pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Analysis (and an Annotated Corpus) of User Responses to Machine Translation Output
Authors: Daniele Pighin, Llu{\'\i}s M{\`a}rquez, Jonathan May
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We present an annotated resource consisting of open-domain translation requests, automatic translations and user-provided corrections collected from casual users of the translation portal http://reverso.net. The layers of annotation provide: 1) quality assessments for 830 correction suggestions for translations into English, at the segment level, and 2) 814 usefulness assessments for English-Spanish and English-French translation suggestions, a suggestion being useful if it contains at least local clues that can be used to improve translation quality. We also discuss the results of our preliminary experiments concerning 1) the development of an automatic filter to separate useful from non-useful feedback, and 2) the incorporation in the machine translation pipeline of bilingual phrases extracted from the suggestions. The annotated data, available for download from ftp://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/data/faust/LW-UPC-Oct11-FAUST-feedback-annotation.tgz, is released under a Creative Commons license. To our best knowledge, this is the first resource of this kind that has ever been made publicly available.
A Basic Language Resource Kit for Persian
Authors: Mojgan Seraji, Be{\'a}ta Megyesi, Joakim Nivre
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, Sentence, Sentence segmentation, Text Normalization

Persian with its about 100,000,000 speakers in the world belongs to the group of languages with less developed linguistically annotated resources and tools. The few existing resources and tools are neither open source nor freely available. Thus, our goal is to develop open source resources such as corpora and treebanks, and tools for data-driven linguistic analysis of Persian. We do this by exploring the reusability of existing resources and adapting state-of-the-art methods for the linguistic annotation. We present fully functional tools for text normalization, sentence segmentation, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing. As for resources, we describe the Uppsala PErsian Corpus (UPEC) which is a modified version of the Bijankhan corpus with additional sentence segmentation and consistent tokenization modified for more appropriate syntactic annotation. The corpus consists of 2,782,109 tokens and is annotated with parts of speech and morphological features. A treebank is derived from UPEC with an annotation scheme based on Stanford Typed Dependencies and is planned to consist of 10,000 sentences of which 215 have already been annotated. Keywords: BLARK for Persian, PoS tagged corpus, Persian treebank
Re-ordering Source Sentences for SMT
Authors: Amit Sangodkar, Om Damani
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

We propose a pre-processing stage for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems where the words of the source sentence are re-ordered as per the syntax of the target language prior to the alignment process, so that the alignment found by the statistical system is improved. We take a dependency parse of the source sentence and linearize it as per the syntax of the target language, before it is used in either the training or the decoding phase. During this linearization, the ordering decisions among dependency nodes having a common parent are done based on two aspects: parent-child positioning and relation priority. To make the linearization process rule-driven, we assume that the relative word order of a dependency relation's relata does not depend either on the semantic properties of the relata or on the rest of the expression. We also assume that the relative word order of various relations sharing a relata does not depend on the rest of the expression. We experiment with a publicly available English-Hindi parallel corpus and show that our scheme improves the BLEU score.
Concept-based Selectional Preferences and Distributional Representations from Wikipedia Articles
Authors: Alex Judea, Vivi Nastase, Michael Strube
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Semantic Role Labeling, Topic Models, Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper describes the derivation of distributional semantic representations for open class words relative to a concept inventory, and of concepts relative to open class words through grammatical relations extracted from Wikipedia articles. The concept inventory comes from WikiNet, a large-scale concept network derived from Wikipedia. The distinctive feature of these representations are their relation to a concept network, through which we can compute selectional preferences of open-class words relative to general concepts. The resource thus derived provides a meaning representation that complements the relational representation captured in the concept network. It covers English open-class words, but the concept base is language independent. The resource can be extended to other languages, with the use of language specific dependency parsers. Good results in metonymy resolution show the resource's potential use for NLP applications.
Semi-Supervised Technical Term Tagging With Minimal User Feedback
Authors: Behrang QasemiZadeh, Paul Buitelaar, Tianqi Chen, Georgeta Bordea
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Language Modelling, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we address the problem of extracting technical terms automatically from an unannotated corpus. We introduce a technology term tagger that is based on Liblinear Support Vector Machines and employs linguistic features including Part of Speech tags and Dependency Structures, in addition to user feedback to perform the task of identification of technology related terms. Our experiments show the applicability of our approach as witnessed by acceptable results on precision and recall.
Extended Named Entities Annotation on OCRed Documents: From Corpus Constitution to Evaluation Campaign
Authors: Olivier Galibert, Sophie Rosset, Cyril Grouin, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Ludovic Quintard
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Within the framework of the Quaero project, we proposed a new definition of named entities, based upon an extension of the coverage of named entities as well as the structure of those named entities. In this new definition, the extended named entities we proposed are both hierarchical and compositional. In this paper, we focused on the annotation of a corpus composed of press archives, OCRed from French newspapers of December 1890. We present the methodology we used to produce the corpus and the characteristics of the corpus in terms of named entities annotation. This annotated corpus has been used in an evaluation campaign. We present this evaluation, the metrics we used and the results obtained by the participants.
Joint Grammar and Treebank Development for Mandarin Chinese with HPSG
Authors: Yi Zhang, Rui Wang, Yu Chen
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present the ongoing development of MCG, a linguistically deep and precise grammar for Mandarin Chinese together with its accompanying treebank, both based on the linguistic framework of HPSG, and using MRS as the semantic representation. We highlight some key features of our grammar design, and review a number of challenging phenomena, with comparisons to alternative linguistic treatments and implementations. One of the distinguishing characteristics of our approach is the tight integration of grammar and treebank development. The two-step treebank annotation procedure benefits from the efficiency of the discriminant-based annotation approach, while giving the annotators full freedom of producing extra-grammatical structures. This not only allows the creation of a precise and full-coverage treebank with an imperfect grammar, but also provides prompt feedback for grammarians to identify the errors in the grammar design and implementation. Preliminary evaluation and error analysis shows that the grammar already covers most of the core phenomena for Mandarin Chinese, and the treebank annotation procedure reaches a stable speed of 35 sentences per hour with satisfying quality.
Wordnet Based Lexicon Grammar for Polish
Authors: Zygmunt Vetulani
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

