pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech
Authors: Mirjam Ernestus, Lucie Ko{\v{c}}kov{\'a}-Amortov{\'a}, Petr Pollak
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This article introduces a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech (NCCCz), which contains more than 30 hours of high-quality recordings of casual conversations in Common Czech, among ten groups of three male and ten groups of three female friends. All speakers were native speakers of Czech, raised in Prague or in the region of Central Bohemia, and were between 19 and 26 years old. Every group of speakers consisted of one confederate, who was instructed to keep the conversations lively, and two speakers naive to the purposes of the recordings. The naive speakers were engaged in conversations for approximately 90 minutes, while the confederate joined them for approximately the last 72 minutes. The corpus was orthographically annotated by experienced transcribers and this orthographic transcription was aligned with the speech signal. In addition, the conversations were videotaped. This corpus can form the basis for all types of research on casual conversations in Czech, including phonetic research and research on how to improve automatic speech recognition. The corpus will be freely available.
Modern Chinese Helps Archaic Chinese Processing: Finding and Exploiting the Shared Properties
Authors: Yan Song, Fei Xia
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Articles, POS, Sentiment Analysis

Languages change over time and ancient languages have been studied in linguistics and other related fields. A main challenge in this research area is the lack of empirical data; for instance, ancient spoken languages often leave little trace of their linguistic properties. From the perspective of natural language processing (NLP), while the NLP community has created dozens of annotated corpora, very few of them are on ancient languages. As an effort toward bridging the gap, we have created a word segmented and POS tagged corpus for Archaic Chinese using articles from Huainanzi, a book written during ChinaÂ’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-9 AD). We then compare this corpus with the Chinese Penn Treebank (CTB), a well-known corpus for Modern Chinese, and report several interesting differences and similarities between the two corpora. Finally, we demonstrate that the CTB can be used to improve the performance of word segmenters and POS taggers for Archaic Chinese, but only through features that have similar behaviors in the two corpora.
Digital Library 2.0: Source of Knowledge and Research Collaboration Platform
Authors: W{\l}odzimierz Gruszczy{\'n}ski, Maciej Ogrodniczuk
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

Digital libraries are frequently treated just as a new method of storage of digitized artifacts, with all consequences of transferring long-established ways of dealing with physical objects into the digital world. Such attitude improves availability, but often neglects other opportunities offered by global and immediate access, virtuality and linking â€• as easy as never before. The article presents the idea of transforming a conventional digital library into knowledge source and research collaboration platform, facilitating content augmentation, interpretation and co-operation of geographically distributed researchers representing different academic fields. This concept has been verified by the process of extending descriptions stored in thematic Digital Library of Polish and Poland-related Ephemeral Prints from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries with extended item-associated information provided by historians, philologists, librarians and computer scientists. It resulted in associating the customary fixed metadata and digitized content with historical comments, mini-dictionaries of foreign interjections or explanation of less-known background details.
Open-domain Interaction and Online Content in the Sami Language
Authors: Kristiina Jokinen
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

This paper presents data collection and collaborative community events organised within the project Digital Natives on the North Sami language. The project is one of the collaboration initiatives on endangered Finno-Ugric languages, supported by the larger framework between the Academy of Finland and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The goal of the project is to improve digital visibility and viability of the targeted Finno-Ugric languages, as well as to develop language technology tools and resources in order to assist automatic language processing and experimenting with multilingual interactive applications.
A Character-based Approach to Distributional Semantic Models: Exploiting Kanji Characters for Constructing JapaneseWord Vectors
Authors: Akira Utsumi
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Information Retrieval

Many Japanese words are made of kanji characters, which themselves represent meanings. However traditional word-based distributional semantic models (DSMs) do not benefit from the useful semantic information of kanji characters. In this paper, we propose a method for exploiting the semantic information of kanji characters for constructing Japanese word vectors in DSMs. In the proposed method, the semantic representations of kanji characters (i.e, kanji vectors) are constructed first using the techniques of DSMs, and then word vectors are computed by combining the vectors of constituent kanji characters using vector composition methods. The evaluation experiment using a synonym identification task demonstrates that the kanji-based DSM achieves the best performance when a kanji-kanji matrix is weighted by positive pointwise mutual information and word vectors are composed by weighted multiplication. Comparison between kanji-based DSMs and word-based DSMs reveals that our kanji-based DSMs generally outperform latent semantic analysis, and also surpasses the best score word-based DSM for infrequent words comprising only frequent kanji characters. These findings clearly indicate that kanji-based DSMs are beneficial in improvement of quality of Japanese word vectors.
Cross-Language Authorship Attribution
Authors: Dasha Bogdanova, Angeliki Lazaridou
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Authorship Attribution, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Text Classification, Translation

