pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Translation errors from English to Portuguese: an annotated corpus
Authors: Angela Costa, Tiago Lu{\'\i}s, Lu{\'\i}sa Coheur
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Analysing the translation errors is a task that can help us finding and describing translation problems in greater detail, but can also suggest where the automatic engines should be improved. Having these aims in mind we have created a corpus composed of 150 sentences, 50 from the TAP magazine, 50 from a TED talk and the other 50 from the from the TREC collection of factoid questions. We have automatically translated these sentences from English into Portuguese using Google Translate and Moses. After we have analysed the errors and created the error annotation taxonomy, the corpus was annotated by a linguist native speaker of Portuguese. Although Google{'}s overall performance was better in the translation task (we have also calculated the BLUE and NIST scores), there are some error types that Moses was better at coping with, specially discourse level errors.
Amazigh Verb Conjugator
Authors: Fadoua Ataa Allah, Siham Boulaknadel
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

With the aim of preserving the Amazigh heritage from being threatened with disappearance, it seems suitable to provide Amazigh with required resources to confront the stakes of access to the domain of New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In this context and in the perspective to build linguistic resources and natural language processing tools for this language, we have undertaken to develop an online conjugating tool that generates the inflectional forms of the Amazigh verbs. This tool is based on novel linguistically motivated morphological rules describing the verbal paradigm for all the Moroccan Amazigh varieties. Furthermore, it is based on the notion of morphological tree structure and uses transformational rules which are attached to the leaf nodes. Each rule may have numerous mutually exclusive clauses, where each part of a clause is a regular expression pattern that is matched against the radical pattern. This tool is an interactive conjugator that provides exhaustive coverage of linguistically accurate conjugation paradigms for over 3584 Armazigh verbs. It has been made simple and easy to use and designed from the ground up to be a highly effective learning aid that stimulates a desire to learn.
The liability of service providers in e-Research Infrastructures: killing the messenger?
Authors: Pawel Kamocki
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

Hosting Providers play an essential role in the development of Internet services such as e-Research Infrastructures. In order to promote the development of such services, legislators on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean introduced safe harbour provisions to protect Service Providers (a category which includes Hosting Providers) from legal claims (e.g. of copyright infringement). Relevant provisions can be found in {\^A}{\S} 512 of the United States Copyright Act and in art. 14 of the Directive 2000/31/EC (and its national implementations). The cornerstone of this framework is the passive role of the Hosting Provider through which he has no knowledge of the content that he hosts. With the arrival of Web 2.0, however, the role of Hosting Providers on the Internet changed; this change has been reflected in court decisions that have reached varying conclusions in the last few years. The purpose of this article is to present the existing framework (including recent case law from the US, Germany and France).
Adapting VerbNet to French using existing resources
Authors: Quentin Pradet, Laurence Danlos, Ga{\"e}l de Chalendar
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Semantic Role Labeling, Semantic Textual Similarity, Stock Prediction, Word Sense Disambiguation

VerbNet is an English lexical resource for verbs that has proven useful for English NLP due to its high coverage and coherent classification. Such a resource doesnt exist for other languages, despite some (mostly automatic and unsupervised) attempts. We show how to semi-automatically adapt VerbNet using existing resources designed for di{\"\i}{\neg}erent purposes. This study focuses on French and uses two French resources: a semantic lexicon (Les Verbes Fran{\c{c}}ais) and a syntactic lexicon (Lexique-Grammaire).
English-French Verb Phrase Alignment in Europarl for Tense Translation Modeling
Authors: Sharid Lo{\'a}iciga, Thomas Meyer, Andrei Popescu-Belis
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, POS, Translation, Word Alignment

This paper presents a method for verb phrase (VP) alignment in an English-French parallel corpus and its use for improving statistical machine translation (SMT) of verb tenses. The method starts from automatic word alignment performed with GIZA++, and relies on a POS tagger and a parser, in combination with several heuristics, in order to identify non-contiguous components of VPs, and to label the aligned VPs with their tense and voice on each side. This procedure is applied to the Europarl corpus, leading to the creation of a smaller, high-precision parallel corpus with about 320,000 pairs of finite VPs, which is made publicly available. This resource is used to train a tense predictor for translation from English into French, based on a large number of surface features. Three MT systems are compared: (1) a baseline phrase-based SMT; (2) a tense-aware SMT system using the above predictions within a factored translation model; and (3) a system using oracle predictions from the aligned VPs. For several tenses, such as the French {``}imparfait{''}, the tense-aware SMT system improves significantly over the baseline and is closer to the oracle system.
The evolving infrastructure for language resources and the role for data scientists
Authors: Nelleke Oostdijk, Henk van den Heuvel
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

