pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Annotating Factive Verbs
Authors: Alvin Grissom II, Yusuke Miyao
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

We have created a scheme for annotating corpora designed to capture relevant aspects of factivity in verb-complement constructions. Factivity constructions are a well-known linguistic phenomenon that embed presuppositions about the state of the world into a clause. These embedded presuppositions provide implicit information about facts assumed to be true in the world, and are thus potentially valuable in areas of research such as textual entailment. We attempt to address both clear-cut cases of factivity and non-factivity, as well as account for the fluidity and ambiguous nature of some realizations of this construction. Our extensible scheme is designed to account for distinctions between claims, performatives, atypical uses of factivity, and the authority of the one making the utterance. We introduce a simple XML-based syntax for the annotation of factive verbs and clauses, in order to capture this information. We also provide an analysis of the issues which led to these annotative decisions, in the hope that these analyses will be beneficial to those dealing with factivity in a practical context.
Annotating Errors in a Hungarian Learner Corpus
Authors: Markus Dickinson, Scott Ledbetter
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We are developing and annotating a learner corpus of Hungarian, composed of student journals from three different proficiency levels written at Indiana University. Our annotation marks learner errors that are of different linguistic categories, including phonology, morphology, and syntax, but defining the annotation for an agglutinative language presents several issues. First, we must adapt an analysis that is centered on the morpheme rather than the word. Second, and more importantly, we see a need to distinguish errors from secondary corrections. We argue that although certain learner errors require a series of corrections to reach a target form, these secondary corrections, conditioned on those that come before, are our own adjustments that link the learner's productions to the target form and are not representative of the learner's internal grammar. In this paper, we report the annotation scheme and the principles that guide it, as well as examples illustrating its functionality and directions for expansion.
Evaluation of a Complex Information Extraction Application in Specific Domain
Authors: Romaric Besan{\c{c}}on, Olivier Ferret, Ludovic Jean-Louis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Clustering, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Operational intelligence applications in specific domains are developed using numerous natural language processing technologies and tools. A challenge for this integration is to take into account the limitations of each of these technologies in the global evaluation of the application. We present in this article a complex intelligence application for the gathering of information from the Web about recent seismic events. We present the different components needed for the development of such system, including Information Extraction, Filtering and Clustering, and the technologies behind each component. We also propose an independent evaluation of each component and an insight of their influence in the overall performance of the system.
Text Simplification Tools for Spanish
Authors: Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion, Simon Mille
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Simplification

In this paper we describe the development of a text simplification system for Spanish. Text simplification is the adaptation of a text to the special needs of certain groups of readers, such as language learners, people with cognitive difficulties and elderly people, among others. There is a clear need for simplified texts, but manual production and adaptation of existing texts is labour intensive and costly. Automatic simplification is a field which attracts growing attention in Natural Language Processing, but, to the best of our knowledge, there are no simplification tools for Spanish. We present a prototype for automatic simplification, which shows that the most important structural simplification operations can be successfully treated with an approach based on rules which can potentially be improved by statistical methods. For the development of this prototype we carried out a corpus study which aims at identifying the operations a text simplification system needs to carry out in order to produce an output similar to what human editors produce when they simplify texts.
VERTa: Linguistic features in MT evaluation
Authors: Elisabet Comelles, Jordi Atserias, Victoria Arranz, Irene Castell{\'o}n
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In the last decades, a wide range of automatic metrics that use linguistic knowledge has been developed. Some of them are based on lexical information, such as METEOR; others rely on the use of syntax, either using constituent or dependency analysis; and others use semantic information, such as Named Entities and semantic roles. All these metrics work at a specific linguistic level, but some researchers have tried to combine linguistic information, either by combining several metrics following a machine-learning approach or focusing on the combination of a wide variety of metrics in a simple and straightforward way. However, little research has been conducted on how to combine linguistic features from a linguistic point of view. In this paper we present VERTa, a metric which aims at using and combining a wide variety of linguistic features at lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic level. We provide a description of the metric and report some preliminary experiments which will help us to discuss the use and combination of certain linguistic features in order to improve the metric performance
Specifying Treebanks, Outsourcing Parsebanks: FinnTreeBank 3
Authors: Atro Voutilainen, Kristiina Muhonen, Tanja Purtonen, Krister Lind{\'e}n
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Descriptive

