pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
META-SHARE v2: An Open Network of Repositories for Language Resources including Data and Tools
Authors: Christian Federmann, Ioanna Giannopoulou, Christian Girardi, Olivier Hamon, Dimitris Mavroeidis, Salvatore Minutoli, Marc Schr{\"o}der
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We describe META-SHARE which aims at providing an open, distributed, secure, and interoperable infrastructure for the exchange of language resources, including both data and tools. The application has been designed and is developed as part of the T4ME Network of Excellence. We explain the underlying motivation for such a distributed repository for metadata storage and give a detailed overview on the META-SHARE application and its various components. This includes a discussion of the technical architecture of the system as well as a description of the component-based metadata schema format which has been developed in parallel. Development of the META-SHARE infrastructure adopts state-of-the-art technology and follows an open-source approach, allowing the general community to participate in the development process. The META-SHARE software package including full source code has been released to the public in March 2012. We look forward to present an up-to-date version of the META-SHARE software at the conference.
Analyzing and Aligning German compound nouns
Authors: Marion Weller, Ulrich Heid
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, Translation

In this paper, we present and evaluate an approach for the compositional alignment of compound nouns using comparable corpora from technical domains. The task of term alignment consists in relating a source language term to its translation in a list of target language terms with the help of a bilingual dictionary. Compound splitting allows to transform a compound into a sequence of components which can be translated separately and then related to multi-word target language terms. We present and evaluate a method for compound splitting, and compare two strategies for term alignment (bag-of-word vs. pattern-based). The simple word-based approach leads to a considerable amount of erroneous alignments, whereas the pattern-based approach reaches a decent precision. We also assess the reasons for alignment failures: in the comparable corpora used for our experiments, a substantial number of terms has no translation in the target language data; furthermore, the non-isomorphic structures of source and target language terms cause alignment failures in many cases.
Identification of Manner in Bio-Events
Authors: Raheel Nawaz, Paul Thompson, Sophia Ananiadou
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Event Extraction

Due to the rapid growth in the volume of biomedical literature, there is an increasing requirement for high-performance semantic search systems, which allow biologists to perform precise searches for events of interest. Such systems are usually trained on corpora of documents that contain manually annotated events. Until recently, these corpora, and hence the event extraction systems trained on them, focussed almost exclusively on the identification and classification of event arguments, without taking into account how the textual context of the events could affect their interpretation. Previously, we designed an annotation scheme to enrich events with several aspects (or dimensions) of interpretation, which we term meta-knowledge, and applied this scheme to the entire GENIA corpus. In this paper, we report on our experiments to automate the assignment of one of these meta-knowledge dimensions, i.e. Manner, to recognised events. Manner is concerned with the rate, strength intensity or level of the event. We distinguish three different values of manner, i.e., High, Low and Neutral. To our knowledge, our work represents the first attempt to classify the manner of events. Using a combination of lexical, syntactic and semantic features, our system achieves an overall accuracy of 99.4{\%}.
A Tool/Database Interface for Multi-Level Analyses
Authors: Kurt Eberle, Kerstin Eckart, Ulrich Heid, Boris Haselbach
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Morphological Analysis

Depending on the nature of a linguistic theory, empirical investigations of its soundness may focus on corpus studies related to lexical, syntactic, semantic or other phenomena. Especially work in research networks usually comprises analyses of different levels of description, where each one must be as reliable as possible when the same sentences and texts are investigated under very different perspectives. This paper describes an infrastructure that interfaces an analysis tool for multi-level annotation with a generic relational database. It supports three dimensions of analysis-handling and thereby builds an integrated environment for quality assurance in corpus based linguistic analysis: a vertical dimension relating analysis components in a pipeline, a horizontal dimension taking alternative results of the same analysis level into account and a temporal dimension to follow up cases where analyses for the same input have been produced with different versions of a tool. As an example we give a detailed description of a typical workflow for the vertical dimension.
Accessing and standardizing Wiktionary lexical entries for the translation of labels in Cultural Heritage taxonomies
Authors: Thierry Declerck, Karlheinz M{\"o}rth, Piroska Lendvai
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Translation

