pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MultiVal - towards a multilingual valence lexicon
Authors: Lars Hellan, Dorothee Beermann, Tore Bruland, Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, Montserrat Marimon
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

MultiVal is a valence lexicon derived from lexicons of computational HPSG grammars for Norwegian, Spanish and Ga (ISO 639-3, gaa), with altogether about 22,000 verb entries and on average more than 200 valence types defined for each language. These lexical resources are mapped onto a common set of discriminants with a common array of values, and stored in a relational database linked to a web demo and a wiki presentation. Search discriminants are syntactic argument structure (SAS), functional specification, situation type and aspect, for any subset of languages, as well as the verb type systems of the grammars. Search results are lexical entries satisfying the discriminants entered, exposing the specifications from the respective provenance grammars. The Ga grammar lexicon has in turn been converted from a Ga Toolbox lexicon. Aside from the creation of such a multilingual valence resource through converging or converting existing resources, the paper also addresses a tool for the creation of such a resource as part of corpus annotation for less resourced languages.
The Sweet-Home speech and multimodal corpus for home automation interaction
Authors: Michel Vacher, Benjamin Lecouteux, Pedro Chahuara, Fran{\c{c}}ois Portet, Brigitte Meillon, Nicolas Bonnefond
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Distant Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Ambient Assisted Living aims at enhancing the quality of life of older and disabled people at home thanks to Smart Homes and Home Automation. However, many studies do not include tests in real settings, because data collection in this domain is very expensive and challenging and because of the few available data sets. The S WEET-H OME multimodal corpus is a dataset recorded in realistic conditions in D OMUS, a fully equipped Smart Home with microphones and home automation sensors, in which participants performed Activities of Daily living (ADL). This corpus is made of a multimodal subset, a French home automation speech subset recorded in Distant Speech conditions, and two interaction subsets, the first one being recorded by 16 persons without disabilities and the second one by 6 seniors and 5 visually impaired people. This corpus was used in studies related to ADL recognition, context aware interaction and distant speech recognition applied to home automation controled through voice.
Global Intelligent Content: Active Curation of Language Resources using Linked Data
Authors: David Lewis, Rob Brennan, Leroy Finn, Dominic Jones, Alan Meehan, Declan O{'}Sullivan, Sebastian Hellmann, Felix Sasaki
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Translation

As language resources start to become available in linked data formats, it becomes relevant to consider how linked data interoperability can play a role in active language processing workflows as well as for more static language resource publishing. This paper proposes that linked data may have a valuable role to play in tracking the use and generation of language resources in such workflows in order to assess and improve the performance of the language technologies that use the resources, based on feedback from the human involvement typically required within such processes. We refer to this as Active Curation of the language resources, since it is performed systematically over language processing workflows to continuously improve the quality of the resource in specific applications, rather than via dedicated curation steps. We use modern localisation workflows, i.e. assisted by machine translation and text analytics services, to explain how linked data can support such active curation. By referencing how a suitable linked data vocabulary can be assembled by combining existing linked data vocabularies and meta-data from other multilingual content processing annotations and tool exchange standards we aim to demonstrate the relative ease with which active curation can be deployed more broadly.
On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility
Authors: Liviu Dinu, Alina Maria Ciobanu
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Clustering

We propose a method for computing the similarity of natural languages and for clustering them based on their lexical similarity. Our study provides evidence to be used in the investigation of the written intelligibility, i.e., the ability of people writing in different languages to understand one another without prior knowledge of foreign languages. We account for etymons and cognates, we quantify lexical similarity and we extend our analysis from words to languages. Based on the introduced methodology, we compute a matrix of Romance languages intelligibility.
Aggregation methods for efficient collocation detection
Authors: Anca Dinu, Liviu Dinu, Ionut Sorodoc
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Classification, Text Generation, Text Summarization, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this article we propose a rank aggregation method for the task of collocations detection. It consists of applying some well-known methods (e.g. Dice method, chi-square test, z-test and likelihood ratio) and then aggregating the resulting collocations rankings by rank distance and Borda score. These two aggregation methods are especially well suited for the task, since the results of each individual method naturally forms a ranking of collocations. Combination methods are known to usually improve the results, and indeed, the proposed aggregation method performs better then each individual method taken in isolation.
Annotating Inter-Sentence Temporal Relations in Clinical Notes
Authors: Jennifer D{'}Souza, Vincent Ng
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence, Temporal Information Extraction, Temporal Relation Extraction

