pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Fully Automatic Annotation of Audio Books for TTS
Authors: Olivier Boeffard, Laure Charonnat, S{\'e}bastien Le Maguer, Damien Lolive
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

Building speech corpora is a first and crucial step for every text-to-speech synthesis system. Nowadays, the use of statistical models implies the use of huge sized corpora that need to be recorded, transcribed, annotated and segmented to be usable. The variety of corpora necessary for recent applications (content, style, etc.) makes the use of existing digital audio resources very attractive. Among all available resources, audiobooks, considering their quality, are interesting. Considering this framework, we propose a complete acquisition, segmentation and annotation chain for audiobooks that tends to be fully automatic. The proposed process relies on a data structure, Roots, that establishes the relations between the different annotation levels represented as sequences of items. This methodology has been applied successfully on 11 hours of speech extracted from an audiobook. A manual check, on a part of the corpus, shows the efficiency of the process.
Centroids: Gold standards with distributional variation
Authors: Ian Lewin, {\c{S}}enay Kafkas, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Motivation: Gold Standards for named entities are, ironically, not standard themselves. Some specify the one perfect annotation. Others specify perfectly good alternatives. The concept of Silver standard is relatively new. The objective is consensus rather than perfection. How should the two concepts be best represented and related? Approach: We examine several Biomedical Gold Standards and motivate a new representational format, centroids, which simply and effectively represents name distributions. We define an algorithm for finding centroids, given a set of alternative input annotations and we test the outputs quantitatively and qualitatively. We also define a metric of relatively acceptability on top of the centroid standard. Results: Precision, recall and F-scores of over 0.99 are achieved for the simple sanity check of giving the algorithm Gold Standard inputs. Qualitative analysis of the differences very often reveals errors and incompleteness in the original Gold Standard. Given automatically generated annotations, the centroids effectively represent the range of those contributions and the quality of the centroid annotations is highly competitive with the best of the contributors. Conclusion: Centroids cleanly represent alternative name variations for Silver and Gold Standards. A centroid Silver Standard is derived just like a Gold Standard, only from imperfect inputs.
Multimodal Behaviour and Feedback in Different Types of Interaction
Authors: Costanza Navarretta, Patrizia Paggio
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this article, we compare feedback-related multimodal behaviours in two different types of interactions: first encounters between two participants who do not know each other in advance, and naturally-occurring conversations between two and three participants recorded at their homes. All participants are Danish native speakers. The interactions are transcribed using the same methodology, and the multimodal behaviours are annotated according to the same annotation scheme. In the study we focus on the most frequently occurring feedback expressions in the interactions and on feedback-related head movements and facial expressions. The analysis of the corpora, while confirming general facts about feedback-related head movements and facial expressions previously reported in the literature, also shows that the physical setting, the number of participants, the topics discussed, and the degree of familiarity influence the use of gesture types and the frequency of feedback-related expressions and gestures.
On Using Linked Data for Language Resource Sharing in the Long Tail of the Localisation Market
Authors: David Lewis, Alex O{'}Connor, er, Andrzej Zydro{\'n}, Gerd Sj{\"o}gren, Rahzeb Choudhury
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Innovations in localisation have focused on the collection and leverage of language resources. However, smaller localisation clients and Language Service Providers are poorly positioned to exploit the benefits of language resource reuse in comparison to larger companies. Their low throughput of localised content means they have little opportunity to amass significant resources, such as Translation memories and Terminology databases, to reuse between jobs or to train statistical machine translation engines tailored to their domain specialisms and language pairs. We propose addressing this disadvantage via the sharing and pooling of language resources. However, the current localisation standards do not support multiparty sharing, are not well integrated with emerging language resource standards and do not address key requirements in determining ownership and license terms for resources. We survey standards and research in the area of Localisation, Language Resources and Language Technologies to leverage existing localisation standards via Linked Data methodologies. This points to the potential of using semantic representation of existing data models for localisation workflow metadata, terminology, parallel text, provenance and access control, which we illustrate with an RDF example.
Multimedia database of the cultural heritage of the Balkans
Authors: Ivana Tanasijevi{\'c}, Biljana Sikimi{\'c}, Gordana Pavlovi{\'c}-La{\v{z}}eti{\'c}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper presents a system that is designed to make possible the organization and search within the collected digitized material of intangible cultural heritage. The motivation for building the system was a vast quantity of multimedia documents collected by a team from the Institute for Balkan Studies in Belgrade. The main topic of their research were linguistic properties of speeches that are used in various places in the Balkans by different groups of people. This paper deals with a prototype system that enables the annotation of the collected material and its organization into a native XML database through a graphical interface. The system enables the search of the database and the presentation of digitized multimedia documents and spatial as well as non-spatial information of the queried data. The multimedia content can be read, listened to or watched while spatial properties are presented on the graphics that consists of geographic regions in the Balkans. The system also enables spatial queries by consulting the graph of geographic regions.
ANALEC: a New Tool for the Dynamic Annotation of Textual Data
Authors: L, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric ragin, Thierry Poibeau, Bernard Victorri
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Data Visualization, Management, text annotation