This paper presents a novel task of cross-language authorship attribution (CLAA), an extension of authorship attribution task to multilingual settings: given data labelled with authors in language X, the objective is to determine the author of a document written in language Y , where X is different from Y . We propose a number of cross-language stylometric features for the task of CLAA, such as those based on sentiment and emotional markers. We also explore an approach based on machine translation (MT) with both lexical and cross-language features. We experimentally show that MT could be used as a starting point to CLAA, since it allows good attribution accuracy to be achieved. The cross-language features provide acceptable accuracy while using jointly with MT, though do not outperform lexical features.
Using Transfer Learning to Assist Exploratory Corpus Annotation
Authors: Paul Felt, Eric Ringger, Kevin Seppi, Kristian Heal
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Management, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Transfer Learning

We describe an under-studied problem in language resource management: that of providing automatic assistance to annotators working in exploratory settings. When no satisfactory tagset already exists, such as in under-resourced or undocumented languages, it must be developed iteratively while annotating data. This process naturally gives rise to a sequence of datasets, each annotated differently. We argue that this problem is best regarded as a transfer learning problem with multiple source tasks. Using part-of-speech tagging data with simulated exploratory tagsets, we demonstrate that even simple transfer learning techniques can significantly improve the quality of pre-annotations in an exploratory annotation.
ANCOR\_Centre, a large free spoken French coreference corpus: description of the resource and reliability measures
Authors: Judith Muzerelle, Ana{\"\i}s Lefeuvre, Emmanuel Schang, Jean-Yves Antoine, Aurore Pelletier, Denis Maurel, Iris Eshkol, Jeanne Villaneau
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Coreference Resolution, Entity Linking, Information Retrieval

This article presents ANCOR{\_}Centre, a French coreference corpus, available under the Creative Commons Licence. With a size of around 500,000 words, the corpus is large enough to serve the needs of data-driven approaches in NLP and represents one of the largest coreference resources currently available. The corpus focuses exclusively on spoken language, it aims at representing a certain variety of spoken genders. ANCOR{\_}Centre includes anaphora as well as coreference relations which involve nominal and pronominal mentions. The paper describes into details the annotation scheme and the reliability measures computed on the resource.
Guampa: a Toolkit for Collaborative Translation
Authors: Alex Rudnick, Taylor Skidmore, Alberto Samaniego, Michael Gasser
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Translation

Here we present Guampa, a new software package for online collaborative translation. This system grows out of our discussions with Guarani-language activists and educators in Paraguay, and attempts to address problems faced by machine translation researchers and by members of any community speaking an under-represented language. Guampa enables volunteers and students to work together to translate documents into heritage languages, both to make more materials available in those languages, and also to generate bitext suitable for training machine translation systems. While many approaches to crowdsourcing bitext corpora focus on Mechanical Turk and temporarily engaging anonymous workers, Guampa is intended to foster an online community in which discussions can take place, language learners can practice their translation skills, and complete documents can be translated. This approach is appropriate for the Spanish-Guarani language pair as there are many speakers of both languages, and Guarani has a dedicated activist community. Our goal is to make it easy for anyone to set up their own instance of Guampa and populate it with documents -- such as automatically imported Wikipedia articles -- to be translated for their particular language pair. Guampa is freely available and relatively easy to use.
Experiences with the ISOcat Data Category Registry
Authors: Daan Broeder, Ineke Schuurman, Menzo Windhouwer
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The ISOcat Data Category Registry has been a joint project of both ISO TC 37 and the European CLARIN infrastructure. In this paper the experiences of using ISOcat in CLARIN are described and evaluated. This evaluation clarifies the requirements of CLARIN with regard to a semantic registry to support its semantic interoperability needs. A simpler model based on concepts instead of data cate-gories and a simpler workflow based on community recommendations will address these needs better and offer the required flexibility.
RELISH LMF: Unlocking the Full Power of the Lexical Markup Framework
Authors: Menzo Windhouwer, Justin Petro, Shakila Shayan
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The Lexical Markup Framework (ISO 24613:2008) provides a core class diagram and various extensions as the basis for constructing lexical resources. Unfortunately the informative Document Type Definition provided by the standard and other available LMF serializations lack support for many of the powerful features of the model. This paper describes RELISH LMF, which unlocks the full power of the LMF model by providing a set of extensible modern schema modules. As use cases RELISH LL LMF and support by LEXUS, an online lexicon tool, are described.
Building a Corpus of Manually Revised Texts from Discourse Perspective
Authors: Ryu Iida, Takenobu Tokunaga
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