Owing in part to the surge of interest in temporal relation extraction, a number of datasets manually annotated with temporal relations between event-event pairs and event-time pairs have been produced recently. However, it is not uncommon to find missing annotations in these manually annotated datasets. Many researchers attributed this problem to {``}annotator fatigue{''}. While some of these missing relations can be recovered automatically, many of them cannot. Our goals in this paper are to (1) manually annotate certain types of missing links that cannot be automatically recovered in the i2b2 Clinical Temporal Relations Challenge Corpus, one of the recently released evaluation corpora for temporal relation extraction; and (2) empirically determine the usefulness of these additional annotations. We will make our annotations publicly available, in hopes of enabling a more accurate evaluation of temporal relation extraction systems.
Terminology localization guidelines for the national scenario
Authors: Juris Borzovs, Ilze Ilzi{\c{n}}a, Iveta Kei{\v{s}}a, M{\=a}rcis Pinnis, Andrejs Vasi{\c{l}}jevs
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Articles, Lexical Analysis

This paper presents a set of principles and practical guidelines for terminology work in the national scenario to ensure a harmonized approach in term localization. These linguistic principles and guidelines are elaborated by the Terminology Commission in Latvia in the domain of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). We also present a novel approach in a corpus-based selection and an evaluation of the most frequently used terms. Analysis of the terms proves that, in general, in the normative terminology work in Latvia localized terms are coined according to these guidelines. We further evaluate how terms included in the database of official terminology are adopted in the general use such as newspaper articles, blogs, forums, websites etc. Our evaluation shows that in a non-normative context the official terminology faces a strong competition from other variations of localized terms. Conclusions and recommendations from lexical analysis of localized terms are provided. We hope that presented guidelines and approach in evaluation will be useful to terminology institutions, regulative authorities and researchers in different countries that are involved in the national terminology work.
Tools for Arabic Natural Language Processing: a case study in qalqalah prosody
Authors: Claire Brierley, Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Keyword Extraction

In this paper, we focus on the prosodic effect of qalqalah or {``}vibration{''} applied to a subset of Arabic consonants under certain constraints during correct Qur{'}anic recitation or ta{\c{C}}{\S}w{\=\i}d, using our Boundary-Annotated QurÂ’an dataset of 77430 words (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2014). These qalqalah events are rule-governed and are signified orthographically in the Arabic script. Hence they can be given abstract definition in the form of regular expressions and thus located and collected automatically. High frequency qalqalah content words are also found to be statistically significant discriminators or keywords when comparing Meccan and Medinan chapters in the Qur{'}an using a state-of-the-art Visual Analytics toolkit: Semantic Pathways. Thus we hypothesise that qalqalah prosody is one way of highlighting salient items in the text. Finally, we implement Arabic transcription technology (Brierley et al under review; Sawalha et al forthcoming) to create a qalqalah pronunciation guide where each word is transcribed phonetically in IPA and mapped to its chapter-verse ID. This is funded research under the EPSRC {``}Working Together{''} theme.
Teenage and adult speech in school context: building and processing a corpus of European Portuguese
Authors: Ana Isabel Mata, Helena Moniz, Fern Batista, o, Julia Hirschberg
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

We present a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context, CPE-FACES, with an overview of the differential characteristics of high school oral presentations and the challenges this data poses to automatic speech processing. The CPE-FACES corpus has been created with two main goals: to provide a resource for the study of prosodic patterns in both spontaneous and prepared unscripted speech, and to capture inter-speaker and speaking style variations common at school, for research on oral presentations. Research on speaking styles is still largely based on adult speech. References to teenagers are sparse and cross-analyses of speech types comparing teenagers and adults are rare. We expect CPE-FACES, currently a unique resource in this domain, will contribute to filling this gap in European Portuguese. Focusing on disfluencies and phrase-final phonetic-phonological processes we show the impact of teenage speech on the automatic segmentation of oral presentations. Analyzing fluent final intonation contours in declarative utterances, we also show that communicative situation specificities, speaker status and cross-gender differences are key factors in speaking style variation at school.
A Unified Annotation Scheme for the Semantic/Pragmatic Components of Definiteness
Authors: Archna Bhatia, M Simons, y, Lori Levin, Yulia Tsvetkov, Chris Dyer, Jordan Bender
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Specificity

