pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Statistical Section Segmentation in Free-Text Clinical Records
Authors: Michael Tepper, Daniel Capurro, Fei Xia, V, Lucy erwende, Meliha Yetisgen-Yildiz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: General Classification, Information Retrieval, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Retrieval, Segmentation, Text Classification

Automatically segmenting and classifying clinical free text into sections is an important first step to automatic information retrieval, information extraction and data mining tasks, as it helps to ground the significance of the text within. In this work we describe our approach to automatic section segmentation of clinical records such as hospital discharge summaries and radiology reports, along with section classification into pre-defined section categories. We apply machine learning to the problems of section segmentation and section classification, comparing a joint (one-step) and a pipeline (two-step) approach. We demonstrate that our systems perform well when tested on three data sets, two for hospital discharge summaries and one for radiology reports. We then show the usefulness of section information by incorporating it in the task of extracting comorbidities from discharge summaries.
Constructing a Question Corpus for Textual Semantic Relations
Authors: Rui Wang, Shuguang Li
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Community Question Answering, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering

Finding useful questions is a challenging task in Community Question Answering (CQA). There are two key issues need to be resolved: 1) what is a useful question to the given reference question; and furthermore 2) what kind of relations exist between a given pair of questions. In order to answer these two questions, in this paper, we propose a fine-grained inventory of textual semantic relations between questions and annotate a corpus constructed from the WikiAnswers website. We also extract large archives of question pairs with user-generated links and use them as labeled data for separating useful questions from neutral ones, achieving 72.2{\%} of accuracy. We find such online CQA repositories valuable resources for related research.
Building a fine-grained subjectivity lexicon from a web corpus
Authors: Isa Maks, Piek Vossen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Subjectivity Analysis

In this paper we propose a method to build fine-grained subjectivity lexicons including nouns, verbs and adjectives. The method, which is applied for Dutch, is based on the comparison of word frequencies of three corpora: Wikipedia, News and News comments. Comparison of the corpora is carried out with two measures: log-likelihood ratio and a percentage difference calculation. The first step of the method involves subjectivity identification, i.e. determining if a word is subjective or not. The second step aims at the identification of more fine-grained subjectivity which is the distinction between actor subjectivity and speaker / writer subjectivity. The results suggest that this approach can be usefully applied producing subjectivity lexicons of high quality.
Building a database of French frozen adverbial phrases
Authors: Aude Grezka, C{\'e}line Poudat
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

The present paper gives an account of the approach we have led so far to build a database of frozen units. Although it has long been absent from linguistic studies and grammatical tradition, linguistic frozenness is currently a major research issue for linguistic studies, as frozen markers ensure the economy of the language system. The objective of our study is twofold: we first aim to build a comprehensive database of completely frozen units for the French language ― what is traditionally called absolute or total frozenness. We started the project with the description of adverbial units ― in the long term, we will also naturally describe adjectival, verbal and nominal phrases ― and we will first present the database we have developed so far. This first objective is necessarily followed by the second one, which aims to assess the frozenness degree of the other units (i.e. relative frozenness). In this perspective, we resorted to two sets of methods: linguistic tests and statistical methods processed on two corpora (political and scientific discourse).
Matching Cultural Heritage items to Wikipedia
Authors: Eneko Agirre, Ander Barrena, Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Aitor Soroa, Fern, Samuel o, Mark Stevenson
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Entity Linking

Digitised Cultural Heritage (CH) items usually have short descriptions and lack rich contextual information. Wikipedia articles, on the contrary, include in-depth descriptions and links to related articles, which motivate the enrichment of CH items with information from Wikipedia. In this paper we explore the feasibility of finding matching articles in Wikipedia for a given Cultural Heritage item. We manually annotated a random sample of items from Europeana, and performed a qualitative and quantitative study of the issues and problems that arise, showing that each kind of CH item is different and needs a nuanced definition of what ``matching article'' means. In addition, we test a well-known wikification (aka entity linking) algorithm on the task. Our results indicate that a substantial number of items can be effectively linked to their corresponding Wikipedia article.
ATLIS: Identifying Locational Information in Text Automatically
Authors: John Vogel, Marc Verhagen, James Pustejovsky
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

