pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The META-SHARE Language Resources Sharing Infrastructure: Principles, Challenges, Solutions
Authors: Stelios Piperidis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Speech Recognition

Language resources have become a key factor in the development cycle of language technology. The current prevailing methodologies, the sheer number of languages and the vast volumes of digital content together with the wide palette of useful content processing applications, render new models for managing the underlying language resources indispensable. This paper presents META-SHARE, an open resource exchange infrastructure, which aims to boost visibility, documentation, identification, openness and sharing, collaboration, preservation and interoperability of language data and basic language processing tools. META-SHARE is implemented as a network of distributed repositories of language resources. It offers providers and consumers of resources the necessary functionalities for describing, storing, searching, licensing and downloading language resources in a single integrated technical platform. META-SHARE favours and aligns itself with the growing open data and open source tools movement. To this end, it has prepared the necessary underlying legal framework consisting of a Charter for language resource sharing, as well as a set of licensing templates aiming to act as recommended licence models in an attempt to facilitate the legal interoperability of language resources. In its current version, META-SHARE features 13 resource repositories, with over 1200 resource packages.
Annotating progressive aspect constructions in the spoken section of the British National Corpus
Authors: Andrew Caines, Paula Buttery
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

We present a set of stand-off annotations for the ninety thousand sentences in the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC) which feature a progressive aspect verb group. These annotations may be matched to the original BNC text using the supplied document and sentence identifiers. The annotated features mostly relate to linguistic form: subject type, subject person and number, form of auxiliary verb, and clause type, tense and polarity. In addition, the sentences are classified for register, the formality of recording context: three levels of `spontaneity' with genres such as sermons and scripted speech at the most formal level and casual conversation at the least formal. The resource has been designed so that it may easily be augmented with further stand-off annotations. Expert linguistic annotations of spoken data, such as these, are valuable for improving the performance of natural language processing tools in the spoken language domain and assist linguistic research in general.
Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events
Authors: Kirk Roberts, Travis Goodwin, S Harabagiu, a M.
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

A significant amount of spatial information in textual documents is hidden within the relationship between events. While humans have an intuitive understanding of these relationships that allow us to recover an object's or event's location, currently no annotated data exists to allow automatic discovery of spatial containment relations between events. We present our process for building such a corpus of manually annotated spatial relations between events. Events form complex predicate-argument structures that model the participants in the event, their roles, as well as the temporal and spatial grounding. In addition, events are not presented in isolation in text; there are explicit and implicit interactions between events that often participate in event structures. In this paper, we focus on five spatial containment relations that may exist between events: (1) SAME, (2) CONTAINS, (3) OVERLAPS, (4) NEAR, and (5) DIFFERENT. Using the transitive closure across these spatial relations, the implicit location of many events and their participants can be discovered. We discuss our annotation schema for spatial containment relations, placing it within the pre-existing theories of spatial representation. We also discuss our annotation guidelines for maintaining annotation quality as well as our process for augmenting SpatialML with spatial containment relations between events. Additionally, we outline some baseline experiments to evaluate the feasibility of developing supervised systems based on this corpus. These results indicate that although the task is challenging, automated methods are capable of discovering spatial containment relations between events.
Annotating Agreement and Disagreement in Threaded Discussion
Authors: Jacob Andreas, Sara Rosenthal, Kathleen McKeown
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

We introduce a new corpus of sentence-level agreement and disagreement annotations over LiveJournal and Wikipedia threads. This is the first agreement corpus to offer full-document annotations for threaded discussions. We provide a methodology for coding responses as well as an implemented tool with an interface that facilitates annotation of a specific response while viewing the full context of the thread. Both the results of an annotator questionnaire and high inter-annotator agreement statistics indicate that the annotations collected are of high quality.
Logic Based Methods for Terminological Assessment
Authors: Beno{\^\i}t Robichaud
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present a new version of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) called DiCoInfo Visuel, mainly based on a graph visualization device and used for exploring and assessing lexical data found in DiCoInfo, a specialized e-dictionary of computing and the Internet. This new GUI version takes advantage of the fundamental nature of the lexical network encoded in the dictionary: it uses logic based methods from logic programming to explore relations between entries and find pieces of relevant information that may be not accessible by direct searches. The result is a more realistic and useful data coverage shown to end users.
Parsing Any Domain English text to CoNLL dependencies
Authors: Sudheer Kolachina, Prasanth Kolachina
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Benchmarking, Dependency Parsing, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Reranking, Translation