This paper presents building a corpus of manually revised texts which includes both before and after-revision information. In order to create such a corpus, we propose a procedure for revising a text from a discourse perspective, consisting of dividing a text to discourse units, organising and reordering groups of discourse units and finally modifying referring and connective expressions, each of which imposes limits on freedom of revision. Following the procedure, six revisers who have enough experience in either teaching Japanese or scoring Japanese essays revised 120 Japanese essays written by Japanese native speakers. Comparing the original and revised texts, we found some specific manual revisions frequently occurred between the original and revised texts, e.g. thesis statements were frequently placed at the beginning of a text. We also evaluate text coherence using the original and revised texts on the task of pairwise information ordering, identifying a more coherent text. The experimental results using two text coherence models demonstrated that the two models did not outperform the random baseline.
The CMD Cloud
Authors: Matej {\v{D}}ur{\v{c}}o, Menzo Windhouwer
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) established means for flexible resource descriptions for the domain of language resources with sound provisions for semantic interoperability weaved deeply into the meta model and the infrastructure. Based on this solid grounding, the infrastructure accommodates a growing collection of metadata records. In this paper, we give a short overview of the current status in the CMD data domain on the schema and instance level and harness the installed mechanisms for semantic interoperability to explore the similarity relations between individual profiles/schemas. We propose a method to use the semantic links shared among the profiles to generate/compile a similarity graph. This information is further rendered in an interactive graph viewer: the SMC Browser. The resulting interactive graph offers an intuitive view on the complex interrelations of the discussed dataset revealing clusters of more similar profiles. This information is useful both for metadata modellers, for metadata curation tasks as well as for general audience seeking for a {`}big picture{'} of the complex CMD data domain.
Linguistic landscaping of South Asia using digital language resources: Genetic vs. areal linguistics
Authors: Lars Borin, Anju Saxena, Taraka Rama, Bernard Comrie
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

Like many other research fields, linguistics is entering the age of big data. We are now at a point where it is possible to see how new research questions can be formulated - and old research questions addressed from a new angle or established results verified - on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than small, carefully selected samples. For example, South Asia is often mentioned in the literature as a classic example of a linguistic area, but there is no systematic, empirical study substantiating this claim. Examination of genealogical and areal relationships among South Asian languages requires a large-scale quantitative and qualitative comparative study, encompassing more than one language family. Further, such a study cannot be conducted manually, but needs to draw on extensive digitized language resources and state-of-the-art computational tools. We present some preliminary results of our large-scale investigation of the genealogical and areal relationships among the languages of this region, based on the linguistic descriptions available in the 19 tomes of Grierson{'}s monumental {``}Linguistic Survey of India{''} (1903-1927), which is currently being digitized with the aim of turning the linguistic information in the LSI into a digital language resource suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations.
Linguistic Evaluation of Support Verb Constructions by OpenLogos and Google Translate
Authors: Anabela Barreiro, Johanna Monti, Brigitte Orliac, Susanne Preu{\ss}, Kutz Arrieta, Wang Ling, Fern Batista, o, Isabel Trancoso
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper presents a systematic human evaluation of translations of English support verb constructions produced by a rule-based machine translation (RBMT) system (OpenLogos) and a statistical machine translation (SMT) system (Google Translate) for five languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. We classify support verb constructions by means of their syntactic structure and semantic behavior and present a qualitative analysis of their translation errors. The study aims to verify how machine translation (MT) systems translate fine-grained linguistic phenomena, and how well-equipped they are to produce high-quality translation. Another goal of the linguistically motivated quality analysis of SVC raw output is to reinforce the need for better system hybridization, which leverages the strengths of RBMT to the benefit of SMT, especially in improving the translation of multiword units. Taking multiword units into account, we propose an effective method to achieve MT hybridization based on the integration of semantico-syntactic knowledge into SMT.
Single-Person and Multi-Party 3D Visualizations for Nonverbal Communication Analysis
Authors: Michael Kipp, Levin Freiherr von Hollen, Michael Christopher Hrstka, Franziska Zamponi
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The qualitative analysis of nonverbal communication is more and more relying on 3D recording technology. However, the human analysis of 3D data on a regular 2D screen can be challenging as 3D scenes are difficult to visually parse. To optimally exploit the full depth of the 3D data, we propose to enhance the 3D view with a number of visualizations that clarify spatial and conceptual relationships and add derived data like speed and angles. In this paper, we present visualizations for directional body motion, hand movement direction, gesture space location, and proxemic dimensions like interpersonal distance, movement and orientation. The proposed visualizations are available in the open source tool JMocap and are planned to be fully integrated into the ANVIL video annotation tool. The described techniques are intended to make annotation more efficient and reliable and may allow the discovery of entirely new phenomena.
Collection of a Simultaneous Translation Corpus for Comparative Analysis
Authors: Hiroaki Shimizu, Graham Neubig, Sakriani Sakti, Tomoki Toda, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Translation

