pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Inducing Discourse Marker Inventories from Lexical Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Christian Chiarcos
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Discourse marker inventories are important tools for the development of both discourse parsers and corpora with discourse annotations. In this paper we explore the potential of massively multilingual lexical knowledge graphs to induce multilingual discourse marker lexicons using concept propagation methods as previously developed in the context of translation inference across dictionaries. Given one or multiple source languages with discourse marker inventories that discourse relations as senses of potential discourse markers, as well as a large number of bilingual dictionaries that link them – directly or indirectly – with the target language, we specifically study to what extent discourse marker induction can benefit from the integration of information from different sources, the impact of sense granularity and what limiting factors may need to be considered. Our study uses discourse marker inventories from nine European languages normalized against the discourse relation inventory of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), as well as three collections of machine-readable dictionaries with different characteristics, so that the interplay of a large number of factors can be studied.
Story Trees: Representing Documents using Topological Persistence
Authors: Pantea Haghighatkhah, Antske Fokkens, Pia Sommerauer, Bettina Speckmann, Kevin Verbeek
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) focuses on the inherent shape of (spatial) data. As such, it may provide useful methods to explore spatial representations of linguistic data (embeddings) which have become central in NLP. In this paper we aim to introduce TDA to researchers in language technology. We use TDA to represent document structure as so-called story trees. Story trees are hierarchical representations created from semantic vector representations of sentences via persistent homology. They can be used to identify and clearly visualize prominent components of a story line. We showcase their potential by using story trees to create extractive summaries for news stories.
Extracting and Analysing Metaphors in Migration Media Discourse: towards a Metaphor Annotation Scheme
Authors: Ana Zwitter Vitez, Mojca Brglez, Marko Robnik Šikonja, Tadej Škvorc, Andreja Vezovnik, Senja Pollak
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The study of metaphors in media discourse is an increasingly researched topic as media are an important shaper of social reality and metaphors are an indicator of how we think about certain issues through references to other things. We present a neural transfer learning method for detecting metaphorical sentences in Slovene and evaluate its performance on a gold standard corpus of metaphors (classification accuracy of 0.725), as well as on a sample of a domain specific corpus of migrations (precision of 0.40 for extracting domain metaphors and 0.74 if evaluated only on a set of migration related sentences). Based on empirical results and findings of our analysis, we propose a novel metaphor annotation scheme containing linguistic level, conceptual level, and stance information. The new scheme can be used for future metaphor annotations of other socially relevant topics.
DDisCo: A Discourse Coherence Dataset for Danish
Authors: Linea Flansmose Mikkelsen, Oliver Kinch, Anders Jess Pedersen, Ophélie Lacroix
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

To date, there has been no resource for studying discourse coherence on real-world Danish texts. Discourse coherence has mostly been approached with the assumption that incoherent texts can be represented by coherent texts in which sentences have been shuffled. However, incoherent real-world texts rarely resemble that. We thus present DDisCo, a dataset including text from the Danish Wikipedia and Reddit annotated for discourse coherence. We choose to annotate real-world texts instead of relying on artificially incoherent text for training and testing models. Then, we evaluate the performance of several methods, including neural networks, on the dataset.
BeSt: The Belief and Sentiment Corpus
Authors: Jennifer Tracey, Owen Rambow, Claire Cardie, Adam Dalton, Hoa Trang Dang, Mona Diab, Bonnie Dorr, Louise Guthrie, Magdalena Markowska, Smaranda Muresan, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Samira Shaikh, Tomek Strzalkowski
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

We present the BeSt corpus, which records cognitive state: who believes what (i.e., factuality), and who has what sentiment towards what. This corpus is inspired by similar source-and-target corpora, specifically MPQA and FactBank. The corpus comprises two genres, newswire and discussion forums, in three languages, Chinese (Mandarin), English, and Spanish. The corpus is distributed through the LDC.
MOTIF: Contextualized Images for Complex Words to Improve Human Reading
Authors: Xintong Wang, Florian Schneider, Özge Alacam, Prateek Chaudhury, Chris Biemann
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