We introduce ANALEC, a tool which aim is to bring together corpus annotation, visualization and query management. Our main idea is to provide a unified and dynamic way of annotating textual data. ANALEC allows researchers to dynamically build their own annotation scheme and use the possibilities of scheme revision, data querying and graphical visualization during the annotation process. Each query result can be visualized using a graphical representation that puts forward a set of annotations that can be directly corrected or completed. Text annotation is then considered as a cyclic process. We show that statistics like frequencies and correlations make it possible to verify annotated data on the fly during the annotation. In this paper we introduce the annotation functionalities of ANALEC, some of the annotated data visualization functionalities, and three statistical modules: frequency, correlation and geometrical representations. Some examples dealing with reference and coreference annotation illustrate the main contributions of ANALEC.
Feedback in Nordic First-Encounters: a Comparative Study
Authors: Costanza Navarretta, Elisabeth Ahls{\'e}n, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Patrizia Paggio
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The paper compares how feedback is expressed via speech and head movements in comparable corpora of first encounters in three Nordic languages: Danish, Finnish and Swedish. The three corpora have been collected following common guidelines, and they have been annotated according to the same scheme in the NOMCO project. The results of the comparison show that in this data the most frequent feedback-related head movement is Nod in all three languages. Two types of Nods were distinguished in all corpora: Down-nods and Up-nods; the participants from the three countries use Down- and Up-nods with different frequency. In particular, Danes use Down-nods more frequently than Finns and Swedes, while Swedes use Up-nods more frequently than Finns and Danes. Finally, Finns use more often single Nods than repeated Nods, differing from the Swedish and Danish participants. The differences in the frequency of both Down-nods and Up-Nods in the Danish, Finnish and Swedish interactions are interesting given that Nordic countries are not only geographically near, but are also considered to be very similar culturally. Finally, a comparison of feedback-related words in the Danish and Swedish corpora shows that Swedes and Danes use common feedback words corresponding to yes and no with similar frequency.
Annotating Opinions in German Political News
Authors: Hong Li, Xiwen Cheng, Kristina Adson, Tal Kirshboim, Feiyu Xu
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Opinion Mining, Question Answering, Relation Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification

This paper presents an approach to construction of an annotated corpus for German political news for the opinion mining task. The annotated corpus has been applied to learn relation extraction rules for extraction of opinion holders, opinion content and classification of polarities. An adapted annotated schema has been developed on top of the state-of-the-art research. Furthermore, a general tool for annotating relations has been utilized for the annotation task. An evaluation of the inter-annotator agreement has been conducted. The rule learning is realized with the help of a minimally supervised machine learning framework DARE.
MultiUN v2: UN Documents with Multilingual Alignments
Authors: Yu Chen, Andreas Eisele
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

MultiUN is a multilingual parallel corpus extracted from the official documents of the United Nations. It is available in the six official languages of the UN and a small portion of it is also available in German. This paper presents a major update on the first public version of the corpus released in 2010. This version 2 consists of over 513,091 documents, including more than 9{\%} of new documents retrieved from the United Nations official document system. We applied several modifications to the corpus preparation method. In this paper, we describe the methods we used for processing the UN documents and aligning the sentences. The most significant improvement compared to the previous release is the newly added multilingual sentence alignment information. The alignment information is encoded together with the text in XML instead of additional files. Our representation of the sentence alignment allows quick construction of aligned texts parallel in arbitrary number of languages, which is essential for building machine translation systems.
The CONCISUS Corpus of Event Summaries
Authors: Horacio Saggion, S Szasz, ra
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Text Generation, Text Summarization

