pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Turk Bootstrap Word Sense Inventory 2.0: A Large-Scale Resource for Lexical Substitution
Authors: Chris Biemann
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering, Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper presents the Turk Bootstrap Word Sense Inventory (TWSI) 2.0. This lexical resource, created by a crowdsourcing process using Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com), encompasses a sense inventory for lexical substitution for 1,012 highly frequent English common nouns. Along with each sense, a large number of sense-annotated occurrences in context are given, as well as a weighted list of substitutions. Sense distinctions are not motivated by lexicographic considerations, but driven by substitutability: two usages belong to the same sense if their substitutions overlap considerably. After laying out the need for such a resource, the data is characterized in terms of organization and quantity. Then, we briefly describe how this data was used to create a system for lexical substitutions. Training a supervised lexical substitution system on a smaller version of the resource resulted in well over 90{\%} acceptability for lexical substitutions provided by the system. Thus, this resource can be used to set up reliable, enabling technologies for semantic natural language processing (NLP), some of which we discuss briefly.
MULTIPHONIA: a MULTImodal database of PHONetics teaching methods in classroom InterActions.
Authors: Charlotte Alazard, Corine Ast{\'e}sano, Michel Billi{\`e}res
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Acquisition, Rhythm

The Multiphonia Corpus consists of audio-video classroom recordings comparing two methods of phonetic correction (the Â‘traditional' articulatory method, and the Verbo-Tonal Method) This database was created not only to remedy the crucial lack of information and pedagogical resources on teaching pronunciation but also to test the benefit of VTM on Second Language pronunciation. The VTM method emphasizes the role of prosody cues as vectors of second language acquisition of the phonemic system. This method also provides various and unusual procedures including facilitating gestures in order to work on spotting and assimilating the target language prosodic system (rhythm, accentuation, intonation). In doing so, speech rhythm is apprehended in correlation with body/gestural rhythm. The student is thus encouraged to associate gestures activating the motor memory at play during the repetition of target words or phrases. In turn, pedagogical gestures have an impact on second language lexical items' recollection (Allen, 1995; Tellier, 2008). Ultimately, this large corpus (96 hours of class sessions' recordings) will be made available to the scientific community, with several layers of annotations available for the study of segmental, prosodic and gestural aspects of L2 speech.
Discourse-level Annotation over Europarl for Machine Translation: Connectives and Pronouns
Authors: Andrei Popescu-Belis, Thomas Meyer, Jeevanthi Liyanapathirana, Bruno Cartoni, S Zufferey, rine
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper describes methods and results for the annotation of two discourse-level phenomena, connectives and pronouns, over a multilingual parallel corpus. Excerpts from Europarl in English and French have been annotated with disambiguation information for connectives and pronouns, for about 3600 tokens. This data is then used in several ways: for cross-linguistic studies, for training automatic disambiguation software, and ultimately for training and testing discourse-aware statistical machine translation systems. The paper presents the annotation procedures and their results in detail, and overviews the first systems trained on the annotated resources and their use for machine translation.
Challenges in the Knowledge Base Population Slot Filling Task
Authors: Bonan Min, Ralph Grishman
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Diversity, Entity Linking, Knowledge Base Population, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), slot-filling, Slot Filling

The Knowledge Based Population (KBP) evaluation track of the Text Analysis Conferences (TAC) has been held for the past 3 years. One of the two tasks of KBP is slot filling: finding within a large corpus the values of a set of attributes of given people and organizations. This task has proven very challenging, with top systems rarely exceeding 30{\%} F-measure. In this paper, we present an error analysis and classification for those answers which could be found by a manual corpus search but were not found by any of the systems participating in the 2010 evaluation. The most common sources of failure were limitations on inference, errors in coreference (particularly with nominal anaphors), and errors in named entity recognition. We relate the types of errors to the characteristics of the task and show the wide diversity of problems that must be addressed to improve overall performance.
Logical metonymies and qualia structures: an annotated database of logical metonymies for German
Authors: Aless Zarcone, ra, Stefan Rued
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Sentence