Corpus-based treebank annotation is known to result in incomplete coverage of mid- and low-frequency linguistic constructions: the linguistic representation and corpus annotation quality are sometimes suboptimal. Large descriptive grammars cover also many mid- and low-frequency constructions. We argue for use of large descriptive grammars and their sample sentences as a basis for specifying higher-coverage grammatical representations. We present an sample case from an ongoing project (FIN-CLARIN FinnTreeBank) where an grammatical representation is documented as an annotator's manual alongside manual annotation of sample sentences extracted from a large descriptive grammar of Finnish. We outline the linguistic representation (morphology and dependency syntax) for Finnish, and show how the resulting `Grammar Definition Corpus' and the documentation is used as a task specification for an external subcontractor for building a parser engine for use in morphological and dependency syntactic analysis of large volumes of Finnish for parsebanking purposes. The resulting corpus, FinnTreeBank 3, is due for release in June 2012, and will contain tens of millions of words from publicly available corpora of Finnish with automatic morphological and dependency syntactic analysis, for use in research on the corpus linguistics and language engineering.
W-PhAMT: A web tool for phonetic multilevel timeline visualization
Authors: Francesco Cutugno, Vincenza Anna Leano, Antonio Origlia
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper presents a web platform with an its own graphic environment to visualize and filter multilevel phonetic annotations. The tool accepts as input Annotation Graph XML and Praat TextGrids files and converts these files into a specific XML format. XML output is used to browse data by means of a web tool using a visualization metaphor, namely a timeline. A timeline is a graphical representation of a period of time, on which relevant events are marked. Events are usually distributed over many layers in a geometrical metaphor represented by segments and points spatially distributed with reference to a temporal axis. The tool shows all the annotations included in the uploaded dataset, allowing the listening of the entire file or of its parts. Filtering is allowed on annotation labels by means of string pattern matching. The web service includes cloud services to share data with other users. The tool is available at http://w-phamt.fisica.unina.it
The LRE Map. Harmonising Community Descriptions of Resources
Authors: Nicoletta Calzolari, Riccardo Del Gratta, Gil Francopoulo, Joseph Mariani, Francesco Rubino, Irene Russo, Claudia Soria
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Accurate and reliable documentation of Language Resources is an undisputable need: documentation is the gateway to discovery of Language Resources, a necessary step towards promoting the data economy. Language resources that are not documented virtually do not exist: for this reason every initiative able to collect and harmonise metadata about resources represents a valuable opportunity for the NLP community. In this paper we describe the LRE Map, reporting statistics on resources associated with LREC2012 papers and providing comparisons with LREC2010 data. The LRE Map, jointly launched by FLaReNet and ELRA in conjunction with the LREC 2010 Conference, is an instrument for enhancing availability of information about resources, either new or already existing ones. It wants to reinforce and facilitate the use of standards in the community. The LRE Map web interface provides the possibility of searching according to a fixed set of metadata and to view the details of extracted resources. The LRE Map is continuing to collect bottom-up input about resources from authors of other conferences through standard submission process. This will help broadening the notion of language resources and attract to the field neighboring disciplines that so far have been only marginally involved by the standard notion of language resources.
Romanian TimeBank: An Annotated Parallel Corpus for Temporal Information
Authors: Corina For{\u{a}}scu, Dan Tufi{\c{s}}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Question Answering, TAG

The paper describes the main steps for the construction, annotation and validation of the Romanian version of the TimeBank corpus. Starting from the English TimeBank corpus â€• the reference annotated corpus in the temporal domain, we have translated all the 183 English news texts into Romanian and mapped the English annotations onto Romanian, with a success rate of 96.53{\%}. Based on ISO-Time - the emerging standard for representing temporal information, which includes many of the previous annotations schemes -, we have evaluated the automatic transfer onto Romanian and, and, when necessary, corrected the Romanian annotations so that in the end we obtained a 99.18{\%} transfer rate for the TimeML annotations. In very few cases, due to language peculiarities, some original annotations could not be transferred. For the portability of the temporal annotation standard to Romanian, we suggested some additions for the ISO-Time standard, concerning especially the EVENT tag, based on linguistic evidence, the Romanian grammar, and also on the localisations of TimeML to other Romance languages. Future improvements to the Ro-TimeBank will take into consideration all temporal expressions, signals and events in texts, even those with a not very clear temporal anchoring.
Chinese Whispers: Cooperative Paraphrase Acquisition
Authors: Matteo Negri, Yashar Mehdad, Aless Marchetti, ro, Danilo Giampiccolo, Luisa Bentivogli
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Sentence, valid, Video Captioning