We present a definiteness annotation scheme that captures the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information, which we call communicative functions, associated with linguistic descriptions such as {``}a story about my speech{''}, {``}the story{''}, {``}every time I give it{''}, {``}this slideshow{''}. A survey of the literature suggests that definiteness does not express a single communicative function but is a grammaticalization of many such functions, for example, identifiability, familiarity, uniqueness, specificity. Our annotation scheme unifies ideas from previous research on definiteness while attempting to remove redundancy and make it easily annotatable. This annotation scheme encodes the communicative functions of definiteness rather than the grammatical forms of definiteness. We assume that the communicative functions are largely maintained across languages while the grammaticalization of this information may vary. One of the final goals is to use our semantically annotated corpora to discover how definiteness is grammaticalized in different languages. We release our annotated corpora for English and Hindi, and sample annotations for Hebrew and Russian, together with an annotation manual.
Aligning Predicate-Argument Structures for Paraphrase Fragment Extraction
Authors: Michaela Regneri, Rui Wang, Manfred Pinkal
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Document Summarization, Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, Sentence, Text Generation

Paraphrases and paraphrasing algorithms have been found of great importance in various natural language processing tasks. While most paraphrase extraction approaches extract equivalent sentences, sentences are an inconvenient unit for further processing, because they are too specific, and often not exact paraphrases. Paraphrase fragment extraction is a technique that post-processes sentential paraphrases and prunes them to more convenient phrase-level units. We present a new approach that uses semantic roles to extract paraphrase fragments from sentence pairs that share semantic content to varying degrees, including full paraphrases. In contrast to previous systems, the use of semantic parses allows for extracting paraphrases with high wording variance and different syntactic categories. The approach is tested on four different input corpora and compared to two previous systems for extracting paraphrase fragments. Our system finds three times as many good paraphrase fragments per sentence pair as the baselines, and at the same time outputs 30{\%} fewer unrelated fragment pairs.
An evaluation of the role of statistical measures and frequency for MWE identification
Authors: S Antunes, ra, Am{\'a}lia Mendes
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

We report on an experiment to evaluate the role of statistical association measures and frequency for the identification of MWE. We base our evaluation on a lexicon of 14.000 MWE comprising different types of word combinations: collocations, nominal compounds, light verbs + predicate, idioms, etc. These MWE were manually validated from a list of n-grams extracted from a 50 million word corpus of Portuguese (a subcorpus of the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese), using several criteria: syntactic fixedness, idiomaticity, frequency and Mutual Information measure, although no threshold was established, either in terms of group frequency or MI. We report on MWE that were selected on the basis of their syntactic and semantics properties while the MI or both the MI and the frequency show low values, which would constitute difficult cases to establish a cutting point. We analyze the MI values of the MWE selected in our gold dataset and, for some specific cases, compare these values with two other statistical measures.
On the reliability and inter-annotator agreement of human semantic MT evaluation via HMEANT
Authors: Chi-kiu Lo, Dekai Wu
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling, Semantic Textual Similarity

We present analyses showing that HMEANT is a reliable, accurate and fine-grained semantic frame based human MT evaluation metric with high inter-annotator agreement (IAA) and correlation with human adequacy judgments, despite only requiring a minimal training of about 15 minutes for lay annotators. Previous work shows that the IAA on the semantic role labeling (SRL) subtask within HMEANT is over 70{\%}. In this paper we focus on (1) the IAA on the semantic role alignment task and (2) the overall IAA of HMEANT. Our results show that the IAA on the alignment task of HMEANT is over 90{\%} when humans align SRL output from the same SRL annotator, which shows that the instructions on the alignment task are sufficiently precise, although the overall IAA where humans align SRL output from different SRL annotators falls to only 61{\%} due to the pipeline effect on the disagreement in the two annotation task. We show that instead of manually aligning the semantic roles using an automatic algorithm not only helps maintaining the overall IAA of HMEANT at 70{\%}, but also provides a finer-grained assessment on the phrasal similarity of the semantic role fillers. This suggests that HMEANT equipped with automatic alignment is reliable and accurate for humans to evaluate MT adequacy while achieving higher correlation with human adequacy judgments than HTER.
Dual Subtitles as Parallel Corpora
Authors: Shikun Zhang, Wang Ling, Chris Dyer
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we leverage the existence of dual subtitles as a source of parallel data. Dual subtitles present viewers with two languages simultaneously, and are generally aligned in the segment level, which removes the need to automatically perform this alignment. This is desirable as extracted parallel data does not contain alignment errors present in previous work that aligns different subtitle files for the same movie. We present a simple heuristic to detect and extract dual subtitles and show that more than 20 million sentence pairs can be extracted for the Mandarin-English language pair. We also show that extracting data from this source can be a viable solution for improving Machine Translation systems in the domain of subtitles.
REFRACTIVE: An Open Source Tool to Extract Knowledge from Syntactic and Semantic Relations
Authors: Peter Exner, Pierre Nugues
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Relation Extraction, Semantic Parsing, Semantic Role Labeling

