pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robust clause boundary identification for corpus annotation
Authors: Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Sentence

The paper describes a rule-based system for tagging clause boundaries, implemented for annotating the Estonian Reference Corpus of the University of Tartu, a collection of written texts containing ca 245 million running words and available for querying via Keeleveeb language portal. The system needs information about parts of speech and grammatical categories coded in the word-forms, i.e. it takes morphologically annotated text as input, but requires no information about the syntactic structure of the sentence. Among the strong points of our system we should mention identifying parenthesis and embedded clauses, i.e. clauses that are inserted into another clause dividing it into two separate parts in the linear text, for example a relative clause following its head noun. That enables a corpus query system to unite the otherwise divided clause, a feature that usually presupposes full parsing. The overall precision of the system is 95{\%} and the recall is 96{\%}. If ordinary clause boundary detection and parenthesis and embedded clause boundary detection are evaluated separately, then one can say that detecting an ordinary clause boundary (recall 98{\%}, precision 96{\%}) is an easier task than detecting an embedded clause (recall 79{\%}, precision 100{\%}).
NKI-CCRT Corpus - Speech Intelligibility Before and After Advanced Head and Neck Cancer Treated with Concomitant Chemoradiotherapy
Authors: R.P. Clapham, L. van der Molen, R.J.J.H. van Son, M. van den Brekel, F.J.M. Hilgers
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Evaluations of speech intelligibility based on a read passage are often used in the clinical situation to assess the impact of the disease and/or treatment on spoken communication. Although scale-based measures are often used in the clinical setting, these measures are susceptible to listener response bias. Automatic evaluation tools are being developed in response to some of the drawbacks of perceptual evaluation, however, large corpora judged by listeners are needed to improve and test these tools. To this end, the NKI-CCRT corpus with individual listener judgements on the intelligibility of recordings of 55 speakers treated for cancer of the head and neck will be made available for restricted scientific use. The corpus contains recordings and perceptual evaluations of speech intelligibility over three evaluation moments: before treatment and after treatment (10-weeks and 12-months). Treatment was by means of chemoradiotherapy (CCRT). Thirteen recently graduated speech pathologists rated the speech intelligibility of the recordings on a 7-point scale. Information on recording and perceptual evaluation procedures is presented in addition to preliminary rater reliability and agreement information. Preliminary results show that for many speakers speech intelligibility is rated low before cancer treatment.
PaCo2: A Fully Automated tool for gathering Parallel Corpora from the Web
Authors: I{\~n}aki San Vicente, Iker Manterola
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The importance of parallel corpora in the NLP field is fully acknowledged. This paper presents a tool that can build parallel corpora given just a seed word list and a pair of languages. Our approach is similar to others proposed in the literature, but introduces a new phase to the process. While most of the systems leave the task of finding websites containing parallel content up to the user, PaCo2 (Parallel Corpora Collector) takes care of that as well. The tool is language independent as far as possible, and adapting the system to work with new languages is fairly straightforward. Evaluation of the different modules has been carried out for Basque-Spanish, Spanish-English and Portuguese-English language pairs. Even though there is still room for improvement, results are positive. Results show that the corpora created have very good quality translations units, and the quality is maintained for the various language pairs. Details of the corpora created up until now are also provided.
Mapping WordNet synsets to Wikipedia articles
Authors: Fern, Samuel o, Mark Stevenson
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Information Retrieval, Word Sense Disambiguation