We present a framework for the acquisition of sentential paraphrases based on crowdsourcing. The proposed method maximizes the lexical divergence between an original sentence s and its valid paraphrases by running a sequence of paraphrasing jobs carried out by a crowd of non-expert workers. Instead of collecting direct paraphrases of s, at each step of the sequence workers manipulate semantically equivalent reformulations produced in the previous round. We applied this method to paraphrase English sentences extracted from Wikipedia. Our results show that, keeping at each round n the most promising paraphrases (i.e. the more lexically dissimilar from those acquired at round n-1), the monotonic increase of divergence allows to collect good-quality paraphrases in a cost-effective manner.
The Nordic Dialect Corpus
Authors: Janne Bondi Johannessen, Joel Priestley, Kristin Hagen, Anders N{\o}klestad, Andr{\'e} Lynum
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper, we describe the Nordic Dialect Corpus, which has recently been completed. The corpus has a variety of features that combined makes it an advanced tool for language researchers. These features include: Linguistic contents (dialects from five closely related languages), annotation (tagging and two types of transcription), search interface (advanced possibilities for combining a large array of search criteria and results presentation in an intuitive and simple interface), many search variables (linguistics-based, informant-based, time-based), multimedia display (linking of sound and video to transcriptions), display of results in maps, display of informant details (number of words and other information on informants), advanced results handling (concordances, collocations, counts and statistics shown in a variety of graphical modes, plus further processing). Finally, and importantly, the corpus is freely available for research on the web. We give examples of both various kinds of searches, of displays of results and of results handling.
The WeSearch Corpus, Treebank, and Treecache -- A Comprehensive Sample of User-Generated Content
Authors: Jonathon Read, Dan Flickinger, Rebecca Dridan, Stephan Oepen, Lilja {\O}vrelid
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

We present the WeSearch Data Collection (WDC)â€•a freely redistributable, partly annotated, comprehensive sample of User-Generated Content. The WDC contains data extracted from a range of genres of varying formality (user forums, product review sites, blogs and Wikipedia) and covers two different domains (NLP and Linux). In this article, we describe the data selection and extraction process, with a focus on the extraction of linguistic content from different sources. We present the format of syntacto-semantic annotations found in this resource and present initial parsing results for these data, as well as some reflections following a first round of treebanking.
Legal electronic dictionary for Czech
Authors: Franti{\v{s}}ek Cvr{\v{c}}ek, Karel Pala, Pavel Rychl{\'y}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In the paper the results of the project of Czech Legal Electronic dictionary (PES) are presented. During the 4 year project the large legal terminological dictionary of Czech was created in the form of the electronic lexical database enriched with a hierarchical ontology of legal terms. It contains approx. 10,000 entries ― legal terms together with their ontological relations and hypertext references. In the second part of the project the web interface based on the platform DEBII has been designed and implemented that allows users to browse and search effectively the database. At the same time the Czech Dictionary of Legal Terms will be generated from the database and later printed as a book. Inter-annotator's agreement in manual selection of legal terms was high ― approx. 95 {\%}.
This also affects the context - Errors in extraction based summaries
Authors: Thomas Kaspersson, Christian Smith, Henrik Danielsson, Arne J{\"o}nsson
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Although previous studies have shown that errors occur in texts summarized by extraction based summarizers, no study has investigated how common different types of errors are and how that changes with degree of summarization. We have conducted studies of errors in extraction based single document summaries using 30 texts, summarized to 5 different degrees and tagged for errors by human judges. The results show that the most common errors are absent cohesion or context and various types of broken or missing anaphoric references. The amount of errors is dependent on the degree of summarization where some error types have a linear relation to the degree of summarization and others have U-shaped or cut-off linear relations. These results show that the degree of summarization has to be taken into account to minimize the amount of errors by extraction based summarizers.
The FLaReNet Strategic Language Resource Agenda
Authors: Claudia Soria, N{\'u}ria Bel, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Monica Monachini, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Valeria Quochi, Nicoletta Calzolari
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Question Answering

