ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Which Model Should We Use for a Real-World Conversational Dialogue System? a Cross-Language Relevance Model or a Deep Neural Net? (2020)

We compare two models for corpus-based selection of dialogue responses: one based on cross-language relevance with a cross-language LSTM model. Each model is tested on multiple corpora, collected from two different types of dialogue source material. Results show that while the LSTM model performs adequately on a very large corpus (millions of utterances), its performance is dominated by the cross-language relevance model for a more moderate-sized corpus (ten thousands of utterances).
Chinese Whispers: A Multimodal Dataset for Embodied Language Grounding (2020)

In this paper, we introduce a multimodal dataset in which subjects are instructing each other how to assemble IKEA furniture. Using the concept of {\textquoteleft}Chinese Whispers', an old children`s game, we employ a novel method to avoid implicit experimenter biases. We let subjects instruct each other on the nature of the task: the process of the furniture assembly. Uncertainty, hesitations, repairs and self-corrections are naturally introduced in the incremental process of establishing common ground. The corpus consists of 34 interactions, where each subject first assembles and then instructs. We collected speech, eye-gaze, pointing gestures, and object movements, as well as subjective interpretations of mutual understanding, collaboration and task recall. The corpus is of particular interest to researchers who are interested in multimodal signals in situated dialogue, especially in referential communication and the process of language grounding.
AMUSED: A Multi-Stream Vector Representation Method for Use in Natural Dialogue (2020)

The problem of building a coherent and non-monotonous conversational agent with proper discourse and coverage is still an area of open research. Current architectures only take care of semantic and contextual information for a given query and fail to completely account for syntactic and external knowledge which are crucial for generating responses in a chit-chat system. To overcome this problem, we propose an end to end multi-stream deep learning architecture that learns unified embeddings for query-response pairs by leveraging contextual information from memory networks and syntactic information by incorporating Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) over their dependency parse. A stream of this network also utilizes transfer learning by pre-training a bidirectional transformer to extract semantic representation for each input sentence and incorporates external knowledge through the neighborhood of the entities from a Knowledge Base (KB). We benchmark these embeddings on the next sentence prediction task and significantly improve upon the existing techniques. Furthermore, we use AMUSED to represent query and responses along with its context to develop a retrieval based conversational agent which has been validated by expert linguists to have comprehensive engagement with humans.
An Annotation Approach for Social and Referential Gaze in Dialogue (2020)

This paper introduces an approach for annotating eye gaze considering both its social and the referential functions in multi-modal human-human dialogue. Detecting and interpreting the temporal patterns of gaze behavior cues is natural for humans and also mostly an unconscious process. However, these cues are difficult for conversational agents such as robots or avatars to process or generate. The key factor is to recognize these variants and carry out a successful conversation, as misinterpretation can lead to total failure of the given interaction. This paper introduces an annotation scheme for eye-gaze in human-human dyadic interactions that is intended to facilitate the learning of eye-gaze patterns in multi-modal natural dialogue.
A Penn-style Treebank of Middle Low German (2020)

We outline the issues and decisions involved in creating a Penn-style treebank of Middle Low German (MLG, 1200-1650), which will form part of the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG). The attestation for MLG is rich, but the syntax of the language remains relatively understudied. The development of a syntactically annotated corpus for the language will facilitate future studies with a strong empirical basis, building on recent work which indicates that, syntactically, MLG occupies a position in its own right within West Germanic. In this paper, we describe the background for the corpus and the process by which texts were selected to be included. In particular, we focus on the decisions involved in the syntactic annotation of the corpus, specifically, the practical and linguistic reasons for adopting the Penn annotation scheme, the stages of the annotation process itself, and how we have adapted the Penn scheme for syntactic features specific to MLG. We also discuss the issue of data uncertainty, which is a major issue when building a corpus of an under-researched language stage like MLG, and some novel ways in which we capture this uncertainty in the annotation.
Books of Hours. the First Liturgical Data Set for Text Segmentation. (2020)

The Book of Hours was the bestseller of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is a historical invaluable treasure, documenting the devotional practices of Christians in the late Middle Ages. Up to now, its textual content has been scarcely studied because of its manuscript nature, its length and its complex content. At first glance, it looks too standardized. However, the study of book of hours raises important challenges: (i) in image analysis, its often lavish ornamentation (illegible painted initials, line-fillers, etc.), abbreviated words, multilingualism are difficult to address in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR); (ii) its hierarchical entangled structure offers a new field of investigation for text segmentation; (iii) in digital humanities, its textual content gives opportunities for historical analysis. In this paper, we provide the first corpus of books of hours, which consists of Latin transcriptions of 300 books of hours generated by Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) - that is like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but for handwritten and not printed texts. We designed a structural scheme of the book of hours and annotated manually two books of hours according to this scheme. Lastly, we performed a systematic evaluation of the main state of the art text segmentation approaches.
Corpus of Chinese Dynastic Histories: Gender Analysis over Two Millennia (2020)

Chinese dynastic histories form a large continuous linguistic space of approximately 2000 years, from the 3rd century BCE to the 18th century CE. The histories are documented in Classical (Literary) Chinese in a corpus of over 20 million characters, suitable for the computational analysis of historical lexicon and semantic change. However, there is no freely available open-source corpus of these histories, making Classical Chinese low-resource. This project introduces a new open-source corpus of twenty-four dynastic histories covered by Creative Commons license. An original list of Classical Chinese gender-specific terms was developed as a case study for analyzing the historical linguistic use of male and female terms. The study demonstrates considerable stability in the usage of these terms, with dominance of male terms. Exploration of word meanings uses keyword analysis of focus corpora created for gender-specific terms. This method yields meaningful semantic representations that can be used for future studies of diachronic semantics.
The Royal Society Corpus 6.0: Providing 300+ Years of Scientific Writing for Humanistic Study (2020)