Text summarization and information extraction systems require adaptation to new domains and languages. This adaptation usually depends on the availability of language resources such as corpora. In this paper we present a comparable corpus in Spanish and English for the study of cross-lingual information extraction and summarization: the CONCISUS Corpus. It is a rich human-annotated dataset composed of comparable event summaries in Spanish and English covering four different domains: aviation accidents, rail accidents, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. In addition to the monolingual summaries in English and Spanish, we provide automatic translations and ``comparable'' full event reports of the events. The human annotations are concepts marked in the textual sources representing the key event information associated to the event type. The dataset has also been annotated using text processing pipelines. It is being made freely available to the research community for research purposes.
Building and Exploring Semantic Equivalences Resources
Authors: Gracinda Carvalho, David Martins de Matos, Vitor Rocio
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Opinion Mining, Question Answering

Language resources that include semantic equivalences at word level are common, and its usefulness is well established in text processing applications, as in the case of search. Named entities also play an important role for text based applications, but are not usually covered by the previously mentioned resources. The present work describes the WES base, Wikipedia Entity Synonym base, a freely available resource based on the Wikipedia. The WES base was built for the Portuguese Language, with the same format of another freely available thesaurus for the same language, the TeP base, which allows integration of equivalences both at word level and entity level. The resource has been built in a language independent way, so that it can be extended to different languages. The WES base was used in a Question Answering system, enhancing significantly its performance.
IDENTIC Corpus: Morphologically Enriched Indonesian-English Parallel Corpus
Authors: Septina Dian Larasati
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Spelling Correction

This paper describes the creation process of an Indonesian-English parallel corpus (IDENTIC). The corpus contains 45,000 sentences collected from different sources in different genres. Several manual text preprocessing tasks, such as alignment and spelling correction, are applied to the corpus to assure its quality. We also apply language specific text processing such as tokenization on both sides and clitic normalization on the Indonesian side. The corpus is available in two different formats: plain', stored in text format and morphologically enriched', stored in CoNLL format. Some parts of the corpus are publicly available at the IDENTIC homepage.
The Joy of Parallelism with CzEng 1.0
Authors: Ond{\v{r}}ej Bojar, Zden{\v{e}}k {\v{Z}}abokrtsk{\'y}, Ond{\v{r}}ej Du{\v{s}}ek, Petra Galu{\v{s}}{\v{c}}{\'a}kov{\'a}, Martin Majli{\v{s}}, David Mare{\v{c}}ek, Ji{\v{r}}{\'\i} Mar{\v{s}}{\'\i}k, Michal Nov{\'a}k, Martin Popel, Ale{\v{s}} Tamchyna
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence

CzEng 1.0 is an updated release of our Czech-English parallel corpus, freely available for non-commercial research or educational purposes. In this release, we approximately doubled the corpus size, reaching 15 million sentence pairs (about 200 million tokens per language). More importantly, we carefully filtered the data to reduce the amount of non-matching sentence pairs. CzEng 1.0 is automatically aligned at the level of sentences as well as words. We provide not only the plain text representation, but also automatic morphological tags, surface syntactic as well as deep syntactic dependency parse trees and automatic co-reference links in both English and Czech. This paper describes key properties of the released resource including the distribution of text domains, the corpus data formats, and a toolkit to handle the provided rich annotation. We also summarize the procedure of the rich annotation (incl. co-reference resolution) and of the automatic filtering. Finally, we provide some suggestions on exploiting such an automatically annotated sentence-parallel corpus.
LAMP: A Multimodal Web Platform for Collaborative Linguistic Analysis
Authors: Kais Dukes, Eric Atwell
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Translation

This paper describes the underlying software platform used to develop and publish annotations for the Quranic Arabic Corpus (QAC). The QAC (Dukes, Atwell and Habash, 2011) is a multimodal language resource that integrates deep tagging, interlinear translation, multiple speech recordings, visualization and collaborative analysis for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. Available online at http://corpus.quran.com, the website is a popular study guide for Quranic Arabic, used by over 1.2 million visitors over the past year. We provide a description of the underlying software system that has been used to develop the corpus annotations. The multimodal data is made available online through an accessible cross-referenced web interface. Although our Linguistic Analysis Multimodal Platform (LAMP) has been applied to the Classical Arabic language of the Quran, we argue that our annotation model and software architecture may be of interest to other related corpus linguistics projects. Work related to LAMP includes recent efforts for annotating other Classical languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin (Bamman, Mambrini and Crane, 2009), as well as commercial systems (e.g. Logos Bible study) that provide access to syntactic tagging for the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament (Brannan, 2011).
Web Service integration platform for Polish linguistic resources
Authors: Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Micha{\l} Lenart
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