Logical metonymies like ''''''``The author began the book'''''''' involve the interpretation of events that are not realized in the sentence (Covert events: -{\textgreater} ''''''``writing the book''''''''). The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) provides a qualia-based account of covert event interpretation, claiming that the covert event is retrieved from the qualia structure of the object. Such a theory poses the question of to what extent covert events in logical metonymies can be accounted for by qualia structures. Building on previous work on English, we present a corpus study for German verbs (''''''``anfangen (mit)'''''''', ''''''``aufhoeren (mit)'''''''', ''''''``beenden'''''''', ''''''``beginnen (mit)'''''''', ''''''``geniessen'''''''', based on data obtained from the deWaC corpus. We built a corpus of logical metonymies, which were manually annotated and compared with the qualia structures of their objects, then we contrasted annotation results from two expert annotators for metonymies (''''''``The author began the book'''''''') and long forms (''''''``The author began reading the book'''''''') across verbs. Our annotation was evaluated on a sample of sentences annotated by a group of naive annotators on a crowdsourcing platform. The logical metonymy database (2661 metonymies and 1886 long forms) with two expert annotations is freely available for scientific research purposes.
HunOr: A Hungarian---Russian Parallel Corpus
Authors: Martina Katalin Szab{\'o}, Veronika Vincze, Istv{\'a}n Nagy T.
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition (NER), POS, Retrieval, Sentence, Translation

In this paper, we present HunOr, the first multi-domain Hungarianâ€•Russian parallel corpus. Some of the corpus texts have been manually aligned and split into sentences, besides, named entities also have been annotated while the other parts are automatically aligned at the sentence level and they are POS-tagged as well. The corpus contains texts from the domains literature, official language use and science, however, we would like to add texts from the news domain to the corpus. In the future, we are planning to carry out a syntactic annotation of the HunOr corpus, which will further enhance the usability of the corpus in various NLP fields such as transfer-based machine translation or cross lingual information retrieval.
PoliMorf: a (not so) new open morphological dictionary for Polish
Authors: Marcin Woli{\'n}ski, Marcin Mi{\l}kowski, Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Adam Przepi{\'o}rkowski
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Morphological Analysis

This paper presents preliminary results of an effort aiming at the creation of a morphological dictionary of Polish, PoliMorf, available under a very liberal BSD-style license. The dictionary is a result of a merger of two existing resources, SGJP and Morfologik and was prepared within the CESAR/META-NET initiative. The work completed so far includes re-licensing of the two dictionaries and filling the new resource with the morphological data semi-automatically unified from both sources. The merging process is controlled by the collaborative dictionary development web application Ku{\'z}nia, also implemented within the project. The tool involves several advanced features such as using SGJP inflectional patterns for form generation, possibility of attaching dictionary labels and classification schemes to lexemes, dictionary source record and change tracking. Since SGJP and Morfologik are already used in a significant number of Natural Language Processing projects in Poland, we expect PoliMorf to become the Polish morphological dictionary of choice for many years to come.
Introducing the Swedish Kelly-list, a new lexical e-resource for Swedish
Authors: Elena Volodina, Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Frequency lists and/or lexicons contain information about the words and their statistics. They tend to find their readers among language learners, language teachers, linguists and lexicographers. Making them available in electronic format helps to expand the target group to cover language engineers, computer programmers and other specialists working in such areas as information retrieval, spam filtering, text readability analysis, test generation etc. This article describes a new freely available electronic frequency list of modern Swedish which was created in the EU project KELLY. We provide a short description of the KELLY project; examine the methodological approach and mention some details on the compiling of the corpus from which the list has been derived. Further, we discuss the type of information the list contains; describe the steps for list generation; provide information on the coverage and some other statistics over the items in the list. Finally, some practical information on the license for the Swedish Kelly-list distribution is given; potential application areas are suggested; and future plans for its expansion are mentioned. We hope that with some publicity we can help this list find its users.
A Cross-Lingual Dictionary for English Wikipedia Concepts
Authors: Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Angel X. Chang
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Entity Linking, Information Retrieval

We present a resource for automatically associating strings of text with English Wikipedia concepts. Our machinery is bi-directional, in the sense that it uses the same fundamental probabilistic methods to map strings to empirical distributions over Wikipedia articles as it does to map article URLs to distributions over short, language-independent strings of natural language text. For maximal inter-operability, we release our resource as a set of flat line-based text files, lexicographically sorted and encoded with UTF-8. These files capture joint probability distributions underlying concepts (we use the terms article, concept and Wikipedia URL interchangeably) and associated snippets of text, as well as other features that can come in handy when working with Wikipedia articles and related information.
Language Richness of the Web
Authors: Martin Majli{\v{s}}, Zden{\v{e}}k {\v{Z}}abokrtsk{\'y}
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5