In the context of ongoing developments as regards the creation of a sustainable, interoperable language resource infrastructure and spreading ideas of the need for open access, not only of research publications but also of the underlying data, various issues present themselves which require that different stakeholders reconsider their positions. In the present paper we relate the experiences from the CLARIN-NL data curation service (DCS) over the two years that it has been operational, and the future role we envisage for expertise centres like the DCS in the evolving infrastructure.
A New Form of Humor --- Mapping Constraint-Based Computational Morphologies to a Finite-State Representation
Authors: Attila Nov{\'a}k
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Form, Morphological Analysis, Speech Recognition

MorphoLogic{'}s Humor morphological analyzer engine has been used for the development of several high-quality computational morphologies, among them ones for complex agglutinative languages. However, Humor{'}s closed source licensing scheme has been an obstacle to making these resources widely available. Moreover, there are other limitations of the rule-based Humor engine: lack of support for morphological guessing and for the integration of frequency information or other weighting of the models. These problems were solved by converting the databases to a finite-state representation that allows for morphological guessing and the addition of weights. Moreover, it has open-source implementations.
SLMotion - An extensible sign language oriented video analysis tool
Authors: Matti Karppa, Ville Viitaniemi, Marcos Luzardo, Jorma Laaksonen, Tommi Jantunen
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition

We present a software toolkit called SLMotion which provides a framework for automatic and semiautomatic analysis, feature extraction and annotation of individual sign language videos, and which can easily be adapted to batch processing of entire sign language corpora. The program follows a modular design, and exposes a Numpy-compatible Python application programming interface that makes it easy and convenient to extend its functionality through scripting. The program includes support for exporting the annotations in ELAN format. The program is released as free software, and is available for GNU/Linux and MacOS platforms.
Constructing a Chinese---Japanese Parallel Corpus from Wikipedia
Authors: Chenhui Chu, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Sadao Kurohashi
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Parallel corpora are crucial for statistical machine translation (SMT). However, they are quite scarce for most language pairs, such as Chinese―Japanese. As comparable corpora are far more available, many studies have been conducted to automatically construct parallel corpora from comparable corpora. This paper presents a robust parallel sentence extraction system for constructing a Chinese―Japanese parallel corpus from Wikipedia. The system is inspired by previous studies that mainly consist of a parallel sentence candidate filter and a binary classifier for parallel sentence identification. We improve the system by using the common Chinese characters for filtering and two novel feature sets for classification. Experiments show that our system performs significantly better than the previous studies for both accuracy in parallel sentence extraction and SMT performance. Using the system, we construct a Chinese―Japanese parallel corpus with more than 126k highly accurate parallel sentences from Wikipedia. The constructed parallel corpus is freely available at http://orchid.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/{\textasciitilde}chu/resource/wiki{\_}zh{\_}ja.tgz.
CFT13: A resource for research into the post-editing process
Authors: Michael Carl, Mercedes Mart{\'\i}nez Garc{\'\i}a, Bartolom{\'e} Mesa-Lao
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper describes the most recent dataset that has been added to the CRITT Translation Process Research Database (TPR-DB). Under the name CFT13, this new study contains user activity data (UAD) in the form of key-logging and eye-tracking collected during the second CasMaCat field trial in June 2013. The CFT13 is a publicly available resource featuring a number of simple and compound process and product units suited to investigate human-computer interaction while post-editing machine translation outputs.
M\"orkum Nj\'alu. An annotated corpus to analyse and explain grammatical divergences between 14th-century manuscripts of Nj\'al's saga.
Authors: Ludger Zeevaert
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5