ATLIS (short for  ATLIS Tags Locations in Strings) is a tool being developed using a maximum-entropy machine learning model for automatically identifying information relating to spatial and locational information in natural language text. It is being developed in parallel with the ISO-Space standard for annotation of spatial information (Pustejovsky, Moszkowicz {\&} Verhagen 2011). The goal of ATLIS is to be able to take in a document as raw text and mark it up with ISO-Space annotation data, so that another program could use the information in a standardized format to reason about the semantics of the spatial information in the document. The tool (as well as ISO-Space itself) is still in the early stages of development. At present it implements a subset of the proposed ISO-Space annotation standard: it identifies expressions that refer to specific places, as well as identifying prepositional constructions that indicate a spatial relationship between two objects. In this paper, the structure of the ATLIS tool is presented, along with preliminary evaluations of its performance.
A Speech and Gesture Spatial Corpus in Assisted Living
Authors: Dimitra Anastasiou
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Gesture Recognition

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the name for a European technology and innovation funding programme. AAL research field is about intelligent assistant systems for a healthier and safer life in the preferred living environments through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We focus specifically on speech and gesture interaction which can enhance the quality of lifestyle of people living in assistive environments, be they seniors or people with physical or cognitive disabilities. In this paper we describe our user study conducted in a lab at the University of Bremen in order to collect empirical speech and gesture data and later create and analyse a multimodal corpus. The user study is about a human user sitting in a wheelchair and performing certain inherently spatial tasks.
3rd party observer gaze as a continuous measure of dialogue flow
Authors: Jens Edlund, Alex, Simon ersson, Jonas Beskow, Lisa Gustavsson, Mattias Heldner, Anna Hjalmarsson, Petter Kallionen, Ellen Marklund
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Action Detection

We present an attempt at using 3rd party observer gaze to get a measure of how appropriate each segment in a dialogue is for a speaker change. The method is a step away from the current dependency of speaker turns or talkspurts towards a more general view of speaker changes. We show that 3rd party observers do indeed largely look at the same thing (the speaker), and how this can be captured and utilized to provide insights into human communication. In addition, the results also suggest that there might be differences in the distribution of 3rd party observer gaze depending on how information-rich an utterance is.
Constraint Based Description of Polish Multiword Expressions
Authors: Roman Kurc, Maciej Piasecki, Bartosz Broda
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Morphological Analysis, Question Answering

We present an approach to the description of Polish Multi-word Expressions (MWEs) which is based on expressions in the WCCL language of morpho-syntactic constraints instead of grammar rules or transducers. For each MWE its basic morphological form and the base forms of its constituents are specified but also each MWE is assigned to a class on the basis of its syntactic structure. For each class a WCCL constraint is defined which is parametrised by string variables referring to MWE constituent base forms or inflected forms. The constraint specifies a minimal set of conditions that must be fulfilled in order to recognise an occurrence of the given MWE in text with high accuracy. Our formalism is focused on the efficient description of large MWE lexicons for the needs of utilisation in text processing. The formalism allows for the relatively easy representation of flexible word order and discontinuous constructions. Moreover, there is no necessity for the full specification of the MWE grammatical structure. Only some aspects of the particular MWE structure can be selected in way facilitating the target accuracy of recognition. On the basis of a set of simple heuristics, WCCL-based representation of MWEs can be automatically generated from a list of MWE base forms. The proposed representation was applied on a practical scale for the description of a large set of Polish MWEs included in plWordNet.
An Open Source Persian Computational Grammar
Authors: Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Elnaz Abolahrar
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Abstract In this paper, we describe a multilingual open-source computational grammar of Persian, developed in Grammatical Framework (GF) â€• A type-theoretical grammar formalism. We discuss in detail the structure of different syntactic (i.e. noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectival phrases, etc.) categories of Persian. First, we show how to structure and construct these categories individually. Then we describe how they are glued together to make well-formed sentences in Persian, while maintaining the grammatical features such as agreement, word order, etc. We also show how some of the distinctive features of Persian, such as the ezafe construction, are implemented in GF. In order to evaluate the grammar's correctness, and to demonstrate its usefulness, we have added support for Persian in a multilingual application grammar (the Tourist Phrasebook) using the reported resource grammar.
Project FLY: a multidisciplinary project within Linguistics
Authors: Mariana Gomes, Ana Guilherme, Leonor Tavares, Rita Marquilhas
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sociology, Unity