We have built a corpus containing texts in 106 languages from texts available on the Internet and on Wikipedia. The W2C Web Corpus contains 54.7{\textasciitilde}GB of text and the W2C Wiki Corpus contains 8.5{\textasciitilde}GB of text. The W2C Web Corpus contains more than 100{\textasciitilde}MB of text available for 75 languages. At least 10{\textasciitilde}MB of text is available for 100 languages. These corpora are a unique data source for linguists, since they outclass all published works both in the size of the material collected and the number of languages covered. This language data resource can be of use particularly to researchers specialized in multilingual technologies development. We also developed software that greatly simplifies the creation of a new text corpus for a given language, using text materials freely available on the Internet. Special attention was given to components for filtering and de-duplication that allow to keep the material quality very high.
Feature Discovery for Diachronic Register Analysis: a Semi-Automatic Approach
Authors: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Elke Teich
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Text Classification

In this paper, we present corpus-based procedures to semi-automatically discover features relevant for the study of recent language change in scientific registers. First, linguistic features potentially adherent to recent language change are extracted from the SciTex Corpus. Second, features are assessed for their relevance for the study of recent language change in scientific registers by means of correspondence analysis. The discovered features will serve for further investigations of the linguistic evolution of newly emerged scientific registers.
Using Verb Subcategorization for Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Will Roberts, Valia Kordoni
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation

We develop a model for predicting verb sense from subcategorization information and integrate it into SSI-Dijkstra, a wide-coverage knowledge-based WSD algorithm. Adding syntactic knowledge in this way should correct the current poor performance of WSD systems on verbs. This paper also presents, for the first time, an evaluation of SSI-Dijkstra on a standard data set which enables a comparison of this algorithm with other knowledge-based WSD systems. Our results show that our system is competitive with current graph-based WSD algorithms, and that the subcategorization model can be used to achieve better verb sense disambiguation performance.
DSim, a Danish Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification
Authors: Sigrid Klerke, Anders S{\o}gaard
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Sentence, Text Generation, Text Simplification

We present DSim, a new sentence aligned Danish monolingual parallel corpus extracted from 3701 pairs of news telegrams and corresponding professionally simplified short news articles. The corpus is intended for building automatic text simplification for adult readers. We compare DSim to different examples of monolingual parallel corpora, and we argue that this corpus is a promising basis for future development of automatic data-driven text simplification systems in Danish. The corpus contains both the collection of paired articles and a sentence aligned bitext, and we show that sentence alignment using simple tf*idf weighted cosine similarity scoring is on line with state―of―the―art when evaluated against a hand-aligned sample. The alignment results are compared to state of the art for English sentence alignment. We finally compare the source and simplified sides of the corpus in terms of lexical and syntactic characteristics and readability, and find that the one―to―many sentence aligned corpus is representative of the sentence simplifications observed in the unaligned collection of article pairs.
Propbank-Br: a Brazilian Treebank annotated with semantic role labels
Authors: Magali Sanches Duran, S Alu{\'\i}sio, ra Maria
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Question Answering, Semantic Role Labeling

This paper reports the annotation of a Brazilian Portuguese Treebank with semantic role labels following Propbank guidelines. A different language and a different parser output impact the task and require some decisions on how to annotate the corpus. Therefore, a new annotation guide â€• called Propbank-Br - has been generated to deal with specific language phenomena and parser problems. In this phase of the project, the corpus was annotated by a unique linguist. The annotation task reported here is inserted in a larger projet for the Brazilian Portuguese language. This project aims to build Brazilian verbs frames files and a broader and distributed annotation of semantic role labels in Brazilian Portuguese, allowing inter-annotator agreement measures. The corpus, available in web, is already being used to build a semantic tagger for Portuguese language.
A large scale annotated child language construction database
Authors: Aline Villavicencio, Beracah Yankama, Marco Idiart, Robert Berwick
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Language Acquisition, POS, POS Tagging

Large scale annotated corpora of child language can be of great value in assessing theoretical proposals regarding language acquisition models. For example, they can help determine whether the type and amount of data required by a proposed language acquisition model can actually be found in a naturalistic data sample. To this end, several recent efforts have augmented the CHILDES child language corpora with POS tagging and parsing information for languages such as English. With the increasing availability of robust NLP systems and electronic resources, these corpora can be further annotated with more detailed information about the properties of words, verb argument structure, and sentences. This paper describes such an initiative for combining information from various sources to extend the annotation of the English CHILDES corpora with linguistic, psycholinguistic and distributional information, along with an example illustrating an application of this approach to the extraction of verb alternation information. The end result, the English CHILDES Verb Construction Database, is an integrated resource containing information such as grammatical relations, verb semantic classes, and age of acquisition, enabling more targeted complex searches involving different levels of annotation that can facilitate a more detailed analysis of the linguistic input available to children.
Parallel Aligned Treebanks at LDC: New Challenges Interfacing Existing Infrastructures
Authors: Xuansong Li, Stephanie Strassel, Stephen Grimes, Safa Ismael, Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Nianwen Xue
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

