pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Distributed Resource Repository for Cloud-Based Machine Translation
Authors: J{\"o}rg Tiedemann, Dorte Haltrup Hansen, Lene Offersgaard, Sussi Olsen, Matthias Zumpe
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Management, Sentence, Translation

In this paper, we present the architecture of a distributed resource repository developed for collecting training data for building customized statistical machine translation systems. The repository is designed for the cloud-based translation service integrated in the Let'sMT! platform which is about to be launched to the public. The system includes important features such as automatic import and alignment of textual documents in a variety of formats, a flexible database for meta-information using modern key-value stores and a grid-based backend for running off-line processes. The entire system is very modular and supports highly distributed setups to enable a maximum of flexibility and scalability. The system uses secure connections and includes an effective permission management to ensure data integrity. In this paper, we also take a closer look at the task of sentence alignment. The process of alignment is extremely important for the success of translation models trained on the platform. Alignment decisions significantly influence the quality of SMT engines.
Treebanking by Sentence and Tree Transformation: Building a Treebank to support Question Answering in Portuguese
Authors: Patr{\'\i}cia Gon{\c{c}}alves, Rita Santos, Ant{\'o}nio Branco
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Question Answering, Sentence, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

This paper presents CINTIL-QATreebank, a treebank composed of Portuguese sentences that can be used to support the development of Question Answering systems. To create this treebank, we use declarative sentences from the pre-existing CINTIL-Treebank and manually transform their syntactic structure into a non-declarative sentence. Our corpus includes two clause types: interrogative and imperative clauses. CINTIL-QATreebank can be used in language science and techology general research, but it was developed particularly for the development of automatic Question Answering systems. The non-declarative entences are annotated with several layers of linguistic information, namely (i) trees with information on constituency and grammatical function; (ii) sentence type; (iii) interrogative pronoun; (iv) question type; and (v) semantic type of expected answer. Moreover, these non-declarative sentences are paired with their declarative counterparts and associated with the expected answer snippets.
Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects
Authors: David Graff, Mohamed Maamouri
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management

The Linguistic Data Consortium and Georgetown University Press are collaborating to create updated editions of bilingual diction- aries that had originally been published in the 1960's for English-speaking learners of Moroccan, Syrian and Iraqi Arabic. In their first editions, these dictionaries used ad hoc Latin-alphabet orthography for each colloquial Arabic dialect, but adopted some proper- ties of Arabic-based writing (collation order of Arabic headwords, clitic attachment to word forms in example phrases); despite their common features, there are notable differences among the three books that impede comparisons across the dialects, as well as com- parisons of each dialect to Modern Standard Arabic. In updating these volumes, we use both Arabic script and International Pho- netic Alphabet orthographies; the former provides a common basis for word recognition across dialects, while the latter provides dialect-specific pronunciations. Our goal is to preserve the full content of the original publications, supplement the Arabic headword inventory with new usages, and produce a uniform lexicon structure expressible via the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO 24613). To this end, we developed a relational database schema that applies consistently to each dialect, and HTTP-based tools for searching, editing, workflow, review and inventory management.
Parallel Data, Tools and Interfaces in OPUS
Authors: J{\"o}rg Tiedemann
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper presents the current status of OPUS, a growing language resource of parallel corpora and related tools. The focus in OPUS is to provide freely available data sets in various formats together with basic annotation to be useful for applications in computational linguistics, translation studies and cross-linguistic corpus studies. In this paper, we report about new data sets and their features, additional annotation tools and models provided from the website and essential interfaces and on-line services included in the project.
SemSim: Resources for Normalized Semantic Similarity Computation Using Lexical Networks
Authors: Elias Iosif, Alex Potamianos, ros
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Categorization

We investigate the creation of corpora from web-harvested data following a scalable approach that has linear query complexity. Individual web queries are posed for a lexicon that includes thousands of nouns and the retrieved data are aggregated. A lexical network is constructed, in which the lexicon nouns are linked according to their context-based similarity. We introduce the notion of semantic neighborhoods, which are exploited for the computation of semantic similarity. Two types of normalization are proposed and evaluated on the semantic tasks of: (i) similarity judgement, and (ii) noun categorization and taxonomy creation. The created corpus along with a set of tools and noun similarities are made publicly available.
Annotating and Learning Morphological Segmentation of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic
Authors: Emad Mohamed, Behrang Mohit, Kemal Oflazer
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: General Classification, Part-Of-Speech Tagging