This paper concerns the presentation of two projects that aim to make available an online archive of 4,000 original private letters, mainly having in mind research in Linguistics (Corpus Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, General Linguistics), History and Sociology. Our corpus is prepared for each research area and provides a diachronic archive of the Portuguese language. Projects CARDS and FLY have the main goal of making available an online electronic edition of each letter, which is completely open source, searchable and available. Users can search for an individual letter, a text by type, a group of letters by year or even the whole archive as a corpus for research or other purposes. The means of corpus presentation is a multimodal framework, since it joins together both the manuscript's image and the written text: the letter's material representation in facsimile and the letter's digital transcription. This editing method allows for the possibility of creating an annotated corpus where the textual unity is not lost.
The Common Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language: a set of open lexical resources for a pluricentric language
Authors: Jos{\'e} Pedro Ferreira, Maarten Janssen, Gladis Barcellos de Oliveira, Margarita Correia, Gilvan M{\"u}ller de Oliveira
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper outlines the design principles and choices, as well as the ongoing development process of the Common Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language (VOC), a large scale electronic lexical database which was adopted by the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries' (CPLP) Instituto Internacional da L{\'\i}ngua Portuguesa to implement a spelling reform that is currently taking place. Given the different available resources and lexicographic traditions within the CPLP countries, a range of different solutions was adopted for different countries and integrated into a common development framework. Although the publication of lexicographic resources to implement spelling reforms has always been done for Portuguese, VOC represents a paradigm change, switching from idiosyncratic, closed source, paper-format official resources to standardized, open, free, web-accessible and reusable ones. We start by outlining the context that justifies the resource development and its requirements, then focusing on the description of the methodology, workflow and tools used, showing how a collaborative project in a common web-based platform and administration interface make the creation of such a long-sought and ambitious project possible.
NLP Challenges for Eunomos a Tool to Build and Manage Legal Knowledge
Authors: Guido Boella, Luigi di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo, Leon van der Torre
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Management, Text Classification

In this paper, we describe how NLP can semi-automate the construction and analysis of knowledge in Eunomos, a legal knowledge management service which enables users to view legislation from various sources and find the right definitions and explanations of legal concepts in a given context. NLP can semi-automate some routine tasks currently performed by knowledge engineers, such as classifying norm, or linking key terms within legislation to ontological concepts. This helps overcome the resource bottleneck problem of creating specialist knowledge management systems. While accuracy is of the utmost importance in the legal domain, and the information should be verified by domain experts as a matter of course, a semi-automated approach can result in considerable efficiency gains.
Pursing power in Arabic on-line discussion forums
Authors: Marc Tomlinson, David Bracewell, Mary Draper, Zewar Almissour, Ying Shi, Jeremy Bensley
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present a novel corpus for identifying individuals within a group setting that are attempting to gain power within the group. The corpus is entirely in Arabic and is derived from the on-line WikiTalk discussion forums. Entries on the forums were annotated at multiple levels, top-level annotations identified whether an individual was pursuing power on the forum, and low level annotations identified linguistic indicators that signaled an individuals social intentions. An analysis of our annotations reflects a high-degree of overlap between current theories on power and conflict within a group and the behavior of individuals within the transcripts. The described datasource provides an appropriate means for modeling an individual's pursuit of power within an on-line discussion group and also allows for enumeration and validation of current theories on the ways in which individuals strive for power.
The Dependency-Parsed FrameNet Corpus
Authors: Daniel Bauer, Hagen F{\"u}rstenau, Owen Rambow
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, POS, Semantic Role Labeling, Sentence

When training semantic role labeling systems, the syntax of example sentences is of particular importance. Unfortunately, for the FrameNet annotated sentences, there is no standard parsed version. The integration of the automatic parse of an annotated sentence with its semantic annotation, while conceptually straightforward, is complex in practice. We present a standard dataset that is publicly available and that can be used in future research. This dataset contains parser-generated dependency structures (with POS tags and lemmas) for all FrameNet 1.5 sentences, with nodes automatically associated with FrameNet annotations.
Incorporating an Error Corpus into a Spellchecker for Maltese
Authors: Michael Rosner, Albert Gatt, Andrew Attard, Jan Joachimsen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper discusses the ongoing development of a new Maltese spell checker, highlighting the methodologies which would best suit such a language. We thus discuss several previous attempts, highlighting what we believe to be their weakest point: a lack of attention to context. Two developments are of particular interest, both of which concern the availability of language resources relevant to spellchecking: (i) the Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS) which now includes a representative corpus of c. 100M words extracted from diverse documents including the Maltese Legislation, press releases and extracts from Maltese web-pages and (ii) an extensive and detailed corpus of spelling errors that was collected whilst part of the MLRS texts were being prepared. We describe the structure of these resources as well as the experimental approaches focused on context that we are now in a position to adopt. We describe the framework within which a variety of different approaches to spellchecking and evaluation will be carried out, and briefly discuss the first baseline system we have implemented. We conclude the paper with a roadmap for future improvements.
Building Synthetic Voices in the META-NET Framework
Authors: Em{\'\i}lia Garcia Casademont, Antonio Bonafonte, Asunci{\'o}n Moreno
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