Parallel aligned treebanks (PAT) are linguistic corpora annotated with morphological and syntactic structures that are aligned at sentence as well as sub-sentence levels. They are valuable resources for improving machine translation (MT) quality. Recently, there has been an increasing demand for such data, especially for divergent language pairs. The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and its academic partners have been developing Arabic-English and Chinese-English PATs for several years. This paper describes the PAT corpus creation effort for the program GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) and introduces the potential issues of scaling up this PAT effort for the program BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation). Based on existing infrastructures and in the light of current annotation process, challenges and approaches, we are exploring new methodologies to address emerging challenges in constructing PATs, including data volume bottlenecks, dialect issues of Arabic languages, and new genre features related to rapidly changing social media. Preliminary experimental results are presented to show the feasibility of the approaches proposed.
Linguistic Resources for Entity Linking Evaluation: from Monolingual to Cross-lingual
Authors: Xuansong Li, Stephanie Strassel, Heng Ji, Kira Griffitt, Joe Ellis
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Entity Linking, Entity Linking, Knowledge Base Population, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Question Answering, slot-filling, Slot Filling

To advance information extraction and question answering technologies toward a more realistic path, the U.S. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) initiated the KBP (Knowledge Base Population) task as one of the TAC (Text Analysis Conference) evaluation tracks. It aims to encourage research in automatic information extraction of named entities from unstructured texts with the ultimate goal of integrating such information into a structured Knowledge Base. The KBP track consists of two types of evaluation: Named Entity Linking (NEL) and Slot Filling. This paper describes the linguistic resource creation efforts at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in support of Named Entity Linking evaluation of KBP, focusing on annotation methodologies, process, and features of corpora from 2009 to 2011, with a highlighted analysis of the cross-lingual NEL data. Progressing from monolingual to cross-lingual Entity Linking technologies, the 2011 cross-lingual NEL evaluation targeted multilingual capabilities. Annotation accuracy is presented in comparison with system performance, with promising results from cross-lingual entity linking systems.
Constructing a Class-Based Lexical Dictionary using Interactive Topic Models
Authors: Kugatsu Sadamitsu, Kuniko Saito, Kenji Imamura, Yoshihiro Matsuo
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Topic Models

This paper proposes a new method of constructing arbitrary class-based related word dictionaries on interactive topic models; we assume that each class is described by a topic. We propose a new semi-supervised method that uses the simplest topic model yielded by the standard EM algorithm; model calculation is very rapid. Furthermore our approach allows a dictionary to be modified interactively and the final dictionary has a hierarchical structure. This paper makes three contributions. First, it proposes a word-based semi-supervised topic model. Second, we apply the semi-supervised topic model to interactive learning; this approach is called the Interactive Topic Model. Third, we propose a score function; it extracts the related words that occupy the middle layer of the hierarchical structure. Experiments show that our method can appropriately retrieve the words belonging to an arbitrary class.
Multimodal Corpus of Multi-party Conversations in Second Language
Authors: Shota Yamasaki, Hirohisa Furukawa, Masafumi Nishida, Kristiina Jokinen, Seiichi Yamamoto
Date: 2012-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2012 5
Tasks: Speech Recognition

We developed a dialogue-based tutoring system for teaching English to Japanese students and plan to transfer the current software tutoring agent into an embodied robot in the hope that the robot will enrich conversation by allowing more natural interactions in small group learning situations. To enable smooth communication between an intelligent agent and the user, the agent must have realistic models on when to take turns, when to interrupt, and how to catch the partner's attention. For developing the realistic models applicable for computer assisted language learning systems, we also need to consider the differences between the mother tongue and second language that affect communication style. We collected a multimodal corpus of multi-party conversations in English as the second language to investigate the differences in communication styles. We describe our multimodal corpus and explore features of communication style e.g. filled pauses, and non-verbal information, such as eye-gaze, which show different characteristics between the mother tongue and second language.