Lexical knowledge bases (LKBs), such as WordNet, have been shown to be useful for a range of language processing tasks. Extending these resources is an expensive and time-consuming process. This paper describes an approach to address this problem by automatically generating a mapping from WordNet synsets to Wikipedia articles. A sample of synsets has been manually annotated with article matches for evaluation purposes. The automatic methods are shown to create mappings with precision of 87.8{\%} and recall of 46.9{\%}. These mappings can then be used as a basis for enriching WordNet with new relations based on Wikipedia links. The manual and automatically created data is available online.
BLEU Evaluation of Machine-Translated English-Croatian Legislation
Authors: Sanja Seljan, Marija Brki{\'c}, Tomislav Vi{\v{c}}i{\'c}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper presents work on the evaluation of online available machine translation (MT) service, i.e. Google Translate, for English-Croatian language pair in the domain of legislation. The total set of 200 sentences, for which three reference translations are provided, is divided into short and long sentences. Human evaluation is performed by native speakers, using the criteria of adequacy and fluency. For measuring the reliability of agreement among raters, Fleiss' kappa metric is used. Human evaluation is enriched by error analysis, in order to examine the influence of error types on fluency and adequacy, and to use it in further research. Translation errors are divided into several categories: non-translated words, word omissions, unnecessarily translated words, morphological errors, lexical errors, syntactic errors and incorrect punctuation. The automatic evaluation metric BLEU is calculated with regard to a single and multiple reference translations. System level Pearson's correlation between BLEU scores based on a single and multiple reference translations is given, as well as correlation between short and long sentences BLEU scores, and correlation between the criteria of fluency and adequacy and each error category.
Making Ellipses Explicit in Dependency Conversion for a German Treebank
Authors: Wolfgang Seeker, Jonas Kuhn
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present a carefully designed dependency conversion of the German phrase-structure treebank TiGer that explicitly represents verb ellipses by introducing empty nodes into the tree. Although the conversion process uses heuristics like many other conversion tools we designed them to fail if no reasonable solution can be found. The failing of the conversion process makes it possible to detect elliptical constructions where the head is missing, but it also allows us to find errors in the original annotation. We discuss the conversion process and the heuristics, and describe some design decisions and error corrections that we applied to the corpus. Since most of today's data-driven dependency parsers are not able to handle empty nodes directly during parsing, our conversion tool also derives a canonical dependency format without empty nodes. It is shown experimentally to be well suited for training statistical dependency parsers by comparing the performance of two parsers from different parsing paradigms on the data set of the CoNLL 2009 Shared Task data and our corpus.
SentiSense: An easily scalable concept-based affective lexicon for sentiment analysis
Authors: Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz, Laura Plaza, Pablo Gerv{\'a}s
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in sentiment analysis-related tasks, specially in polarity and intensity classification and emotion identification. SentiSense attaches emotional meanings to concepts from the WordNet lexical database, instead of terms, thus allowing to address the word ambiguity problem using one of the many WordNet-based word sense disambiguation algorithms. SentiSense consists of 5,496 words and 2,190 synsets labeled with an emotion from a set of 14 emotional categories, which are related by an antonym relationship. SentiSense has been developed semi-automatically using several semantic relations between synsets in WordNet. SentiSense is endowed with a set of tools that allow users to visualize the lexicon and some statistics about the distribution of synsets and emotions in SentiSense, as well as to easily expand the lexicon. SentiSense is available for research purposes.
Distractorless Authorship Verification
Authors: John Noecker Jr, Michael Ryan
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Authorship Verification

Authorship verification is the task of, given a document and a candi- date author, determining whether or not the document was written by the candi- date author. Traditional approaches to authorship verification have revolved around a candidate author vs. everything else approach. Thus, perhaps the most important aspect of performing authorship verification on a document is the development of an appropriate distractor set to represent everything not the candidate author. The validity of the results of such experiments hinges on the ability to develop an appropriately representative set of distractor documents. Here, we propose a method for performing authorship verification without the use of a distractor set. Using only training data from the candidate author, we are able to perform authorship verification with high confidence (greater than 90{\%} accuracy rates across a large corpus).
Predicting Phrase Breaks in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text
Authors: Majdi Sawalha, Claire Brierley, Eric Atwell
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Chunking, Human Parsing, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, Speech Synthesis

We train and test two probabilistic taggers for Arabic phrase break prediction on a purpose-built, gold standard, boundary-annotated and PoS-tagged Qur'an corpus of 77430 words and 8230 sentences. In a related LREC paper (Brierley et al., 2012), we cover dataset build. Here we report on comparative experiments with off-the-shelf N-gram and HMM taggers and coarse-grained feature sets for syntax and prosody, where the task is to predict boundary locations in an unseen test set stripped of boundary annotations by classifying words as breaks or non-breaks. The preponderance of non-breaks in the training data sets a challenging baseline success rate: 85.56{\%}. However, we achieve significant gains in accuracy with the trigram tagger, and significant gains in performance recognition of minority class instances with both taggers via Balanced Classification Rate. This is initial work on a long-term research project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.
Open-Source Boundary-Annotated Corpus for Arabic Speech and Language Processing
Authors: Claire Brierley, Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Chunking, Descriptive, Speech Synthesis, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