The FLaReNet Strategic Agenda highlights the most pressing needs for the sector of Language Resources and Technologies and presents a set of recommendations for its development and progress in Europe, as issued from a three-year consultation of the FLaReNet European project. The FLaReNet recommendations are organised around nine dimensions: a) documentation b) interoperability c) availability, sharing and distribution d) coverage, quality and adequacy e) sustainability f) recognition g) development h) infrastructure and i) international cooperation. As such, they cover a broad range of topics and activities, spanning over production and use of language resources, licensing, maintenance and preservation issues, infrastructures for language resources, resource identification and sharing, evaluation and validation, interoperability and policy issues. The intended recipients belong to a large set of players and stakeholders in Language Resources and Technology, ranging from individuals to research and education institutions, to policy-makers, funding agencies, SMEs and large companies, service and media providers. The main goal of these recommendations is to serve as an instrument to support stakeholders in planning for and addressing the urgencies of the Language Resources and Technologies of the future.
Yes we can!? Annotating English modal verbs
Authors: Josef Ruppenhofer, Ines Rehbein
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Subjectivity Analysis

This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training resource for NLP systems.
Building a Multimodal Laughter Database for Emotion Recognition
Authors: Merlin Teodosia Suarez, Jocelynn Cu, Madelene Sta. Maria
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

Laughter is a significant paralinguistic cue that is largely ignored in multimodal affect analysis. In this work, we investigate how a multimodal laughter corpus can be constructed and annotated both with discrete and dimensional labels of emotions for acted and spontaneous laughter. Professional actors enacted emotions to produce acted clips, while spontaneous laughter was collected from volunteers. Experts annotated acted laughter clips, while volunteers who possess an acceptable empathic quotient score annotated spontaneous laughter clips. The data was pre-processed to remove noise from the environment, and then manually segmented starting from the onset of the expression until its offset. Our findings indicate that laughter carries distinct emotions, and that emotion in laughter is best recognized using audio information rather than facial information. This may be explained by emotion regulation, i.e. laughter is used to suppress or regulate certain emotions. Furthermore, contextual information plays a crucial role in understanding the kind of laughter and emotion in the enactment.
Towards Emotion and Affect Detection in the Multimodal LAST MINUTE Corpus
Authors: J{\"o}rg Frommer, Bernd Michaelis, Dietmar R{\"o}sner, Andreas Wendemuth, Rafael Friesen, Matthias Haase, Manuela Kunze, Rico Andrich, Julia Lange, Axel Panning, Ingo Siegert
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The LAST MINUTE corpus comprises multimodal recordings (e.g. video, audio, transcripts) from WOZ interactions in a mundane planning task (R{\"o}sner et al., 2011). It is one of the largest corpora with naturalistic data currently available. In this paper we report about first results from attempts to automatically and manually analyze the different modes with respect to emotions and affects exhibited by the subjects. We describe and discuss difficulties encountered due to the strong contrast between the naturalistic recordings and traditional databases with acted emotions.
Rapid creation of large-scale corpora and frequency dictionaries
Authors: Attila Zs{\'e}der, G{\'a}bor Recski, D{\'a}niel Varga, Andr{\'a}s Kornai
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

We describe, and make public, large-scale language resources and the toolchain used in their creation, for fifteen medium density European languages: Catalan, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. To make the process uniform across languages, we selected tools that are either language-independent or easily customizable for each language, and reimplemented all stages that were taking too long. To achieve processing times that are insignificant compared to the time data collection (crawling) takes, we reimplemented the standard sentence- and word-level tokenizers and created new boilerplate and near-duplicate detection algorithms. Preliminary experiments with non-European languages indicate that our methods are now applicable not just to our sample, but the entire population of digitally viable languages, with the main limiting factor being the availability of high quality stemmers.
Adaptive Dictionary for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora
Authors: Amir Hazem, Emmanuel Morin
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval

One of the main resources used for the task of bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora is : the bilingual dictionary, which is considered as a bridge between two languages. However, no particular attention has been given to this lexicon, except its coverage, and the fact that it can be issued from the general language, the specialised one, or a mix of both. In this paper, we want to highlight the idea that a better consideration of the bilingual dictionary by studying its entries and filtering the non-useful ones, leads to a better lexicon extraction and thus, reach a higher precision. The experiments are conducted on a medical domain corpora. The French-English specialised corpus 'breast cancer' of 1 million words. We show that the empirical results obtained with our filtering process improve the standard approach traditionally dedicated to this task and are promising for future work.