It is well known that accuracies of statistical parsers trained over Penn Treebank on test sets drawn from the same corpus tend to be overestimates of their actual parsing performance. This gives rise to the need for evaluation of parsing performance on corpora from different domains. Evaluating multiple parsers on test sets from different domains can give a detailed picture about the relative strengths/weaknesses of different parsing approaches. Such information is also necessary to guide choice of parser in applications such as machine translation where text from multiple domains needs to be handled. In this paper, we report a benchmarking study of different state-of-art parsers for English, both constituency and dependency. The constituency parser output is converted into CoNLL-style dependency trees so that parsing performance can be compared across formalisms. Specifically, we train rerankers for Berkeley and Stanford parsers to study the usefulness of reranking for handling texts from different domains. The results of our experiments lead to interesting insights about the out-of-domain performance of different English parsers.
NeoTag: a POS Tagger for Grammatical Neologism Detection
Authors: Maarten Janssen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, POS, TAG

POS Taggers typically fail to correctly tag grammatical neologisms: for known words, a tagger will only take known tags into account, and hence discard any possibility that the word is used in a novel or deviant grammatical category in the text at hand. Grammatical neologisms are relatively rare, and therefore do not pose a significant problem for the overall performance of a tagger. But for studies on neologisms and grammaticalization processes, this makes traditional taggers rather unfit. This article describes a modified POS tagger that explicitly considers new tags for known words, hence making it better fit for neologism research. This tagger, called NeoTag, has an overall accuracy that is comparable to other taggers, but scores much better for grammatical neologisms. To achieve this, the tagger applies a system of {{\textbackslash}em lexical smoothing}, which adds new categories to known words based on known homographs. NeoTag also lemmatizes words as part of the tagging system, achieving a high accuracy on lemmatization for both known and unknown words, without the need for an external lexicon. The use of NeoTag is not restricted to grammatical neologism detection, and it can be used for other purposes as well.
Using DiAML and ANVIL for multimodal dialogue annotations
Authors: Harry Bunt, Michael Kipp, Volha Petukhova
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper shows how interoperable dialogue act annotations, using the multidimensional annotation scheme and the markup language DiAML of ISO standard 24617-2, can conveniently be obtained using the newly implemented facility in the ANVIL annotation tool to produce XML-based output directly in the DiAML format. ANVIL offers the use of multiple user-defined `tiers' for annotating various kinds of information. This is shown to be convenient not only for multimodal information but also for dialogue act annotation according to ISO standard 24617-2 because of the latter's multidimensionality: functional dialogue segments are viewed as expressing one or more dialogue acts, and every dialogue act belongs to one of a number of dimensions of communication, defined in the standard, for each of which a different ANVIL tier can conveniently be used. Annotations made in the multi-tier interface can be exported in the ISO 24617-2 format, thus supporting the creation of interoperable annotated corpora of multimodal dialogue.
Annotated Corpora for Word Alignment between Japanese and English and its Evaluation with MAP-based Word Aligner
Authors: Tsuyoshi Okita
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Word Alignment

This paper presents two annotated corpora for word alignment between Japanese and English. We annotated on top of the IWSLT-2006 and the NTCIR-8 corpora. The IWSLT-2006 corpus is in the domain of travel conversation while the NTCIR-8 corpus is in the domain of patent. We annotated the first 500 sentence pairs from the IWSLT-2006 corpus and the first 100 sentence pairs from the NTCIR-8 corpus. After mentioned the annotation guideline, we present two evaluation algorithms how to use such hand-annotated corpora: although one is a well-known algorithm for word alignment researchers, one is novel which intends to evaluate a MAP-based word aligner of Okita et al. (2010b).
Assigning Connotation Values to Events
Authors: Tommaso Caselli, Irene Russo, Francesco Rubino
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Word Sense Disambiguation

Sentiment Analysis (SA) and Opinion Mining (OM) have become a popular task in recent years in NLP with the development of language resources, corpora and annotation schemes. The possibility to discriminate between objective and subjective expressions contributes to the identification of a document's semantic orientation and to the detection of the opinions and sentiments expressed by the authors or attributed to other participants in the document. Subjectivity word sense disambiguation helps in this task, automatically determining which word senses in a corpus are being used subjectively and which are being used objectively. This paper reports on a methodology to assign in a semi-automatic way connotative values to eventive nouns usually labelled as neutral through syntagmatic patterns that express cause-effect relations between emotion cause events and emotion words. We have applied our method to nouns and we have been able reduce the number of OBJ polarity values associated to event noun.
An Annotated Corpus of Film Dialogue for Learning and Characterizing Character Style
Authors: Marilyn Walker, Grace Lin, Jennifer Sawyer
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Text Generation