This paper describes the collection of an English-Japanese/Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation corpus. There are two main features of the corpus. The first is that professional simultaneous interpreters with different amounts of experience cooperated with the collection. By comparing data from simultaneous interpretation of each interpreter, it is possible to compare better interpretations to those that are not as good. The second is that for part of our corpus there are already translation data available. This makes it possible to compare translation data with simultaneous interpretation data. We recorded the interpretations of lectures and news, and created time-aligned transcriptions. A total of 387k words of transcribed data were collected. The corpus will be helpful to analyze differences in interpretations styles and to construct simultaneous interpretation systems.
The AV-LASYN Database : A synchronous corpus of audio and 3D facial marker data for audio-visual laughter synthesis
Authors: H{\"u}seyin {\c{C}}akmak, J{\'e}r{\^o}me Urbain, Thierry Dutoit, Jo{\"e}lle Tilmanne
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Speech Synthesis

A synchronous database of acoustic and 3D facial marker data was built for audio-visual laughter synthesis. Since the aim is to use this database for HMM-based modeling and synthesis, the amount of collected data from one given subject had to be maximized. The corpus contains 251 utterances of laughter from one male participant. Laughter was elicited with the help of humorous videos. The resulting database is synchronous between modalities (audio and 3D facial motion capture data). Visual 3D data is available in common formats such as BVH and C3D with head motion and facial deformation independently available. Data is segmented and audio has been annotated. Phonetic transcriptions are available in the HTK-compatible format. Principal component analysis has been conducted on visual data and has shown that a dimensionality reduction might be relevant. The corpus may be obtained under a research license upon request to authors.
Interoperability of Dialogue Corpora through ISO 24617-2-based Querying
Authors: Volha Petukhova, Andrei Malchanau, Harry Bunt
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: valid

This paper explores a way of achieving interoperability: developing a query format for accessing existing annotated corpora whose expressions make use of the annotation language defined by the standard. The interpretation of expressions in the query implements a mapping from ISO 24617-2 concepts to those of the annotation scheme used in the corpus. We discuss two possible ways to query existing annotated corpora using DiAML. One way is to transform corpora into DiAML compliant format, and subsequently query these data using XQuery or XPath. The second approach is to define a DiAML query that can be directly used to retrieve requested information from the annotated data. Both approaches are valid. The first one presents a standard way of querying XML data. The second approach is a DiAML-oriented querying of dialogue act annotated data, for which we designed an interface. The proposed approach is tested on two important types of existing dialogue corpora: spoken two-person dialogue corpora collected and annotated within the HCRC Map Task paradigm, and multiparty face-to-face dialogues of the AMI corpus. We present the results and evaluate them with respect to accuracy and completeness through statistical comparisons between retrieved and manually constructed reference annotations.
ASR-based CALL systems and learner speech data: new resources and opportunities for research and development in second language learning
Authors: Catia Cucchiarini, Steve Bodnar, Bart Penning de Vries, Roel van Hout, Helmer Strik
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Acquisition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this paper we describe the language resources developed within the project Feedback and the Acquisition of Syntax in Oral Proficiency (FASOP), which is aimed at investigating the effectiveness of various forms of practice and feedback on the acquisition of syntax in second language (L2) oral proficiency, as well as their interplay with learner characteristics such as education level, learner motivation and confidence. For this purpose, use is made of a Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) system that employs Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to allow spoken interaction and to create an experimental environment that guarantees as much control over the language learning setting as possible. The focus of the present paper is on the resources that are being produced in FASOP. In line with the theme of this conference, we present the different types of resources developed within this project and the way in which these could be used to pursue innovative research in second language acquisition and to develop and improve ASR-based language learning applications.