This paper presents a robust linguistic Web service framework for Polish, combining several mature offline linguistic tools in a common online platform. The toolset comprise paragraph-, sentence- and token-level segmenter, morphological analyser, disambiguating tagger, shallow and deep parser, named entity recognizer and coreference resolver. Uniform access to processing results is provided by means of a stand-off packaged adaptation of National Corpus of Polish TEI P5-based representation and interchange format. A concept of asynchronous handling of requests sent to the implemented Web service (Multiservice) is introduced to enable processing large amounts of text by setting up language processing chains of desired complexity. Apart from a dedicated API, a simpleWeb interface to the service is presented, allowing to compose a chain of annotation services, run it and periodically check for execution results, made available as plain XML or in a simple visualization. Usage examples and results from performance and scalability tests are also included.
Suffix Trees as Language Models
Authors: Casey Redd Kennington, Martin Kay, Annemarie Friedrich
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, Translation

Suffix trees are data structures that can be used to index a corpus. In this paper, we explore how some properties of suffix trees naturally provide the functionality of an n-gram language model with variable n. We explain these properties of suffix trees, which we leverage for our Suffix Tree Language Model (STLM) implementation and explain how a suffix tree implicitly contains the data needed for n-gram language modeling. We also discuss the kinds of smoothing techniques appropriate to such a model. We then show that our suffix-tree language model implementation is competitive when compared to the state-of-the-art language model SRILM (Stolke, 2002) in statistical machine translation experiments.
The Romanian Neuter Examined Through A Two-Gender N-Gram Classification System
Authors: Liviu P. Dinu, Vlad Niculae, Octavia-Maria {\c{S}}ulea
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: General Classification

Romanian has been traditionally seen as bearing three lexical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, although it has always been known to have only two agreement patterns (for masculine and feminine). A recent analysis of the Romanian gender system described in (Bateman and Polinsky, 2010), based on older observations, argues that there are two lexically unspecified noun classes in the singular and two different ones in the plural and that what is generally called neuter in Romanian shares the class in the singular with masculines, and the class in the plural with feminines based not only on agreement features but also on form. Previous machine learning classifiers that have attempted to discriminate Romanian nouns according to gender have so far taken as input only the singular form, presupposing the traditional tripartite analysis. We propose a classifier based on two parallel support vector machines using n-gram features from the singular and from the plural which outperforms previous classifiers in its high ability to distinguish the neuter. The performance of our system suggests that the two-gender analysis of Romanian, on which it is based, is on the right track.
Using semi-experts to derive judgments on word sense alignment: a pilot study
Authors: Soojeong Eom, Markus Dickinson, Graham Katz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

The overall goal of this project is to evaluate the performance of word sense alignment (WSA) systems, focusing on obtaining examples appropriate to language learners. Building a gold standard dataset based on human expert judgments is costly in time and labor, and thus we gauge the utility of using semi-experts in performing the annotation. In an online survey, we present a sense of a target word from one dictionary with senses from the other dictionary, asking for judgments of relatedness. We note the difficulty of agreement, yet the utility in using such results to evaluate WSA work. We find that one's treatment of related senses heavily impacts the results for WSA.
The Polish Sejm Corpus
Authors: Maciej Ogrodniczuk
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence, Word Sense Disambiguation

This document presents the first edition of the Polish Sejm Corpus -- a new specialized resource containing transcribed, automatically annotated utterances of the Members of Polish Sejm (lower chamber of the Polish Parliament). The corpus data encoding is inherited from the National Corpus of Polish and enhanced with session metadata and structure. The multi-layered stand-off annotation contains sentence- and token-level segmentation, disambiguated morphosyntactic information, syntactic words and groups resulting from shallow parsing and named entities. The paper also outlines several novel ideas for corpus preparation, e.g. the notion of a live corpus, constantly populated with new data or the concept of linking corpus data with external databases to enrich content. Although initial statistical comparison of the resource with the balanced corpus of general Polish reveals substantial differences in language richness, the resource makes a valuable source of linguistic information as a large (300 M segments) collection of quasi-spoken data ready to be aligned with the audio/video recording of sessions, currently being made publicly available by Sejm.