In the paper we present a long-term on-going project of a lexicon-grammar of Polish. It is based on our former research focusing mainly on morphological dictionaries, text understanding and related tools. By Lexicon Grammars we mean grammatical formalisms which are based on the idea that sentence is the fundamental unit of meaning and that grammatical information should be closely related to words. Organization of the grammatical knowledge into a lexicon results in a powerful NLP tool, particularly well suited to support heuristic parsing. The project is inspired by the achievements of Maurice Gross, Kazimierz Polanski and George Miller. We present the actual state of the project of a wordnet-like lexical network PolNet with particular emphasis on its verbal component, now being converted into the kernel of a lexicon grammar for Polish. We present various aspects of PolNet development and validation within the POLINT-112-SMS project. The reader is precisely informed on the current stage of the project.
A tree is a Baum is an \'arbol is a sach'a: Creating a trilingual treebank
Authors: Annette Rios, Anne G{\"o}hring
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation

This paper describes the process of constructing a trilingual parallel treebank. While for two of the involved languages, Spanish and German, there are already corpora with well-established annotation schemes available, this is not the case with the third language: Cuzco Quechua (ISO 639-3:quz), a low-resourced, non-standardized language for which we had to define a linguistically plausible annotation scheme first.
Investigating Verbal Intelligence Using the TF-IDF Approach
Authors: Kseniya Zablotskaya, Fern Mart{\'\i}nez, o Fern{\'a}ndez, Wolfgang Minker
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this paper we investigated differences in language use of speakers yielding different verbal intelligence when they describe the same event. The work is based on a corpus containing descriptions of a short film and verbal intelligence scores of the speakers. For analyzing the monologues and the film transcript, the number of reused words, lemmas, n-grams, cosine similarity and other features were calculated and compared to each other for different verbal intelligence groups. The results showed that the similarity of monologues of higher verbal intelligence speakers was greater than of lower and average verbal intelligence participants. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is that candidates yielding higher verbal intelligence have a good short-term memory. In this paper we also checked a hypothesis that differences in vocabulary of speakers yielding different verbal intelligence are sufficient enough for good classification results. For proving this hypothesis, the Nearest Neighbor classifier was trained using TF-IDF vocabulary measures. The maximum achieved accuracy was 92.86{\%}.
Relating Dominance of Dialogue Participants with their Verbal Intelligence Scores
Authors: Kseniya Zablotskaya, Umair Rahim, Fern Mart{\'\i}nez, o Fern{\'a}ndez, Wolfgang Minker
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