The extraction of semantic propositions has proven instrumental in applications like IBM Watson and in Google{'}s knowledge graph . One of the core components of IBM Watson is the PRISMATIC knowledge base consisting of one billion propositions extracted from the English version of Wikipedia and the New York Times. However, extracting the propositions from the English version of Wikipedia is a time-consuming process. In practice, this task requires multiple machines and a computation distribution involving a good deal of system technicalities. In this paper, we describe Refractive, an open-source tool to extract propositions from a parsed corpus based on the Hadoop variant of MapReduce. While the complete process consists of a parsing part and an extraction part, we focus here on the extraction from the parsed corpus and we hope this tool will help computational linguists speed up the development of applications.
Variations on quantitative comparability measures and their evaluations on synthetic French-English comparable corpora
Authors: Guiyao Ke, Pierre-Francois Marteau, Gildas Menier
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation

Following the pioneering work by {\textbackslash}cite{Li-Gaussier-10}, we address in this paper the analysis of a family of quantitative comparability measures dedicated to the construction and evaluation of topical comparable corpora. After recalling the definition of the quantitative comparability measure proposed by {\textbackslash}cite{Li-Gaussier-10}, we develop some variants of this measure based primarily on the consideration that the occurrence frequencies of lexical entries and the number of their translations are important. We compare the respective advantages and disadvantages of these variants in the context of an evaluation framework that is based on the progressive degradation of the Europarl parallel corpus. The degradation is obtained by replacing either deterministically or randomly a varying amount of lines in blocks that compose partitions of the initial Europarl corpus. The impact of the coverage of bilingual dictionaries on these measures is also discussed and perspectives are finally presented.
Using a machine learning model to assess the complexity of stress systems
Authors: Liviu Dinu, Alina Maria Ciobanu, Ioana Chitoran, Vlad Niculae
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Speech Synthesis, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

We address the task of stress prediction as a sequence tagging problem. We present sequential models with averaged perceptron training for learning primary stress in Romanian words. We use character n-grams and syllable n-grams as features and we account for the consonant-vowel structure of the words. We show in this paper that Romanian stress is predictable, though not deterministic, by using data-driven machine learning techniques.
Prosodic, syntactic, semantic guidelines for topic structures across domains and corpora
Authors: Ana Isabel Mata, Helena Moniz, Telmo M{\'o}ia, Anabela Gon{\c{c}}alves, F{\'a}tima Silva, Fern Batista, o, In{\^e}s Duarte, F{\'a}tima Oliveira, Isabel Fal{\'e}
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging

This paper presents the annotation guidelines applied to naturally occurring speech, aiming at an integrated account of contrast and parallel structures in European Portuguese. These guidelines were defined to allow for the empirical study of interactions among intonation and syntax-discourse patterns in selected sets of different corpora (monologues and dialogues, by adults and teenagers). In this paper we focus on the multilayer annotation process of left periphery structures by using a small sample of highly spontaneous speech in which the distinct types of topic structures are displayed. The analysis of this sample provides fundamental training and testing material for further application in a wider range of domains and corpora. The annotation process comprises the following time-linked levels (manual and automatic): phone, syllable and word level transcriptions (including co-articulation effects); tonal events and break levels; part-of-speech tagging; syntactic-discourse patterns (construction type; construction position; syntactic function; discourse function), and disfluency events as well. Speech corpora with such a multi-level annotation are a valuable resource to look into grammar module relations in language use from an integrated viewpoint. Such viewpoint is innovative in our language, and has not been often assumed by studies for other languages.