We describe the usefulness of Wiktionary, the freely available web-based lexical resource, in providing multilingual extensions to catalogues that serve content-based indexing of folktales and related narratives. We develop conversion tools between Wiktionary and TEI, using ISO standards (LMF, MAF), to make such resources available to both the Digital Humanities community and the Language Resources community. The converted data can be queried via a web interface, while the tools of the workflow are to be released with an open source license. We report on the actual state and functionality of our tools and analyse some shortcomings of Wiktionary, as well as potential domains of application.
Using an ASR database to design a pronunciation evaluation system in Basque
Authors: Igor Odriozola, Eva Navas, Inma Hernaez, I{\~n}aki Sainz, Ibon Saratxaga, Jon S{\'a}nchez, Daniel Erro
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Clustering, Speech Recognition

This paper presents a method to build CAPT systems for under resourced languages, as Basque, using a general purpose ASR speech database. More precisely, the proposed method consists in automatically determine the threshold of GOP (Goodness Of Pronunciation) scores, which have been used as pronunciation scores in phone-level. Two score distributions have been obtained for each phoneme corresponding to its correct and incorrect pronunciations. The distribution of the scores for erroneous pronunciation has been calculated inserting controlled errors in the dictionary, so that each changed phoneme has been randomly replaced by a phoneme from the same group. These groups have been obtained by means of a phonetic clustering performed using regression trees. After obtaining both distributions, the EER (Equal Error Rate) of each distribution pair has been calculated and used as a decision threshold for each phoneme. The results show that this method is useful when there is no database specifically designed for CAPT systems, although it is not as accurate as those specifically designed for this purpose.
A Corpus of Scientific Biomedical Texts Spanning over 168 Years Annotated for Uncertainty
Authors: Ramona Bongelli, Carla Canestrari, Ilaria Riccioni, Andrzej Zuczkowski, Cinzia Buldorini, Ricardo Pietrobon, Alberto Lavelli, Bernardo Magnini
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles

Uncertainty language permeates biomedical research and is fundamental for the computer interpretation of unstructured text. And yet, a coherent, cognitive-based theory to interpret Uncertainty language and guide Natural Language Processing is, to our knowledge, non-existing. The aim of our project was therefore to detect and annotate Uncertainty markers ― which play a significant role in building knowledge or beliefs in readers' minds ― in a biomedical research corpus. Our corpus includes 80 manually annotated articles from the British Medical Journal randomly sampled from a 168-year period. Uncertainty markers have been classified according to a theoretical framework based on a combined linguistic and cognitive theory. The corpus was manually annotated according to such principles. We performed preliminary experiments to assess the manually annotated corpus and establish a baseline for the automatic detection of Uncertainty markers. The results of the experiments show that most of the Uncertainty markers can be recognized with good accuracy.
New language resources for the Pashto language
Authors: Djamel Mostefa, Khalid Choukri, Sylvie Brunessaux, Karim Boudahmane
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper reports on the development of new language resources for the Pashto language, a very low-resource language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the scope of a multilingual data collection project, three large corpora are collected for Pashto. Firstly a monolingual text corpus of 100 million words is produced. Secondly a 100 hours speech database is recorded and manually transcribed. Finally a bilingual Pashto-French parallel corpus of around 2 million is produced by translating Pashto texts into French. These resources will be used to develop Human Language Technology systems for Pashto with a special focus on Machine Translation.
Extending the MPC corpus to Chinese and Urdu - A Multiparty Multi-Lingual Chat Corpus for Modeling Social Phenomena in Language
Authors: Ting Liu, Samira Shaikh, Tomek Strzalkowski, Aaron Broadwell, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Sarah Taylor, Umit Boz, Xiaoai Ren, Jingsi Wu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper, we report our efforts in building a multi-lingual multi-party online chat corpus in order to develop a firm understanding in a set of social constructs such as agenda control, influence, and leadership as well as to computationally model such constructs in online interactions. These automated models will help capture the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper, we first introduce our experiment design and data collection method in Chinese and Urdu, and then report on the current stage of our data collection. We annotated the collected corpus on four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics, and meso-topics. Results from the analyses of annotated data on different languages indicate some interesting phenomena, which are reported in this paper.
CALBC: Releasing the Final Corpora
Authors: {\c{S}}enay Kafkas, Ian Lewin, David Milward, Erik van Mulligen, Jan Kors, Udo Hahn, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