Interactive story systems often involve dialogue with virtual dramatic characters. However, to date most character dialogue is written by hand. One way to ease the authoring process is to (semi-)automatically generate dialogue based on film characters. We extract features from dialogue of film characters in leading roles. Then we use these character-based features to drive our language generator to produce interesting utterances. This paper describes a corpus of film dialogue that we have collected from the IMSDb archive and annotated for linguistic structures and character archetypes. We extract different sets of features using external sources such as LIWC and SentiWordNet as well as using our own written scripts. The automation of feature extraction also eases the process of acquiring additional film scripts. We briefly show how film characters can be represented by models learned from the corpus, how the models can be distinguished based on different categories such as gender and film genre, and how they can be applied to a language generator to generate utterances that can be perceived as being similar to the intended character model.
SPPAS: a tool for the phonetic segmentation of speech
Authors: Brigitte Bigi
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

SPPAS is a tool to produce automatic annotations which include utterance, word, syllabic and phonemic segmentations from a recorded speech sound and its transcription. SPPAS is distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License. It was successfully applied during the Evalita 2011 campaign, on Italian map-task dialogues. It can also deal with French, English and Chinese and there is an easy way to add other languages. The paper describes the development of resources and free tools, consisting of acoustic models, phonetic dictionaries, and libraries and programs to deal with these data. All of them are publicly available.
Twenty Years of Language Resource Development and Distribution: A Progress Report on LDC Activities
Authors: Christopher Cieri, Marian Reed, Denise DiPersio, Mark Liberman
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

On the Linguistic Data Consortium's (LDC) 20th anniversary, this paper describes the changes to the language resource landscape over the past two decades, how LDC has adjusted its practice to adapt to them and how the business model continues to grow. Specifically, we will discuss LDC's evolving roles and changes in the sizes and types of LDC language resources (LR) as well as the data they include and the annotations of that data. We will also discuss adaptations of the LDC business model and the sponsored projects it supports.
A Phonemic Corpus of Polish Child-Directed Speech
Authors: Luc Boruta, Justyna Jastrzebska
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Acquisition

Recent advances in modeling early language acquisition are due not only to the development of machine-learning techniques, but also to the increasing availability of data on child language and child-adult interaction. In the absence of recordings of child-directed speech, or when models explicitly require such a representation for training data, phonemic transcriptions are commonly used as input data. We present a novel (and to our knowledge, the first) phonemic corpus of Polish child-directed speech. It is derived from the Weist corpus of Polish, freely available from the seminal CHILDES database. For the sake of reproducibility, and to exemplify the typical trade-off between ecological validity and sample size, we report all preprocessing operations and transcription guidelines. Contributed linguistic resources include updated CHAT-formatted transcripts with phonemic transcriptions in a novel phonology tier, as well as by-product data, such as a phonemic lexicon of Polish. All resources are distributed under the LGPL-LR license.
The KIT Lecture Corpus for Speech Translation
Authors: Sebastian St{\"u}ker, Florian Kraft, Christian Mohr, Teresa Herrmann, Eunah Cho, Alex Waibel
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Recognition, Translation