We present an annotation and morphological segmentation scheme for Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) in which we annotate user-generated content that significantly deviates from the orthographic and grammatical rules of Modern Standard Arabic and thus cannot be processed by the commonly used MSA tools. Using a per letter classification scheme in which each letter is classified as either a segment boundary or not, and using a memory-based classifier, with only word-internal context, prove effective and achieve a 92{\%} exact match accuracy at the word level. The well-known MADA system achieves 81{\%} while the per letter classification scheme using the ATB achieves 82{\%}. Error analysis shows that the major problem is that of character ambiguity since the ECA orthography overloads the characters which would otherwise be more specific in MSA, like the differences between y ({\`U}) and Y ({\`U}) and A ({\O}{\S}) , {\textgreater} ( {\O}{\pounds}), and {\textless} ({\O}¥) which are collapsed to y ({\`U}) and A ({\O}{\S}) respectively or even totally confused and interchangeable. While normalization helps alleviate orthographic inconsistencies, it aggravates the problem of ambiguity.
A Resource-light Approach to Phrase Extraction for English and German Documents from the Patent Domain and User Generated Content
Authors: Julia Maria Schulz, Daniela Becks, Christa Womser-Hacker, M, Thomas l
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Opinion Mining, Retrieval

In order to extract meaningful phrases from corpora (e. g. in an information retrieval context) intensive knowledge of the domain in question and the respective documents is generally needed. When moving to a new domain or language the underlying knowledge bases and models need to be adapted, which is often time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper adresses the described challenge of phrase extraction from documents in different domains and languages and proposes an approach, which does not use comprehensive lexica and therefore can be easily transferred to new domains and languages. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on user generated content and documents from the patent domain in English and German.
Kitten: a tool for normalizing HTML and extracting its textual content
Authors: Mathieu-Henri Falco, V{\'e}ronique Moriceau, Anne Vilnat
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modelling, Question Answering

The web is composed of a gigantic amount of documents that can be very useful for information extraction systems. Most of them are written in HTML and have to be rendered by an HTML engine in order to display the data they contain on a screen. HTML file thus mix both informational and rendering content. Our goal is to design a tool for informational content extraction. A linear extraction with only a basic filtering of rendering content would not be enough as objects such as lists and tables are linearly coded but need to be read in a non-linear way to be well interpreted. Besides these HTML pages are often incorrectly coded from an HTML point of view and use a segmentation of blocks based on blank space that cannot be transposed in a text filewithout confusing syntactic parsers. For this purpose, we propose the Kitten tool that first normalizes HTML file into unicode XHTML file, then extracts the informational content into a text filewith a special processing for sentences, lists and tables.
A Metadata Editor to Support the Description of Linguistic Resources
Authors: Emanuel Dima, Christina Hoppermann, Erhard Hinrichs, Thorsten Trippel, Claus Zinn
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Creating and maintaining metadata for various kinds of resources requires appropriate tools to assist the user. The paper presents the metadata editor ProFormA for the creation and editing of CMDI (Component Metadata Infrastructure) metadata in web forms. This editor supports a number of CMDI profiles currently being provided for different types of resources. Since the editor is based on XForms and server-side processing, users can create and modify CMDI files in their standard browser without the need for further processing. Large parts of ProFormA are implemented as web services in order to reuse them in other contexts and programs.
A Portuguese-Spanish Corpus Annotated for Subject Realization and Referentiality
Authors: Luz Rello, Iria Gayo
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Coreference Resolution

This paper presents a comparable corpus of Portuguese and Spanish consisting of legal and health texts. We describe the annotation of zero subject, impersonal constructions and explicit subjects in the corpus. We annotated 12,492 examples using a scheme that distinguishes between different linguistic levels (phonology, syntax, semantics, etc.) and present a taxonomy of instances on which annotators disagree. The high level of inter-annotator agreement (83{\%}-95{\%}) and the performance of learning algorithms trained on the corpus show that our corpus is a reliable and useful resource.
A Repository for the Sustainable Management of Research Data
Authors: Emanuel Dima, Verena Henrich, Erhard Hinrichs, Marie Hinrichs, Christina Hoppermann, Thorsten Trippel, Thomas Zastrow, Claus Zinn
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management

This paper presents the system architecture as well as the underlying workflow of the Extensible Repository System of Digital Objects (ERDO) which has been developed for the sustainable archiving of language resources within the T{\"u}bingen CLARIN-D project. In contrast to other approaches focusing on archiving experts, the described workflow can be used by researchers without required knowledge in the field of long-term storage for transferring data from their local file systems into a persistent repository.
A Galician Syntactic Corpus with Application to Intonation Modeling
Authors: Montserrat Arza, Jos{\'e} M. Garc{\'\i}a Miguel, Francisco Campillo, Miguel Cuevas - Alonso
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