A number of gold standard corpora for named entity recognition are available to the public. However, the existing gold standard corpora are limited in size and semantic entity types. These usually lead to implementation of trained solutions (1) for a limited number of semantic entity types and (2) lacking in generalization capability. In order to overcome these problems, the CALBC project has aimed to automatically generate large scale corpora annotated with multiple semantic entity types in a community-wide manner based on the consensus of different named entity solutions. The generated corpus is called the silver standard corpus since the corpus generation process does not involve any manual curation. In this publication, we announce the release of the final CALBC corpora which include the silver standard corpus in different versions and several gold standard corpora for the further usage of the biomedical text mining community. The gold standard corpora are utilised to benchmark the methods used in the silver standard corpora generation process and released in a shared format. All the corpora are released in a shared format and accessible at www.calbc.eu.
BUCEADOR, a multi-language search engine for digital libraries
Authors: Jordi Adell, Antonio Bonafonte, Antonio Cardenal, Marta R. Costa-juss{\`a}, Jos{\'e} A. R. Fonollosa, Asunci{\'o}n Moreno, Eva Navas, Eduardo R. Banga
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Translation

This paper presents a web-based multimedia search engine built within the Buceador (www.buceador.org) research project. A proof-of-concept tool has been implemented which is able to retrieve information from a digital library made of multimedia documents in the 4 official languages in Spain (Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician). The retrieved documents are presented in the user language after translation and dubbing (the four previous languages + English). The paper presents the tool functionality, the architecture, the digital library and provide some information about the technology involved in the fields of automatic speech recognition, statistical machine translation, text-to-speech synthesis and information retrieval. Each technology has been adapted to the purposes of the presented tool as well as to interact with the rest of the technologies involved.
Linguistic Analysis Processing Line for Bulgarian
Authors: Aleks Savkov, ar, Laska Laskova, Stanislava Kancheva, Petya Osenova, Kiril Simov
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modelling, Lemmatization, Machine Translation, Management, Morphological Analysis, Morphological Tagging, Sentence

This paper presents a linguistic processing pipeline for Bulgarian including morphological analysis, lemmatization and syntactic analysis of Bulgarian texts. The morphological analysis is performed by three modules â€• two statistical-based and one rule-based. The combination of these modules achieves the best result for morphological tagging of Bulgarian over a rich tagset (680 tags). The lemmatization is based on rules, generated from a large morphological lexicon of Bulgarian. The syntactic analysis is implemented via MaltParser. The two statistical morphological taggers and MaltParser are trained on datasets constructed within BulTreeBank project. The processing pipeline includes also a sentence splitter and a tokenizer. All tools in the pipeline are packed in modules that can also perform separately. The whole pipeline is designed to be able to serve as a back-end of a web service oriented interface, but it also supports the user tasks with a command-line interface. The processing pipeline is compatible with the Text Corpus Format, which allows it to delegate the management of the components to the WebLicht platform.
Getting more data -- Schoolkids as annotators
Authors: Jirka Hana, Barbora Hladk{\'a}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: text annotation

We present a new way to get more morphologically and syntactically annotated data. We have developed an annotation editor tailored to school children to involve them in text annotation. Using this editor, they practice morphology and dependency-based syntax in the same way as they normally do at (Czech) schools, without any special training. Their annotation is then automatically transformed into the target annotation schema. The editor is designed to be language independent, however the subsequent transformation is driven by the annotation framework we are heading for. In our case, the object language is Czech and the target annotation scheme corresponds to the Prague Dependency Treebank annotation framework.
Visualizing word senses in WordNet Atlas
Authors: Matteo Abrate, Clara Bacciu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: LEMMA, Navigate

This demo presents the second prototype of WordNet Atlas, a web application that gives users the ability to navigate and visualize the 146,312 word senses of the nouns contained within the Princeton WordNet. Two complementary, interlinked visualizations are provided: an hypertextual dictionary to represent detailed information about a word sense, such as lemma, definition and depictions, and a zoomable map representing the taxonomy of noun synsets in a circular layout. The application could help users unfamiliar with WordNet to get oriented in the large amount of data it contains.
Building Large Corpora from the Web Using a New Efficient Tool Chain
Authors: Rol Sch{\"a}fer, Felix Bildhauer
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Text Detection