MOTIF (MultimOdal ConTextualized Images For Language Learners) is a multimodal dataset that consists of 1125 comprehension texts retrieved from Wikipedia Simple Corpus. Allowing multimodal processing or enriching the context with multimodal information has proven imperative for many learning tasks, specifically for second language (L2) learning. In this respect, several traditional NLP approaches can assist L2 readers in text comprehension processes, such as simplifying text or giving dictionary descriptions for complex words. As nicely stated in the well-known proverb, sometimes “a picture is worth a thousand words” and an image can successfully complement the verbal message by enriching the representation, like in Pictionary books. This multimodal support can also assist on-the-fly text reading experience by providing a multimodal tool that chooses and displays the most relevant images for the difficult words, given the text context. This study mainly focuses on one of the key components to achieving this goal; collecting a multimodal dataset enriched with complex word annotation and validated image match.
Challenges with Sign Language Datasets for Sign Language Recognition and Translation
Authors: Mirella De Sisto, Vincent Vandeghinste, Santiago Egea Gómez, Mathieu De Coster, Dimitar Shterionov, Horacio Saggion
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition, Translation

Sign Languages (SLs) are the primary means of communication for at least half a million people in Europe alone. However, the development of SL recognition and translation tools is slowed down by a series of obstacles concerning resource scarcity and standardization issues in the available data. The former challenge relates to the volume of data available for machine learning as well as the time required to collect and process new data. The latter obstacle is linked to the variety of the data, i.e., annotation formats are not unified and vary amongst different resources. The available data formats are often not suitable for machine learning, obstructing the provision of automatic tools based on neural models. In the present paper, we give an overview of these challenges by comparing various SL corpora and SL machine learning datasets. Furthermore, we propose a framework to address the lack of standardization at format level, unify the available resources and facilitate SL research for different languages. Our framework takes ELAN files as inputs and returns textual and visual data ready to train SL recognition and translation models. We present a proof of concept, training neural translation models on the data produced by the proposed framework.
A Low-Cost Motion Capture Corpus in French Sign Language for Interpreting Iconicity and Spatial Referencing Mechanisms
Authors: Clémence Mertz, Vincent Barreaud, Thibaut Le Naour, Damien Lolive, Sylvie Gibet
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

The automatic translation of sign language videos into transcribed texts is rarely approached in its whole, as it implies to finely model the grammatical mechanisms that govern these languages. The presented work is a first step towards the interpretation of French sign language (LSF) by specifically targeting iconicity and spatial referencing. This paper describes the LSF-SHELVES corpus as well as the original technology that was designed and implemented to collect it. Our goal is to use deep learning methods to circumvent the use of models in spatial referencing recognition. In order to obtain training material with sufficient variability, we designed a light-weight (and low-cost) capture protocol that enabled us to collect data from a large panel of LSF signers. This protocol involves the use of a portable device providing a 3D skeleton, and of a software developed specifically for this application to facilitate the post-processing of handshapes. The LSF-SHELVES includes simple and compound iconic and spatial dynamics, organized in 6 complexity levels, representing a total of 60 sequences signed by 15 LSF signers.
The CLAMS Platform at Work: Processing Audiovisual Data from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Authors: Marc Verhagen, Kelley Lynch, Kyeongmin Rim, James Pustejovsky
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

The Computational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS) platform provides access to computational content analysis tools for multimedia material. The version we present here is a robust update of an initial prototype implementation from 2019. The platform now sports a variety of image, video, audio and text processing tools that interact via a common multi-modal representation language named MMIF (Multi-Media Interchange Format). We describe the overall architecture, the MMIF format, some of the tools included in the platform, the process to set up and run a workflow, visualizations included in CLAMS, and evaluate aspects of the platform on data from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, showing how CLAMS can add metadata to mass-digitized multimedia collections, metadata that are typically only available implicitly in now largely unsearchable digitized media in archives and libraries.
BU-NEmo: an Affective Dataset of Gun Violence News
Authors: Carley Reardon, Sejin Paik, Ge Gao, Meet Parekh, Yanling Zhao, Lei Guo, Margrit Betke, Derry Tanti Wijaya
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Articles

Given our society’s increased exposure to multimedia formats on social media platforms, efforts to understand how digital content impacts people’s emotions are burgeoning. As such, we introduce a U.S. gun violence news dataset that contains news headline and image pairings from 840 news articles with 15K high-quality, crowdsourced annotations on emotional responses to the news pairings. We created three experimental conditions for the annotation process: two with a single modality (headline or image only), and one multimodal (headline and image together). In contrast to prior works on affectively-annotated data, our dataset includes annotations on the dominant emotion experienced with the content, the intensity of the selected emotion and an open-ended, written component. By collecting annotations on different modalities of the same news content pairings, we explore the relationship between image and text influence on human emotional response. We offer initial analysis on our dataset, showing the nuanced affective differences that appear due to modality and individual factors such as political leaning and media consumption habits. Our dataset is made publicly available to facilitate future research in affective computing.
RoomReader: A Multimodal Corpus of Online Multiparty Conversational Interactions
Authors: Justine Reverdy, Sam O’Connor Russell, Louise Duquenne, Diego Garaialde, Benjamin R. Cowan, Naomi Harte
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: multimodal interaction