A boundary-annotated and part-of-speech tagged corpus is a prerequisite for developing phrase break classifiers. Boundary annotations in English speech corpora are descriptive, delimiting intonation units perceived by the listener. We take a novel approach to phrase break prediction for Arabic, deriving our prosodic annotation scheme from Tajw{\=\i}d (recitation) mark-up in the Qur'an which we then interpret as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is prescriptive, and signifies a widely-used recitation style, and one of seven original styles of transmission. Here we report on version 1.0 of our Boundary-Annotated Qur'an dataset of 77430 words and 8230 sentences, where each word is tagged with prosodic and syntactic information at two coarse-grained levels. In (Sawalha et al., 2012), we use the dataset in phrase break prediction experiments. This research is part of a larger-scale project to produce annotation schemes, language resources, algorithms, and applications for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.
Item Development and Scoring for Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing
Authors: Hitokazu Matsushita, Deryle Lonsdale
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Speech Recognition

This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a corpus-based test item creation method to produce EI items with targeted linguistic features in a principled and efficient manner. Second, we sketch how we are able to bootstrap a small learner speech corpus to generate a significantly large corpus of training data for language model construction. Lastly, we show how newly created test items effectively classify learners according to their L2 speaking capability and illustrate how our scoring method computes a metric for language proficiency that correlates well with more traditional human scoring methods.
Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing
Authors: Ziqi Zhang, Philip Webster, Victoria Uren, Andrea Varga, Fabio Ciravegna
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Question Answering

Procedural knowledge is the knowledge required to perform certain tasks, and forms an important part of expertise. A major source of procedural knowledge is natural language instructions. While these readable instructions have been useful learning resources for human, they are not interpretable by machines. Automatically acquiring procedural knowledge in machine interpretable formats from instructions has become an increasingly popular research topic due to their potential applications in process automation. However, it has been insufficiently addressed. This paper presents an approach and an implemented system to assist users to automatically acquire procedural knowledge in structured forms from instructions. We introduce a generic semantic representation of procedures for analysing instructions, using which natural language techniques are applied to automatically extract structured procedures from instructions. The method is evaluated in three domains to justify the generality of the proposed semantic representation as well as the effectiveness of the implemented automatic system.
Identifying equivalents of specialized verbs in a bilingual comparable corpus of judgments: A frame-based methodology
Authors: Janine Pimentel
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Multilingual terminological resources do not always include the equivalents of specialized verbs that occur in legal texts. This study aims to bridge that gap by proposing a methodology to assign the equivalents of this kind of predicative units. We use a comparable corpus of judgments produced by the Supreme Court of Canada and by the Supremo Tribunal de Justi{\c{c}}a de Portugal. From this corpus, 200 English and Portuguese verbs are selected. The description of the verbs is based on the theory of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1977, 1977, 1982, 1985) as well as on the FrameNet methodology (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010). Specialized verbs are said to evoke a semantic frame, a sort of conceptual scenario in which a number of mandatory elements play specific roles (e.g. the role of judge, the role of defendant). Given that semantic frames are language independent to a fair degree (Boas 2005; Baker 2009), the labels attributed to each of the 76 identified frames (e.g. [Crime], [Regulations]) were used to group together 165 pairs of candidate equivalents. 71{\%} of them are full equivalents, whereas 29{\%} are only partial equivalents.
TimeBankPT: A TimeML Annotated Corpus of Portuguese
Authors: Francisco Costa, Ant{\'o}nio Branco
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Temporal Information Extraction, valid