The work of the research project Variance of Nj{\'a}ls saga at the {\'A}rni Magn{\'u}sson Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjav{\'\i}k relies mainly on an annotated XML-corpus of manuscripts of Brennu-Nj{\'a}ls saga or The Story of Burnt Nj{\'a}l, an Icelandic prose narrative from the end of the 13th century. One part of the project is devoted to linguistic variation in the earliest transmission of the text in parchment manuscripts and fragments from the 14th century. The article gives a short overview over the design of the corpus that has to serve quite different purposes from palaeographic over stemmatological to literary research. It focuses on features important for the analysis of certain linguistic variables and the challenge lying in their implementation in a corpus consisting of close transcriptions of medieval manuscripts and gives examples for the use of the corpus for linguistic research in the frame of the project that mainly consists of the analysis of different grammatical/syntactic constructions that are often referred to in connection with stylistic research (narrative inversion, historical present tense, indirect-speech constructions).
A Crowdsourcing Smartphone Application for Swiss German: Putting Language Documentation in the Hands of the Users
Authors: Jean-Philippe Goldman, Adrian Leeman, Marie-Jos{\'e} Kolly, Ingrid Hove, Ibrahim Almajai, Volker Dellwo, Steven Moran
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This contribution describes an on-going projects a smartphone application called Voice {\~A}pp, which is a follow-up of a previous application called Dial{\"a}kt {\~A}pp. The main purpose of both apps is to identify the userÂ’s Swiss German dialect on the basis of the dialectal variations of 15 words. The result is returned as one or more geographical points on a map. In Dial{\"a}kt {\~A}pp, launched in 2013, the user provides his or her own pronunciation through buttons, while the Voice {\~A}pp, currently in development, asks users to pronounce the word and uses speech recognition techniques to identify the variants and localize the user. This second app is more challenging from a technical point of view but nevertheless recovers the nature of dialect variation of spoken language. Besides, the Voice {\~A}pp takes its users on a journey in which they explore the individuality of their own voices, answering questions such as: How high is my voice? How fast do I speak? Do I speak faster than users in the neighbouring city?
ClearTK 2.0: Design Patterns for Machine Learning in UIMA
Authors: Steven Bethard, Philip Ogren, Lee Becker
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Chunking

ClearTK adds machine learning functionality to the UIMA framework, providing wrappers to popular machine learning libraries, a rich feature extraction library that works across different classifiers, and utilities for applying and evaluating machine learning models. Since its inception in 2008, ClearTK has evolved in response to feedback from developers and the community. This evolution has followed a number of important design principles including: conceptually simple annotator interfaces, readable pipeline descriptions, minimal collection readers, type system agnostic code, modules organized for ease of import, and assisting user comprehension of the complex UIMA framework.
A Conventional Orthography for Tunisian Arabic
Authors: In{\`e}s Zribi, Rahma Boujelbane, Abir Masmoudi, Mariem ellouze, Lamia Belguith, Nizar Habash
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Transliteration

Tunisian Arabic is a dialect of the Arabic language spoken in Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is an under-resourced language. It has neither a standard orthography nor large collections of written text and dictionaries. Actually, there is no strict separation between Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of the government, media and education, and Tunisian Arabic; the two exist on a continuum dominated by mixed forms. In this paper, we present a conventional orthography for Tunisian Arabic, following a previous effort on developing a conventional orthography for Dialectal Arabic (or CODA) demonstrated for Egyptian Arabic. We explain the design principles of CODA and provide a detailed description of its guidelines as applied to Tunisian Arabic.
Creating a massively parallel Bible corpus
Authors: Thomas Mayer, Michael Cysouw
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We present our ongoing effort to create a massively parallel Bible corpus. While an ever-increasing number of Bible translations is available in electronic form on the internet, there is no large-scale parallel Bible corpus that allows language researchers to easily get access to the texts and their parallel structure for a large variety of different languages. We report on the current status of the corpus, with over 900 translations in more than 830 language varieties. All translations are tokenized (e.g., separating punctuation marks) and Unicode normalized. Mainly due to copyright restrictions only portions of the texts are made publicly available. However, we provide co-occurrence information for each translation in a (sparse) matrix format. All word forms in the translation are given together with their frequency and the verses in which they occur.
Corpus-Based Computation of Reverse Associations
Authors: Reinhard Rapp
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Language Acquisition, Learning Theory

According to psychological learning theory an important principle governing language acquisition is co-occurrence. For example, when we perceive language, our brain seems to unconsciously analyze and store the co-occurrence patterns of the words. And during language production, these co-occurrence patterns are reproduced. The applicability of this principle is particularly obvious in the case of word associations. There is evidence that the associative responses people typically come up with upon presentation of a stimulus word are often words which frequently co-occur with it. It is thus possible to predict a response by looking at co-occurrence data. The work presented here is along these lines. However, it differs from most previous work in that it investigates the direction from the response to the stimulus rather than vice-versa, and that it also deals with the case when several responses are known. Our results indicate that it is possible to predict a stimulus word from its responses, and that it helps if several responses are given.
LexTec --- a rich language resource for technical domains in Portuguese
Authors: Palmira Marrafa, Raquel Amaro, Sara Mendes
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Translation