Academic lectures offer valuable content, but often do not reach their full potential audience due to the language barrier. Human translations of lectures are too expensive to be widely used. Speech translation technology can be an affordable alternative in this case. State-of-the-art speech translation systems utilize statistical models that need to be trained on large amounts of in-domain data. In order to support the KIT lecture translation project in its effort to introduce speech translation technology in KIT's lecture halls, we have collected a corpus of German lectures at KIT. In this paper we describe how we recorded the lectures and how we annotated them. We further give detailed statistics on the types of lectures in the corpus and its size. We collected the corpus with the purpose in mind that it should not just be suited for training a spoken language translation system the traditional way, but should also enable us to research techniques that enable the translation system to automatically and autonomously adapt itself to the varying topics and speakers of lectures
Orthographic Transcription: which enrichment is required for phonetization?
Authors: Brigitte Bigi, Pauline Péri, Roxane Bertrand
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper addresses the problem of the enrichment of transcriptions in the perspective of an automatic phonetization. Phonetization is the process of representing sounds with phonetic signs. There are two general ways to construct a phonetization process: rule based systems (with rules based on inference approaches or proposed by expert linguists) and dictionary based solutions which consist in storing a maximum of phonological knowledge in a lexicon. In both cases, phonetization is based on a manual transcription. Such a transcription is established on the basis of conventions that can differ depending on their working out context. This present study focuses on three different enrichments of such a transcription. Evaluations compare phonetizations obtained from automatic systems to a reference phonetized manually. The test corpus is made of three types of speech: conversational speech, read speech and political debate. A specific algorithm for the rule-based system is proposed to deal with enrichments. The final system obtained a phonetization of about 95.2{\%} correct (from 3.7{\%} to 5.6{\%} error rates depending on the corpus).
The Role of Model Testing in Standards Development: The Case of ISO-Space
Authors: James Pustejovsky, Jessica Moszkowicz
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper, we describe the methodology being used to develop certain aspects of ISO-Space, an annotation language for encoding spatial and spatiotemporal information as expressed in natural language text. After reviewing the requirements of a specification for capturing such knowledge from linguistic descriptions, we describe how ISO-Space has developed to meet the needs of the specification. ISO-Space is an emerging resource that is being developed in the context of an iterative effort to test the specification model with annotation, a methodology called MAMA (Model-Annotate-Model-Annotate) (Pustejovsky and Stubbs, 2012). We describe the genres of text that are being used in a pilot annotation study, in order to both refine and enrich the specification language by way of crowd sourcing simple annotation tasks with Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service.
Aleda, a free large-scale entity database for French
Authors: Beno{\^\i}t Sagot, Rosa Stern
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Entity Linking, Entity Resolution, Knowledge Base Population, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Named entity recognition, which focuses on the identification of the span and type of named entity mentions in texts, has drawn the attention of the NLP community for a long time. However, many real-life applications need to know which real entity each mention refers to. For such a purpose, often refered to as entity resolution and linking, an inventory of entities is required in order to constitute a reference. In this paper, we describe how we extracted such a resource for French from freely available resources (the French Wikipedia and the GeoNames database). We describe the results of an instrinsic evaluation of the resulting entity database, named Aleda, as well as those of a task-based evaluation in the context of a named entity detection system. We also compare it with the NLGbAse database (Charton and Torres-Moreno, 2010), a resource with similar objectives.
The IWSLT 2011 Evaluation Campaign on Automatic Talk Translation
Authors: Marcello Federico, Sebastian St{\"u}ker, Luisa Bentivogli, Michael Paul, Mauro Cettolo, Teresa Herrmann, Jan Niehues, Giovanni Moretti
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

We report here on the eighth evaluation campaign organized in 2011 by the IWSLT workshop series. That IWSLT 2011 evaluation focused on the automatic translation of public talks and included tracks for speech recognition, speech translation, text translation, and system combination. Unlike in previous years, all data supplied for the evaluation has been publicly released on the workshop website, and is at the disposal of researchers interested in working on our benchmarks and in comparing their results with those published at the workshop. This paper provides an overview of the IWSLT 2011 evaluation campaign, and describes the data supplied, the evaluation infrastructure made available to participants, and the subjective evaluation carried out.
Cleaning noisy wordnets
Authors: Beno{\^\i}t Sagot, Darja Fi{\v{s}}er
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Semantic Textual Similarity, Word Sense Disambiguation

Automatic approaches to creating and extending wordnets, which have become very popular in the past decade, inadvertently result in noisy synsets. This is why we propose an approach to detect synset outliers in order to eliminate the noise and improve accuracy of the developed wordnets, so that they become more useful lexico-semantic resources for natural language applications. The approach compares the words that appear in the synset and its surroundings with the contexts of the literals in question they are used in based on large monolingual corpora. By fine-tuning the outlier threshold we can influence how many outlier candidates will be eliminated. Although the proposed approach is language-independent we test it on Slovene and French that were created automatically from bilingual resources and contain plenty of disambiguation errors. Manual evaluation of the results shows that by applying a threshold similar to the estimated error rate in the respective wordnets, 67{\%} of the proposed outlier candidates are indeed incorrect for French and a 64{\%} for Slovene. This is a big improvement compared to the estimated overall error rates in the resources, which are 12{\%} for French and 15{\%} for Slovene.