Steve Cassidy, Michael Haugh, Pam Peters, Mark Fallu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The Australian National Corpus has been established in an effort to make currently scattered and relatively inaccessible data available to researchers through an online portal. In contrast to other national corpora, it is conceptualised as a linked collection of many existing and future language resources representing language use in Australia, unified through common technical standards. This approach allows us to bootstrap a significant collection and add value to existing resources by providing a unified, online tool-set to support research in a number of disciplines. This paper provides an outline of the technical platform being developed to support the corpus and a brief overview of some of the collections that form part of the initial version of the Australian National Corpus.
A Grammar-informed Corpus-based Sentence Database for Linguistic and Computational Studies
Authors: Hongzhi Xu, Helen Kai-yun Chen, Chu-Ren Huang, Qin Lu, Dingxu Shi, Tin-Shing Chiu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Chinese Word Segmentation, POS, POS Tagging, Sentence

We adopt the corpus-informed approach to example sentence selections for the construction of a reference grammar. In the process, a database containing sentences that are carefully selected by linguistic experts including the full range of linguistic facts covered in an authoritative Chinese Reference Grammar is constructed and structured according to the reference grammar. A search engine system is developed to facilitate the process of finding the most typical examples the users need to study a linguistic problem or prove their hypotheses. The database can also be used as a training corpus by computational linguists to train models for Chinese word segmentation, POS tagging and sentence parsing.
ELAN development, keeping pace with communities' needs
Authors: Han Sloetjes, Aarthy Somasundaram
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.
Revealing Contentious Concepts Across Social Groups
Authors: Ching-Sheng Lin, Zumrut Akcam, Samira Shaikh, Sharon Small, Ken Stahl, Tomek Strzalkowski, Nick Webb
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper, a computational model based on concept polarity is proposed to investigate the influence of communications across the diacultural groups. The hypothesis of this work is that there are communities or groups which can be characterized by a network of concepts and the corresponding valuations of those concepts that are agreed upon by the members of the community. We apply an existing research tool, ECO, to generate text representative of each community and create community specific Valuation Concept Networks (VCN). We then compare VCNs across the communities, to attempt to find contentious concepts, which could subsequently be the focus of further exploration as points of contention between the two communities. A prototype, CPAM (Changing Positions, Altering Minds), was implemented as a proof of concept for this approach. The experiment was conducted using blog data from pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities. A potential application of this method and future work are discussed as well.
Cost and Benefit of Using WordNet Senses for Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Balamurali AR, Aditya Joshi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Typically, accuracy is used to represent the performance of an NLP system. However, accuracy attainment is a function of investment in annotation. Typically, the more the amount and sophistication of annotation, higher is the accuracy. However, a moot question is ''''''``is the accuracy improvement commensurate with the cost incurred in annotation''''''''? We present an economic model to assess the marginal benefit accruing from increase in cost of annotation. In particular, as a case in point we have chosen the sentiment analysis (SA) problem. In SA, documents normally are polarity classified by running them through classifiers trained on document vectors constructed from lexeme features, i.e., words. If, however, instead of words, one uses word senses (synset ids in wordnets) as features, the accuracy improves dramatically. But is this improvement significant enough to justify the cost of annotation? This question, to the best of our knowledge, has not been investigated with the seriousness it deserves. We perform a cost benefit study based on a vendor-machine model. By setting up a cost price, selling price and profit scenario, we show that although extra cost is incurred in sense annotation, the profit margin is high, justifying the cost.
Rembrandt - a named-entity recognition framework
Authors: Nuno Cardoso
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Document Ranking, Information Retrieval, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Rembrandt is a named entity recognition system specially crafted to annotate documents by classifying named entities and ground them into unique identifiers. Rembrandt played an important role within our research over geographic IR, thus evolving into a more capable framework where documents can be annotated, manually curated and indexed. The goal of this paper is to present Rembrandt's simple but powerful annotation framework to the NLP community.
An Adaptive Framework for Named Entity Combination
Authors: Bogdan Sacaleanu, G{\"u}nter Neumann
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

We have developed a new OSGi-based platform for Named Entity Recognition (NER) which uses a voting strategy to combine the results produced by several existing NER systems (currently OpenNLP, LingPipe and Stanford). The different NER systems have been systematically decomposed and modularized into the same pipeline of preprocessing components in order to support a flexible selection and ordering of the NER processing flow. This high modular and component-based design supports the possibility to setup different constellations of chained processing steps including alternative voting strategies for combining the results of parallel running components.
Texto4Science: a Quebec French Database of Annotated Short Text Messages
Authors: Philippe Langlais, Patrick Drouin, Am{\'e}lie Paulus, Eug{\'e}nie Rompr{\'e} Brodeur, Florent Cottin
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