We present RoomReader, a corpus of multimodal, multiparty conversational interactions in which participants followed a collaborative student-tutor scenario designed to elicit spontaneous speech. The corpus was developed within the wider RoomReader Project to explore multimodal cues of conversational engagement and behavioural aspects of collaborative interaction in online environments. However, the corpus can be used to study a wide range of phenomena in online multimodal interaction. The publicly-shared corpus consists of over 8 hours of video and audio recordings from 118 participants in 30 gender-balanced sessions, in the “in-the-wild” online environment of Zoom. The recordings have been edited, synchronised, and fully transcribed. Student participants have been continuously annotated for engagement with a novel continuous scale. We provide questionnaires measuring engagement and group cohesion collected from the annotators, tutors and participants themselves. We also make a range of accompanying data available such as personality tests and behavioural assessments. The dataset and accompanying psychometrics present a rich resource enabling the exploration of a range of downstream tasks across diverse fields including linguistics and artificial intelligence. This could include the automatic detection of student engagement, analysis of group interaction and collaboration in online conversation, and the analysis of conversational behaviours in an online setting.
Quevedo: Annotation and Processing of Graphical Languages
Authors: Antonio F. G. Sevilla, Alberto Díaz Esteban, José María Lahoz-Bengoechea
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Management

In this article, we present Quevedo, a software tool we have developed for the task of automatic processing of graphical languages. These are languages which use images to convey meaning, relying not only on the shape of symbols but also on their spatial arrangement in the page, and relative to each other. When presented in image form, these languages require specialized computational processing which is not the same as usually done either for natural language processing or for artificial vision. Quevedo enables this specialized processing, focusing on a data-based approach. As a command line application and library, it provides features for the collection and management of image datasets, and their machine learning recognition using neural networks and recognizer pipelines. This processing requires careful annotation of the source data, for which Quevedo offers an extensive and visual web-based annotation interface. In this article, we also briefly present a case study centered on the task of SignWriting recognition, the original motivation for writing the software. Quevedo is written in Python, and distributed freely under the Open Software License version 3.0.
Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel’s Weekly Video Podcasts
Authors: Debjoy Saha, Shravan Nayak, Timo Baumann
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Face Detection, Face Generation, Speaker Recognition, Talking Face Generation

We introduce the Merkel Podcast Corpus, an audio-visual-text corpus in German collected from 16 years of (almost) weekly Internet podcasts of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single speaker corpus in the German language consisting of audio, visual and text modalities of comparable size and temporal extent. We describe the methods used with which we have collected and edited the data which involves downloading the videos, transcripts and other metadata, forced alignment, performing active speaker recognition and face detection to finally curate the single speaker dataset consisting of utterances spoken by Angela Merkel. The proposed pipeline is general and can be used to curate other datasets of similar nature, such as talk show contents. Through various statistical analyses and applications of the dataset in talking face generation and TTS, we show the utility of the dataset. We argue that it is a valuable contribution to the research community, in particular, due to its realistic and challenging material at the boundary between prepared and spontaneous speech.
Crowdsourcing Kazakh-Russian Sign Language: FluentSigners-50
Authors: Medet Mukushev, Aigerim Kydyrbekova, Alfarabi Imashev, Vadim Kimmelman, Anara Sandygulova
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

This paper presents the methodology we used to crowdsource a data collection of a new large-scale signer independent dataset for Kazakh-Russian Sign Language (KRSL) created for Sign Language Processing. By involving the Deaf community throughout the research process, we firstly designed a research protocol and then performed an efficient crowdsourcing campaign that resulted in a new FluentSigners-50 dataset. The FluentSigners-50 dataset consists of 173 sentences performed by 50 KRSL signers for 43,250 video samples. Dataset contributors recorded videos in real-life settings on various backgrounds using various devices such as smartphones and web cameras. Therefore, each dataset contribution has a varying distance to the camera, camera angles and aspect ratio, video quality, and frame rates. Additionally, the proposed dataset contains a high degree of linguistic and inter-signer variability and thus is a better training set for recognizing a real-life signed speech. FluentSigners-50 is publicly available at https://krslproject.github.io/fluentsigners-50/
Metaphor annotation for German
Authors: Markus Egg, Valia Kordoni
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