In this work we investigated whether there is a relationship between dominant behaviour of dialogue participants and their verbal intelligence. The analysis is based on a corpus containing 56 dialogues and verbal intelligence scores of the test persons. All the dialogues were divided into three groups: H-H is a group of dialogues between higher verbal intelligence participants, L-L is a group of dialogues between lower verbal intelligence participant and L-H is a group of all the other dialogues. The dominance scores of the dialogue partners from each group were analysed. The analysis showed that differences between dominance scores and verbal intelligence coefficients for L-L were positively correlated. Verbal intelligence scores of the test persons were compared to other features that may reflect dominant behaviour. The analysis showed that number of interruptions, long utterances, times grabbed the floor, influence diffusion model, number of agreements and several acoustic features may be related to verbal intelligence. These features were used for the automatic classification of the dialogue partners into two groups (lower and higher verbal intelligence participants); the achieved accuracy was 89.36{\%}.
Diachronic Changes in Text Complexity in 20th Century English Language: An NLP Approach
Authors: Sanja {\v{S}}tajner, Ruslan Mitkov
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Text Simplification

A syntactically complex text may represent a problem for both comprehension by humans and various NLP tasks. A large number of studies in text simplification are concerned with this problem and their aim is to transform the given text into a simplified form in order to make it accessible to the wider audience. In this study, we were investigating what the natural tendency of texts is in 20th century English language. Are they becoming syntactically more complex over the years, requiring a higher literacy level and greater effort from the readers, or are they becoming simpler and easier to read? We examined several factors of text complexity (average sentence length, Automated Readability Index, sentence complexity and passive voice) in the 20th century for two main English language varieties - British and American, using the `Brown family' of corpora. In British English, we compared the complexity of texts published in 1931, 1961 and 1991, while in American English we compared the complexity of texts published in 1961 and 1992. Furthermore, we demonstrated how the state-of-the-art NLP tools can be used for automatic extraction of some complex features from the raw text version of the corpora.
An English-Portuguese parallel corpus of questions: translation guidelines and application in SMT
Authors: {\^A}ngela Costa, Tiago Lu{\'\i}s, Joana Ribeiro, Ana Cristina Mendes, Lu{\'\i}sa Coheur
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering, Translation

The task of Statistical Machine Translation depends on large amounts of training corpora. Despite the availability of several parallel corpora, these are typically composed of declarative sentences, which may not be appropriate when the goal is to translate other types of sentences, e.g., interrogatives. There have been efforts to create corpora of questions, specially in the context of the evaluation of Question-Answering systems. One of those corpora is the UIUC dataset, composed of nearly 6,000 questions, widely used in the task of Question Classification. In this work, we make available the Portuguese version of the UIUC dataset, which we manually translated, as well as the translation guidelines. We show the impact of this corpus in the performance of a state-of-the-art SMT system when translating questions. Finally, we present a taxonomy of translation errors, according to which we analyze the output of the automatic translation before and after using the corpus as training data.
SMALLWorlds -- Multilingual Content-Controlled Monologues
Authors: Peter Juel Henrichsen, Marcus Uneson
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We present the speech corpus SMALLWorlds (Spoken Multi-lingual Accounts of Logically Limited Worlds), newly established and still growing. SMALLWorlds contains monologic descriptions of scenes or worlds which are simple enough to be formally describable. The descriptions are instances of content-controlled monologue: semantically ''''''``pre-specified'''''''' but still bearing most hallmarks of spontaneous speech (hesitations and filled pauses, relaxed syntax, repetitions, self-corrections, incomplete constituents, irrelevant or redundant information, etc.) as well as idiosyncratic speaker traits. In the paper, we discuss the pros and cons of data so elicited. Following that, we present a typical SMALLWorlds task: the description of a simple drawing with differently coloured circles, squares, and triangles, with no hints given as to which description strategy or language style to use. We conclude with an example on how SMALLWorlds may be used: unsupervised lexical learning from phonetic transcription. At the time of writing, SMALLWorlds consists of more than 250 recordings in a wide range of typologically diverse languages from many parts of the world, some unwritten and endangered.
A database of semantic clusters of verb usages
Authors: Silvie Cinkov{\'a}, Martin Holub, Adam Rambousek, Lenka Smejkalov{\'a}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We are presenting VPS-30-En, a small lexical resource that contains the following 30 English verbs: access, ally, arrive, breathe, claim, cool, crush, cry, deny, enlarge, enlist, forge, furnish, hail, halt, part, plough, plug, pour, say, smash, smell, steer, submit, swell, tell, throw, trouble, wake and yield. We have created and have been using VPS-30-En to explore the interannotator agreement potential of the Corpus Pattern Analysis. VPS-30-En is a small snapshot of the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (Hanks and Pustejovsky, 2005), which we revised (both the entries and the annotated concordances) and enhanced with additional annotations. It is freely available at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/spr. In this paper, we compare the annotation scheme of VPS-30-En with the original PDEV. We also describe the adjustments we have made and their motivation, as well as the most pervasive causes of interannotator disagreements.
Combining Language Resources Into A Grammar-Driven Swedish Parser
Authors: Malin Ahlberg, Ramona Enache
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