In this paper, we introduce TimeBankPT, a TimeML annotated corpus of Portuguese. It has been produced by adapting an existing resource for English, namely the data used in the first TempEval challenge. TimeBankPT is the first corpus of Portuguese with rich temporal annotations (i.e. it includes annotations not only of temporal expressions but also about events and temporal relations). In addition, it was subjected to an automated error mining procedure that checks the consistency of the annotated temporal relations based on their logical properties. This procedure allowed for the detection of some errors in the annotations, that also affect the original English corpus. The Portuguese language is currently undergoing a spelling reform, and several countries where Portuguese is official are in a transitional period where old and new orthographies are valid. TimeBankPT adopts the recent spelling reform. This decision is to preserve its future usefulness. TimeBankPT is freely available for download.
Towards a richer wordnet representation of properties
Authors: Sanni Nimb, Bolette S. Pedersen, ford
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper discusses how information on properties in a currently developed Danish thesaurus can be transferred to the Danish wordnet, DanNet, and in this way enrich the wordnet with the highly relevant links between properties and their external arguments (i.e. tasty â€• food). In spite of the fact that the thesaurus is still under development (two thirds still to be compiled) we perform an automatic transfer of relations from the thesaurus to the wordnet which shows promising results. In all, 2,362 property relations are automatically transferred to DanNet and 2{\%} of the transferred material is manually validated. The pilot validation indicates that approx. 90 {\%} of the transferred relations are correctly assigned whereas around 10{\%} are either erroneous or just not very informative, a fact which, however, can partly be explained by the incompleteness of the material at its current stage. As a further consequence, the experiment has led to a richer specification of the editor guidelines to be used in the last compilation phase of the thesaurus.
Korp --- the corpus infrastructure of Spr\aakbanken
Authors: Lars Borin, Markus Forsberg, Johan Roxendal
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Lemmatization

We present Korp, the corpus infrastructure of Spr{\aa}kbanken (the Swedish Language Bank). The infrastructure consists of three main components: the Korp corpus pipeline, the Korp backend, and the Korp frontend. The Korp corpus pipeline is used for importing corpora, annotating them, and then exporting the annotated corpora into different formats. An essential feature of the pipeline is the ability to leave existing annotations untouched, both structural and word level annotations, and to use the existing annotations as the foundation of other annotations. The Korp backend consists of a set of REST-based web services for searching in and retrieving information about the corpora. Finally, the Korp frontend is a graphical search interface that interacts with the Korp backend. The interface has been inspired by corpus search interfaces such as SketchEngine, Glossa, and DeepDict, and it uses State Chart XML (SCXML) in order to enable users to bookmark interaction states. We give a functional and technical overview of the three components, followed by a discussion of planned future work.
The open lexical infrastructure of Spr\aakbanken
Authors: Lars Borin, Markus Forsberg, Leif-J{\"o}ran Olsson, Jonatan Uppstr{\"o}m
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present our ongoing work on Karp, Spr{\aa}kbanken's (the Swedish Language Bank) open lexical infrastructure, which has two main functions: (1) to support the work on creating, curating, and integrating our various lexical resources; and (2) to publish daily versions of the resources, making them searchable and downloadable. An important requirement on the lexical infrastructure is also that we maintain a strong bidirectional connection to our corpus infrastructure. At the heart of the infrastructure is the SweFN++ project with the goal to create free Swedish lexical resources geared towards language technology applications. The infrastructure currently hosts 15 Swedish lexical resources, including historical ones, some of which have been created from scratch using existing free resources, both external and in-house. The resources are integrated through links to a pivot lexical resource, SALDO, a large morphological and lexical-semantic resource for modern Swedish. SALDO has been selected as the pivot partly because of its size and quality, but also because its form and sense units have been assigned persistent identifiers (PIDs) to which the lexical information in other lexical resources and in corpora are linked.
Further Developments in Treebank Error Detection Using Derivation Trees
Authors: Seth Kulick, Ann Bies, Justin Mott
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Relation, TAG, Transliteration

This work describes how derivation tree fragments based on a variant of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) can be used to check treebank consistency. Annotation of word sequences are compared both for their internal structural consistency, and their external relation to the rest of the tree. We expand on earlier work in this area in three ways. First, we provide a more complete description of the system, showing how a naive use of TAG structures will not work, leading to a necessary refinement. We also provide a more complete account of the processing pipeline, including the grouping together of structurally similar errors and their elimination of duplicates. Second, we include the new experimental external relation check to find an additional class of errors. Third, we broaden the evaluation to include both the internal and external relation checks, and evaluate the system on both an Arabic and English treebank. The evaluation has been successful enough that the internal check has been integrated into the standard pipeline for current English treebank construction at the Linguistic Data Consortium