METANET4U is a European project aiming at supporting language technology for European languages and multilingualism. It is a project in the META-NET Network of Excellence, a cluster of projects aiming at fostering the mission of META, which is the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance, dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. This paper describe the resources produced at our lab to provide Synthethic voices. Using existing 10h corpus for a male and a female Spanish speakers, voices have been developed to be used in Festival, both with unit-selection and with statistical-based technologies. Furthermore, using data produced for supporting research on intra and inter-lingual voice conversion, four bilingual voices (English/Spanish) have been developed. The paper describes these resources which are available through META. Furthermore, an evaluation is presented to compare different synthesis techniques, influence of amount of data in statistical speech synthesis and the effect of sharing data in bilingual voices.
Automatic Translation of Scholarly Terms into Patent Terms Using Synonym Extraction Techniques
Authors: Hidetsugu Nanba, Toshiyuki Takezawa, Kiyoko Uchiyama, Akiko Aizawa
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Translation

Retrieving research papers and patents is important for any researcher assessing the scope of a field with high industrial relevance. However, the terms used in patents are often more abstract or creative than those used in research papers, because they are intended to widen the scope of claims. Therefore, a method is required for translating scholarly terms into patent terms. In this paper, we propose six methods for translating scholarly terms into patent terms using two synonym extraction methods: a statistical machine translation (SMT)-based method and a distributional similarity (DS)-based method. We conducted experiments to confirm the effectiveness of our method using the dataset of the Patent Mining Task from the NTCIR-7 Workshop. The aim of the task was to classify Japanese language research papers (pairs of titles and abstracts) using the IPC system at the subclass (third level), main group (fourth level), and subgroup (the fifth and most detailed level). The results showed that an SMT-based method (SMT{\_}ABST+IDF) performed best at the subgroup level, whereas a DS-based method (DS+IDF) performed best at the subclass level.
Tree-Structured Named Entity Recognition on OCR Data: Analysis, Processing and Results
Authors: Marco Dinarelli, Sophie Rosset
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

In this paper we deal with named entity detection on data acquired via OCR process on documents dating from 1890. The resulting corpus is very noisy. We perform an analysis to find possible strategies to overcome errors introduced by the OCR process. We propose a preprocessing procedure in three steps to clean data and correct, at least in part, OCR mistakes. The task is made even harder by the complex tree-structure of named entities annotated on data, we solve this problem however by adopting an effective named entity detection system we proposed in previous work. We evaluate our procedure for preprocessing OCR-ized data in two ways: in terms of perplexity and OOV rate of a language model on development and evaluation data, and in terms of the performance of the named entity detection system on the preprocessed data. The preprocessing procedure results to be effective, allowing to improve by a large margin the system we proposed for the official evaluation campaign on Old Press, and allowing to outperform also the best performing system of the evaluation campaign.
Building a 70 billion word corpus of English from ClueWeb
Authors: Jan Pomik{\'a}lek, Milo{\v{s}} Jakub{\'\i}{\v{c}}ek, Pavel Rychl{\'y}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Management, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Speech Recognition

This work describes the process of creation of a 70 billion word text corpus of English. We used an existing language resource, namely the ClueWeb09 dataset, as source for the corpus data. Processing such a vast amount of data presented several challenges, mainly associated with pre-processing (boilerplate cleaning, text de-duplication) and post-processing (indexing for efficient corpus querying using the CQL -- Corpus Query Language) steps. In this paper we explain how we tackled them: we describe the tools used for boilerplate cleaning (jusText) and for de-duplication (onion) that was performed not only on full (document-level) duplicates but also on the level of near-duplicate texts. Moreover we show the impact of each of the performed pre-processing steps on the final corpus size. Furthermore we show how effective parallelization of the corpus indexation procedure was employed within the Manatee corpus management system and during computation of word sketches (one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour) from the resulting corpus.