The paper presents current work on a German corpus annotated for metaphor. Metaphors denote entities or situations that are in some sense similar to the literal referent, e.g., when “Handschrift” ‘signature’ is used in the sense of ‘distinguishing mark’ or the suppression of hopes is introduced by the verb “verschütten” ‘bury’. The corpus is part of a project on register, hence, includes material from different registers that represent register variation along a number of important dimensions, but we believe that it is of interest to research on metaphor in general. The corpus extends previous annotation initiatives in that it not only annotates the metaphoric expressions themselves but also their respective relevant contexts that trigger a metaphorical interpretation of the expressions. For the corpus, we developed extended annotation guidelines, which specifically focus not only on the identification of these metaphoric contexts but also analyse in detail specific linguistic challenges for metaphor annotation that emerge due to the grammar of German.
Exploring Transformers for Ranking Portuguese Semantic Relations
Authors: Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Word Similarity

We explored transformer-based language models for ranking instances of Portuguese lexico-semantic relations. Weights were based on the likelihood of natural language sequences that transmitted the relation instances, and expectations were that they would be useful for filtering out noisier instances. However, after analysing the weights, no strong conclusions were taken. They are not correlated with redundancy, but are lower for instances with longer and more specific arguments, which may nevertheless be a consequence of their sensitivity to the frequency of such arguments. They did also not reveal to be useful when computing word similarity with network embeddings. Despite the negative results, we see the reported experiments and insights as another contribution for better understanding transformer language models like BERT and GPT, and we make the weighted instances publicly available for further research.
Building Static Embeddings from Contextual Ones: Is It Useful for Building Distributional Thesauri?
Authors: Olivier Ferret
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

While contextual language models are now dominant in the field of Natural Language Processing, the representations they build at the token level are not always suitable for all uses. In this article, we propose a new method for building word or type-level embeddings from contextual models. This method combines the generalization and the aggregation of token representations. We evaluate it for a large set of English nouns from the perspective of the building of distributional thesauri for extracting semantic similarity relations. Moreover, we analyze the differences between static embeddings and type-level embeddings according to features such as the frequency of words or the type of semantic relations these embeddings account for, showing that the properties of these two types of embeddings can be complementary and exploited for further improving distributional thesauri.
Sentence Selection Strategies for Distilling Word Embeddings from BERT
Authors: Yixiao Wang, Zied Bouraoui, Luis Espinosa Anke, Steven Schockaert
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Sentence, Word Embeddings

Many applications crucially rely on the availability of high-quality word vectors. To learn such representations, several strategies based on language models have been proposed in recent years. While effective, these methods typically rely on a large number of contextualised vectors for each word, which makes them impractical. In this paper, we investigate whether similar results can be obtained when only a few contextualised representations of each word can be used. To this end, we analyse a range of strategies for selecting the most informative sentences. Our results show that with a careful selection strategy, high-quality word vectors can be learned from as few as 5 to 10 sentences.
DiaWUG: A Dataset for Diatopic Lexical Semantic Variation in Spanish
Authors: Gioia Baldissin, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

We provide a novel dataset – DiaWUG – with judgements on diatopic lexical semantic variation for six Spanish variants in Europe and Latin America. In contrast to most previous meaning-based resources and studies on semantic diatopic variation, we collect annotations on semantic relatedness for Spanish target words in their contexts from both a semasiological perspective (i.e., exploring the meanings of a word given its form, thus including polysemy) and an onomasiological perspective (i.e., exploring identical meanings of words with different forms, thus including synonymy). In addition, our novel dataset exploits and extends the existing framework DURel for annotating word senses in context (Erk et al., 2013; Schlechtweg et al., 2018) and the framework-embedded Word Usage Graphs (WUGs) – which up to now have mainly be used for semasiological tasks and resources – in order to distinguish, visualize and interpret lexical semantic variation of contextualized words in Spanish from these two perspectives, i.e., semasiological and onomasiological language variation.
My Case, For an Adposition: Lexical Polysemy of Adpositions and Case Markers in Finnish and Latin
Authors: Daniel Chen, Mans Hulden
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Clustering

Adpositions and case markers contain a high degree of polysemy and participate in unique semantic role configurations. We present a novel application of the SNACS supersense hierarchy to Finnish and Latin data by manually annotating adposition and case marker tokens in Finnish and Latin translations of Chapters IV-V of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). We evaluate the computational validity of the semantic role annotation categories by grouping raw, contextualized Multilingual BERT embeddings using k-means clustering.