This paper describes work on a rule-based, open-source parser for Swedish. The central component is a wide-coverage grammar implemented in the GF formalism (Grammatical Framework), a dependently typed grammar formalism based on Martin-L{\"o}f type theory. GF has strong support for multilinguality and has so far been used successfully for controlled languages and recent experiments have showed that it is also possible to use the framework for parsing unrestricted language. In addition to GF, we use two other main resources: the Swedish treebank Talbanken and the electronic lexicon SALDO. By combining the grammar with a lexicon extracted from SALDO we obtain a parser accepting all sentences described by the given rules. We develop and test this on examples from Talbanken. The resulting parser gives a full syntactic analysis of the input sentences. It will be highly reusable, freely available, and as GF provides libraries for compiling grammars to a number of programming languages, chosen parts of the the grammar may be used in various NLP applications.
Annotating dropped pronouns in Chinese newswire text
Authors: Elizabeth Baran, Yaqin Yang, Nianwen Xue
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We propose an annotation framework to explicitly identify dropped subject pronouns in Chinese. We acknowledge and specify 10 concrete pronouns that exist as words in Chinese and 4 abstract pronouns that do not correspond to Chinese words, but that are recognized conceptually, to native Chinese speakers. These abstract pronouns are identified as ''''''``unspecified'''''''', ''''''``pleonastic'''''''', ''''''``event'''''''', and ''''''``existential'''''''' and are argued to exist cross-linguistically. We trained two annotators, fluent in Chinese, and adjudicated their annotations to form a gold standard. We achieved an inter-annotator agreement kappa of .6 and an observed agreement of .7. We found that annotators had the most difficulty with the abstract pronouns, such as ''''''``unspecified'''''''' and ''''''``event'''''''', but we posit that further specification and training has the potential to significantly improve these results. We believe that this annotated data will serve to help improve Machine Translation models that translate from Chinese to a non pro-drop language, like English, that requires all subject pronouns to be explicit.
Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions
Authors: Maria Aloni, Andreas van Cranenburgh, Raquel Fern{\'a}ndez, Marta Sznajder
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

Natural languages possess a wealth of indefinite forms that typically differ in distribution and interpretation. Although formal semanticists have strived to develop precise meaning representations for different indefinite functions, to date there has hardly been any corpus work on the topic. In this paper, we present the results of a small corpus study where English indefinite forms `any' and `some' were labelled with fine-grained semantic functions well-motivated by typological studies. We developed annotation guidelines that could be used by non-expert annotators and calculated inter-annotator agreement amongst several coders. The results show that the annotation task is hard, with agreement scores ranging from 52{\%} to 62{\%} depending on the number of functions considered, but also that each of the independent annotations is in accordance with theoretical predictions regarding the possible distributions of indefinite functions. The resulting annotated corpus is available upon request and can be accessed through a searchable online database.
Mining Hindi-English Transliteration Pairs from Online Hindi Lyrics
Authors: Kanika Gupta, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Transliteration

This paper describes a method to mine Hindi-English transliteration pairs from online Hindi song lyrics. The technique is based on the observations that lyrics are transliterated word-by-word, maintaining the precise word order. The mining task is nevertheless challenging because the Hindi lyrics and its transliterations are usually available from different, often unrelated, websites. Therefore, it is a non-trivial task to match the Hindi lyrics to their transliterated counterparts. Moreover, there are various types of noise in lyrics data that needs to be appropriately handled before songs can be aligned at word level. The mined data of 30823 unique Hindi-English transliteration pairs with an accuracy of more than 92{\%} is available publicly. Although the present work reports mining of Hindi-English word pairs, the same technique can be easily adapted for other languages for which song lyrics are available online in native and Roman scripts.