This paper will present the design of a Galician syntactic corpus with application to intonation modeling. A corpus of around {\$}3000{\$} sentences was designed with variation in the syntactic structure and the number of accent groups, and recorded by a professional speaker to study the influence on the prosodic structure.
A Reference Dependency Bank for Analyzing Complex Predicates
Authors: Tafseer Ahmed, Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli, Sebastian Sulger
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

When dealing with languages of South Asia from an NLP perspective, a problem that repeatedly crops up is the treatment of complex predicates. This paper presents a first approach to the analysis of complex predicates (CPs) in the context of dependency bank development. The efforts originate in theoretical work on CPs done within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), but are intended to provide a guideline for analyzing different types of CPs in an independent framework. Despite the fact that we focus on CPs in Hindi and Urdu, the design of the dependencies is kept general enough to account for CP constructions across languages.
UBY-LMF -- A Uniform Model for Standardizing Heterogeneous Lexical-Semantic Resources in ISO-LMF
Authors: Judith Eckle-Kohler, Iryna Gurevych, Silvana Hartmann, Michael Matuschek, Christian M. Meyer
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling, Word Sense Disambiguation

We present UBY-LMF, an LMF-based model for large-scale, heterogeneous multilingual lexical-semantic resources (LSRs). UBY-LMF allows the standardization of LSRs down to a fine-grained level of lexical information by employing a large number of Data Categories from ISOCat. We evaluate UBY-LMF by converting nine LSRs in two languages to the corresponding format: the English WordNet, Wiktionary, Wikipedia, OmegaWiki, FrameNet and VerbNet and the German Wikipedia, Wiktionary and GermaNet. The resulting LSR, UBY (Gurevych et al., 2012), holds interoperable versions of all nine resources which can be queried by an easy to use public Java API. UBY-LMF covers a wide range of information types from expert-constructed and collaboratively constructed resources for English and German, also including links between different resources at the word sense level. It is designed to accommodate further resources and languages as well as automatically mined lexical-semantic knowledge.
The Influence of Corpus Quality on Statistical Measurements on Language Resources
Authors: Thomas Eckart, Uwe Quasthoff, Dirk Goldhahn
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

The quality of statistical measurements on corpora is strongly related to a strict definition of the measuring process and to corpus quality. In the case of multiple result inspections, an exact measurement of previously specified parameters ensures compatibility of the different measurements performed by different researchers on possibly different objects. Hence, the comparison of different values requires an exact description of the measuring process. To illustrate this correlation the influence of different definitions for the concepts ''''''``word'''''''' and ''''''``sentence'''''''' is shown for several properties of large text corpora. It is also shown that corpus pre-processing strongly influences corpus size and quality as well. As an example near duplicate sentences are identified as source of many statistical irregularities. The problem of strongly varying results especially holds for Web corpora with a large set of pre-processing steps. Here, a well-defined and language independent pre-processing is indispensable for language comparison based on measured values. Conversely, irregularities found in such measurements are often a result of poor pre-processing and therefore such measurements can help to improve corpus quality.
Applying cross-lingual WSD to wordnet development
Authors: Marianna Apidianaki, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation, Word Sense Induction

The automatic development of semantic resources constitutes an important challenge in the NLP community. The methods used generally exploit existing large-scale resources, such as Princeton WordNet, often combined with information extracted from multilingual resources and parallel corpora. In this paper we show how Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation can be applied to wordnet development. We apply the proposed method to WOLF, a free wordnet for French still under construction, in order to fill synsets that did not contain any literal yet and increase its coverage.
Annotating Qualia Relations in Italian and French Complex Nominals
Authors: Pierrette Bouillon, Elisabetta Jezek, Chiara Melloni, Aur{\'e}lie Picton
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it should help refine existing compound classifications and better explain lexicalization in both languages. On the other hand, we hope that the extracted generalizations can be used in NLP, for example for improving MT systems or for query reformulation (Claveau, 2003). In this paper, we focus on the annotation scheme and its on going evaluation.
Terra: a Collection of Translation Error-Annotated Corpora
Authors: Mark Fishel, Ond{\v{r}}ej Bojar, Maja Popovi{\'c}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Recently the first methods of automatic diagnostics of machine translation have emerged; since this area of research is relatively young, the efforts are not coordinated. We present a collection of translation error-annotated corpora, consisting of automatically produced translations and their detailed manual translation error analysis. Using the collected corpora we evaluate the available state-of-the-art methods of MT diagnostics and assess, how well the methods perform, how they compare to each other and whether they can be useful in practice.
Identifying Nuggets of Information in GALE Distillation Evaluation
Authors: Olga Babko-Malaya, Greg Milette, Michael Schneider, Sarah Scogin
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering

This paper describes an approach to automatic nuggetization and implemented system employed in GALE Distillation evaluation to measure the information content of text returned in response to an open-ended question. The system identifies nuggets, or atomic units of information, categorizes them according to their semantic type, and selects different types of nuggets depending on the type of the question. We further show how this approach addresses the main challenges for using automatic nuggetization for QA evaluation: the variability of relevant nuggets and their dependence on the question. Specifically, we propose a template-based approach to nuggetization, where different semantic categories of nuggets are extracted dependent on the template of a question. During evaluation, human annotators judge each snippet returned in response to a query as relevant or irrelevant, whereas automatic template-based nuggetization is further used to identify the semantic units of information that people would have selected as relevant' or irrelevant' nuggets for a given query. Finally, the paper presents the performance results of the nuggetization system which compare the number of automatically generated nuggets and human nuggets and show that our automatic nuggetization is consistent with human judgments.
SUTAV: A Turkish Audio-Visual Database
Authors: Ibrahim Saygin Topkaya, Hakan Erdogan
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Person Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

This paper contains information about the ''''''``Sabanci University Turkish Audio-Visual (SUTAV)'''''''' database. The main aim of collecting SUTAV database was to obtain a large audio-visual collection of spoken words, numbers and sentences in Turkish language. The database was collected between 2006 and 2010 during ''''''``Novel approaches in audio-visual speech recognition'''''''' project which is funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). First part of the database contains a large corpus of Turkish language and contains standart quality videos. The second part is relatively small compared to the first one and contains recordings of spoken digits in high quality videos. Although the main aim to collect SUTAV database was to obtain a database for audio-visual speech recognition applications, it also contains useful data that can be used in other kinds of multimodal research like biometric security and person verification. The paper presents information about the data collection process and the the spoken content. It also contains a sample evaluation protocol and recognition results that are obtained with a small portion of the database.
Speech and Language Resources for LVCSR of Russian
Authors: Sergey Zablotskiy, Alex Shvets, er, Maxim Sidorov, Eugene Semenkin, Wolfgang Minker
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

A syllable-based language model reduces the lexicon size by hundreds of times. It is especially beneficial in case of highly inflective languages like Russian due to the abundance of word forms according to various grammatical categories. However, the main arising challenge is the concatenation of recognised syllables into the originally spoken sentence or phrase, particularly in the presence of syllable recognition mistakes. Natural fluent speech does not usually incorporate clear information about the outside borders of the spoken words. In this paper a method for the syllable concatenation and error correction is suggested and tested. It is based on the designed co-evolutionary asymptotic probabilistic genetic algorithm for the determination of the most likely sentence corresponding to the recognized chain of syllables within an acceptable time frame. The advantage of this genetic algorithm modification is the minimum number of settings to be manually adjusted comparing to the standard algorithm. Data used for acoustic and language modelling are also described here. A special issue is the preprocessing of the textual data, particularly, handling of abbreviations, Arabic and Roman numerals, since their inflection mostly depends on the context and grammar.
KALAKA-2: a TV Broadcast Speech Database for the Recognition of Iberian Languages in Clean and Noisy Environments
Authors: Luis Javier Rodr{\'\i}guez-Fuentes, Mikel Penagarikano, Amparo Varona, Mireia Diez, Germ{\'a}n Bordel
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper presents the main features (design issues, recording setup, etc.) of KALAKA-2, a TV broadcast speech database specifically designed for the development and evaluation of language recognition systems in clean and noisy environments. KALAKA-2 was created to support the Albayzin 2010 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE), organized by the Spanish Network on Speech Technologies from June to November 2010. The database features 6 target languages: Basque, Catalan, English, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish, and includes segments in other (Out-Of-Set) languages, which allow to perform open-set verification tests. The best performance attained in the Albayzin 2010 LRE is presented and briefly discussed. The performance of a state-of-the-art system in various tasks defined on the database is also presented. In both cases, results highlight the suitability of KALAKA-2 as a benchmark for the development and evaluation of language recognition technology.