Over the last decade, methods of web corpus construction and the evaluation of web corpora have been actively researched. Prominently, the WaCky initiative has provided both theoretical results and a set of web corpora for selected European languages. We present a software toolkit for web corpus construction and a set of siginificantly larger corpora (up to over 9 billion tokens) built using this software. First, we discuss how the data should be collected to ensure that it is not biased towards certain hosts. Then, we describe our software toolkit which performs basic cleanups as well as boilerplate removal, simple connected text detection as well as shingling to remove duplicates from the corpora. We finally report evaluation results of the corpora built so far, for example w.r.t. the amount of duplication contained and the text type/genre distribution. Where applicable, we compare our corpora to the WaCky corpora, since it is inappropriate, in our view, to compare web corpora to traditional or balanced corpora. While we use some methods applied by the WaCky initiative, we can show that we have introduced incremental improvements.
An empirical resource for discovering cognitive principles of discourse organisation: the ANNODIS corpus
Authors: Stergos Afantenos, Nicholas Asher, Farah Benamara, Myriam Bras, C{\'e}cile Fabre, Mai Ho-dac, Anne Le Draoulec, Philippe Muller, Marie-Paule P{\'e}ry-Woodley, Laurent Pr{\'e}vot, Josette Rebeyrolles, Ludovic Tanguy, Marianne Vergez-Couret, Laure Vieu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper describes the ANNODIS resource, a discourse-level annotated corpus for French. The corpus combines two perspectives on discourse: a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. The bottom-up view incrementally builds a structure from elementary discourse units, while the top-down view focuses on the selective annotation of multi-level discourse structures. The corpus is composed of texts that are diversified with respect to genre, length and type of discursive organisation. The methodology followed here involves an iterative design of annotation guidelines in order to reach satisfactory inter-annotator agreement levels. This allows us to raise a few issues relevant for the comparison of such complex objects as discourse structures. The corpus also serves as a source of empirical evidence for discourse theories. We present here two first analyses taking advantage of this new annotated corpus --one that tested hypotheses on constraints governing discourse structure, and another that studied the variations in composition and signalling of multi-level discourse structures.
English to Indonesian Transliteration to Support English Pronunciation Practice
Authors: Amalia Zahra, Julie Carson-Berndsen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Transliteration

The work presented in this paper explores the use of Indonesian transliteration to support English pronunciation practice. It is mainly aimed for Indonesian speakers who have no or minimum English language skills. The approach implemented combines a rule-based and a statistical method. The rules of English-Phone-to-Indonesian-Grapheme mapping are implemented with a Finite State Transducer (FST), followed by a statistical method which is a grapheme-based trigram language model. The Indonesian transliteration generated was used as a means to support the learners where their speech were then recorded. The speech recordings have been evaluated by 19 participants: 8 English native and 11 non-native speakers. The results show that the transliteration positively contributes to the improvement of their English pronunciation.
Boosting the Coverage of a Semantic Lexicon by Automatically Extracted Event Nominalizations
Authors: Kata G{\'a}bor, Marianna Apidianaki, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot, {\'E}ric Villemonte de la Clergerie
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Word Sense Induction

In this article, we present a distributional analysis method for extracting nominalization relations from monolingual corpora. The acquisition method makes use of distributional and morphological information to select nominalization candidates. We explain how the learning is performed on a dependency annotated corpus and describe the nominalization results. Furthermore, we show how these results served to enrich an existing lexical resource, the WOLF (Wordnet Libre du Franc{\^A}{\c{}}ais). We present the techniques that we developed in order to integrate the new information into WOLF, based on both its structure and content. Finally, we evaluate the validity of the automatically obtained information and the correctness of its integration into the semantic resource. The method proved to be useful for boosting the coverage of WOLF and presents the advantage of filling verbal synsets, which are particularly difficult to handle due to the high level of verbal polysemy.
Using the International Standard Language Resource Number: Practical and Technical Aspects
Authors: Khalid Choukri, Victoria Arranz, Olivier Hamon, Jungyeul Park
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper describes the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a new identification schema for Language Resources where a Language Resource is provided with a unique and universal name using a standardized nomenclature. This will ensure that Language Resources be identified, accessed and disseminated in a unique manner, thus allowing them to be recognized with proper references in all activities concerning Human Language Technologies as well as in all documents and scientific papers. This would allow, for instance, the formal identification of potentially repeated resources across different repositories, the formal referencing of language resources and their correct use when different versions are processed by tools.
Assessing Divergence Measures for Automated Document Routing in an Adaptive MT System
Authors: Claire Jaja, Douglas Briesch, Jamal Laoudi, Clare Voss
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Document Classification, Machine Translation, Translation

Custom machine translation (MT) engines systematically outperform general-domain MT engines when translating within the relevant custom domain. This paper investigates the use of the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure for automatically routing new documents within a translation system with multiple MT engines to the appropriate custom MT engine in order to obtain the best translation. Three distinct domains are compared, and the impact of the language, size, and preprocessing of the documents on the Jensen-Shannon score is addressed. Six test datasets are then compared to the three known-domain corpora to predict which of the three custom MT engines they would be routed to at runtime given their Jensen-Shannon scores. The results are promising for incorporating this divergence measure into a translation workflow.