The growing amount of available information and the importance given to the access to technical information enhance the potential role of NLP applications in enabling users to deal with information for a variety of knowledge domains. In this process, language resources are crucial. This paper presents Lextec, a rich computational language resource for technical vocabulary in Portuguese. Encoding a representative set of terms for ten different technical domains, this concept-based relational language resource combines a wide range of linguistic information by integrating each entry in a domain-specific wordnet and associating it with a precise definition for each lexicalization in the technical domain at stake, illustrative texts and information for translation into English.
Boosting the creation of a treebank
Authors: Blanca Arias, N{\'u}ria Bel, Merc{\`e} Lorente, Montserrat Marim{\'o}n, Alba Mil{\`a}, Jorge Vivaldi, Muntsa Padr{\'o}, Marina Fomicheva, Imanol Larrea
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Machine Translation, Question Answering

In this paper we present the results of an ongoing experiment of bootstrapping a Treebank for Catalan by using a Dependency Parser trained with Spanish sentences. In order to save time and cost, our approach was to profit from the typological similarities between Catalan and Spanish to create a first Catalan data set quickly by automatically: (i) annotating with a de-lexicalized Spanish parser, (ii) manually correcting the parses, and (iii) using the Catalan corrected sentences to train a Catalan parser. The results showed that the number of parsed sentences required to train a Catalan parser is about 1000 that were achieved in 4 months, with 2 annotators.
The Dutch LESLLA Corpus
Authors: S, Eric ers, Ineke van de Craats, Vanja de Lint
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Language Acquisition

This paper describes the Dutch LESLLA data and its curation. LESLLA stands for Low-Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition. The data was collected for research in this field and would have been disappeared if it were not saved. Within the CLARIN project Data Curation Service the data was made into a spoken language resource and made available to other researchers.
Improvements to Dependency Parsing Using Automatic Simplification of Data
Authors: Tom{\'a}{\v{s}} Jel{\'\i}nek
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Simplification

In dependency parsing, much effort is devoted to the development of new methods of language modeling and better feature settings. Less attention is paid to actual linguistic data and how appropriate they are for automatic parsing: linguistic data can be too complex for a given parser, morphological tags may not reflect well syntactic properties of words, a detailed, complex annotation scheme may be ill suited for automatic parsing. In this paper, I present a study of this problem on the following case: automatic dependency parsing using the data of the Prague Dependency Treebank with two dependency parsers: MSTParser and MaltParser. I show that by means of small, reversible simplifications of the text and of the annotation, a considerable improvement of parsing accuracy can be achieved. In order to facilitate the task of language modeling performed by the parser, I reduce variability of lemmas and forms in the text. I modify the system of morphological annotation to adapt it better for parsing. Finally, the dependency annotation scheme is also partially modified. All such modifications are automatic and fully reversible: after the parsing is done, the original data and structures are automatically restored. With MaltParser, I achieve an 8.3{\%} error rate reduction.
The Meta-knowledge of Causality in Biomedical Scientific Discourse
Authors: Claudiu Mih{\u{a}}il{\u{a}}, Sophia Ananiadou
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering

Causality lies at the heart of biomedical knowledge, being involved in diagnosis, pathology or systems biology. Thus, automatic causality recognition can greatly reduce the human workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. For this, we rely on corpora that are annotated with classified, structured representations of important facts and findings contained within text. However, it is impossible to correctly interpret these annotations without additional information, e.g., classification of an event as fact, hypothesis, experimental result or analysis of results, confidence of authors about the validity of their analyses etc. In this study, we analyse and automatically detect this type of information, collectively termed meta-knowledge (MK), in the context of existing discourse causality annotations. Our effort proves the feasibility of identifying such pieces of information, without which the understanding of causal relations is limited.
Discosuite - A parser test suite for German discontinuous structures
Authors: Wolfgang Maier, Miriam Kaeshammer, Peter Baumann, S K{\"u}bler, ra
Date: 2014-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2014 5
Tasks: Benchmarking, Constituency Parsing, Dependency Parsing

Parser evaluation traditionally relies on evaluation metrics which deliver a single aggregate score over all sentences in the parser output, such as PARSEVAL. However, for the evaluation of parser performance concerning a particular phenomenon, a test suite of sentences is needed in which this phenomenon has been identified. In recent years, the parsing of discontinuous structures has received a rising interest. Therefore, in this paper, we present a test suite for testing the performance of dependency and constituency parsers on non-projective dependencies and discontinuous constituents for German. The test suite is based on the newly released TIGER treebank version 2.2. It provides a unique possibility of benchmarking parsers on non-local syntactic relationships in German, for constituents and dependencies. We include a linguistic analysis of the phenomena that cause discontinuity in the TIGER annotation, thereby closing gaps in previous literature. The linguistic phenomena we investigate include extraposition, a placeholder/repeated element construction, topicalization, scrambling, local movement, parentheticals, and fronting of pronouns.