In October 2009, was launched the Quebec French part of the international sms4science project, called texto4science. Over a period of 10 months, we collected slightly more than 7000 SMSs that we carefully annotated. This database is now ready to be used by the community. The purpose of this article is to relate the efforts put into designing this database and provide some data analysis of the main linguistic phenomenon that we have annotated. We also report on a socio-linguistic survey we conducted within the project.
Collecting and Analysing Chats and Tweets in SoNaR
Authors: S, Eric ers
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper a collection of chats and tweets from the Netherlands and Flanders is described. The chats and tweets are part of the freely available SoNaR corpus, a 500 million word text corpus of the Dutch language. Recruitment, metadata, anonymisation and IPR issues are discussed. To illustrate the difference of language use between the various text types and other parameters (like gender and age) simple text analysis in the form of unigram frequency lists is carried out. Furthermore a website is presented with which users can retrieve their own frequency lists.
Alternative Lexicalizations of Discourse Connectives in Czech
Authors: Magdal{\'e}na Rysov{\'a}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The paper concentrates on which language means may be included into the annotation of discourse relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and tries to examine the so called alternative lexicalizations of discourse markers (AltLex's) in Czech. The analysis proceeds from the annotated data of PDT and tries to draw a comparison between the Czech AltLex's from PDT and English AltLex's from PDTB (the Penn Discourse Treebank). The paper presents a lexico-syntactic and semantic characterization of the Czech AltLex's and comments on the current stage of their annotation in PDT. In the current version, PDT contains 306 expressions (within the total 43,955 of sentences) that were labeled by annotators as being an AltLex. However, as the analysis demonstrates, this number is not final. We suppose that it will increase after the further elaboration, as AltLex's are not restricted to a limited set of syntactic classes and some of them exhibit a great degree of variation.
Prediction of Non-Linguistic Information of Spontaneous Speech from the Prosodic Annotation: Evaluation of the X-JToBI system
Authors: Kikuo Maekawa
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering

Speakers' gender and age-group were predicted using the symbolic information of the X-JToBI prosodic labelling scheme as applied to the Core of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (44 hours, 155 speakers, 201 talks). The correct prediction rate of speaker gender by means of logistic regression analysis was about 80{\%}, and, the correct discrimination rate of speaker age-group (4 groups) by means of linear discriminant analysis was about 50 {\%}. These results, in conjunction with the previously reported result of the prediction experiment of 4 speech registers from the X-JToBI information, shows convincingly the superiority of X-JToBI over the traditional J{\_}ToBI. Clarification of the mechanism by which gender- and/or age-group information were reflected in the symbolic representations of prosody largely remains as open question, although some preliminary analyses were presented in the current paper.
PEARL: ProjEction of Annotations Rule Language, a Language for Projecting (UIMA) Annotations over RDF Knowledge Bases
Authors: Maria Teresa Pazienza, Arm Stellato, o, Andrea Turbati
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management

In this paper we present a language, PEARL, for projecting annotations based on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) over RDF triples. The language offer is twofold: first, a query mechanism, built upon (and extending) the basic FeaturePath notation of UIMA, allows for efficient access to the standard annotation format of UIMA based on feature structures. PEARL then provides a syntax for projecting the retrieved information onto an RDF Dataset, by using a combination of a SPARQL-like notation for matching pre-existing elements of the dataset and of meta-graph patterns, for storing new information into it. In this paper we present the basics of this language and how a PEARL document is structured, discuss a simple use-case and introduce a wider project about automatic acquisition of knowledge, in which PEARL plays a pivotal role.
Temporal Tagging on Different Domains: Challenges, Strategies, and Gold Standards
Authors: Jannik Str{\"o}tgen, Michael Gertz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Temporal Information Extraction, Temporal Tagging

In the last years, temporal tagging has received increasing attention in the area of natural language processing. However, most of the research so far concentrated on processing news documents. Only recently, two temporal annotated corpora of narrative-style documents were developed, and it was shown that a domain shift results in significant challenges for temporal tagging. Thus, a temporal tagger should be aware of the domain associated with documents that are to be processed and apply domain-specific strategies for extracting and normalizing temporal expressions. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of temporal expressions in different domains. In addition to news- and narrative-style documents, we add two further document types, namely colloquial and scientific documents. After discussing the challenges of temporal tagging on the different domains, we describe some strategies to tackle these challenges and describe their integration into our publicly available temporal tagger HeidelTime. Our cross-domain evaluation validates the benefits of domain-sensitive temporal tagging. Furthermore, we make available two new temporally annotated corpora and a new version of HeidelTime, which now distinguishes between four document domain types.
Correlation between Similarity Measures for Inter-Language Linked Wikipedia Articles
Authors: Monica Lestari Paramita, Paul Clough, Ahmet Aker, Robert Gaizauskas
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Image Captioning, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Retrieval, Translation

Wikipedia articles in different languages have been mined to support various tasks, such as Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Articles on the same topic in different languages are often connected by inter-language links, which can be used to identify similar or comparable content. In this work, we investigate the correlation between similarity measures utilising language-independent and language-dependent features and respective human judgments. A collection of 800 Wikipedia pairs from 8 different language pairs were collected and judged for similarity by two assessors. We report the development of this corpus and inter-assessor agreement between judges across the languages. Results show that similarity measured using language independent features is comparable to using an approach based on translating non-English documents. In both cases the correlation with human judgments is low but also dependent upon the language pair. The results and corpus generated from this work also provide insights into the measurement of cross-language similarity.