We present a new, extended version of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), a diachronic corpus of scientific English now covering 300+ years of scientific writing (1665{--}1996). The corpus comprises 47 837 texts, primarily scientific articles, and is based on publications of the Royal Society of London, mainly its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings. The corpus has been built on the basis of the FAIR principles and is freely available under a Creative Commons license, excluding copy-righted parts. We provide information on how the corpus can be found, the file formats available for download as well as accessibility via a web-based corpus query platform. We show a number of analytic tools that we have implemented for better usability and provide an example of use of the corpus for linguistic analysis as well as examples of subsequent, external uses of earlier releases. We place the RSC against the background of existing English diachronic/scientific corpora, elaborating on its value for linguistic and humanistic study.
Corpus REDEWIEDERGABE (2020)

This article presents corpus REDEWIEDERGABE, a German-language historical corpus with detailed annotations for speech, thought and writing representation (ST{\&}WR). With approximately 490,000 tokens, it is the largest resource of its kind. It can be used to answer literary and linguistic research questions and serve as training material for machine learning. This paper describes the composition of the corpus and the annotation structure, discusses some methodological decisions and gives basic statistics about the forms of ST{\&}WR found in this corpus.
WeDH - a Friendly Tool for Building Literary Corpora Enriched with Encyclopedic Metadata (2020)

In recent years the interest in the use of repositories of literary works has been successful. While many efforts related to Linked Open Data go in the right direction, the use of these repositories for the creation of text corpora enriched with metadata remains difficult and cumbersome. In fact, many of these repositories can be useful to the community not only for the automatic creation of textual corpora but also for retrieving crucial meta-information about texts. In particular, the use of metadata provides the reader with a wealth of information that is often not identifiable in the texts themselves. Our project aims to fill both the access to the textual resources available on the web and the possibility of combining these resources with sources of metadata that can enrich the texts with useful information lengthening the life and maintenance of the data itself. We introduce here a user-friendly web interface of the Digital Humanities toolkit named WeDH with which the user can leverage the encyclopedic knowledge provided by DBpedia, wikidata and VIAF in order to enrich the corpora with bibliographical and exegetical knowledge. WeDH is a collaborative project and we invite anyone who has ideas or suggestions regarding this procedure to reach out to us.
Automatic Section Recognition in Obituaries (2020)

Obituaries contain information about people`s values across times and cultures, which makes them a useful resource for exploring cultural history. They are typically structured similarly, with sections corresponding to Personal Information, Biographical Sketch, Characteristics, Family, Gratitude, Tribute, Funeral Information and Other aspects of the person. To make this information available for further studies, we propose a statistical model which recognizes these sections. To achieve that, we collect a corpus of 20058 English obituaries from TheDaily Item, Remembering.CA and The London Free Press. The evaluation of our annotation guidelines with three annotators on 1008 obituaries shows a substantial agreement of Fleiss {\ensuremath{\kappa}} = 0.87. Formulated as an automatic segmentation task, a convolutional neural network outperforms bag-of-words and embedding-based BiLSTMs and BiLSTM-CRFs with a micro F1 = 0.81.
SL\"aNDa: An Annotated Corpus of Narrative and Dialogue in Swedish Literary Fiction (2020)

We describe a new corpus, SL{\"a}NDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue. It contains Swedish literary fiction, which has been manually annotated for cited materials, with a focus on dialogue. The annotation covers excerpts from eight Swedish novels written between 1879{--}1940, a period of modernization of the Swedish language. SL{\"a}NDa contains annotations for all cited materials that are separate from the main narrative, like quotations and signs. The main focus is on dialogue, for which we annotate speech segments, speech tags, and speakers. In this paper we describe the annotation protocol and procedure and show that we can reach a high inter-annotator agreement. In total, SL{\"a}NDa contains annotations of 44 chapters with over 220K tokens. The annotation identified 4,733 instances of cited material and 1,143 named speaker{--}speech mappings. The corpus is useful for developing computational tools for different types of analysis of literary narrative and speech. We perform a small pilot study where we show how our annotation can help in analyzing language change in Swedish. We find that a number of common function words have their modern version appear earlier in speech than in narrative.
RiQuA: A Corpus of Rich Quotation Annotation for English Literary Text (2020)

We introduce RiQuA (RIch QUotation Annotations), a corpus that provides quotations, including their interpersonal structure (speakers and addressees) for English literary text. The corpus comprises 11 works of 19th-century literature that were manually doubly annotated for direct and indirect quotations. For each quotation, its span, speaker, addressee, and cue are identified (if present). This provides a rich view of dialogue structures not available from other available corpora. We detail the process of creating this dataset, discuss the annotation guidelines, and analyze the resulting corpus in terms of inter-annotator agreement and its properties. RiQuA, along with its annotations guidelines and associated scripts, are publicly available for use, modification, and experimentation.
A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on Contemporary German Pop Lyrics with the Multi-Layer Annotated \textquotedblleftSongkorpus\textquotedblright (2020)

Song lyrics can be considered as a text genre that has features of both written and spoken discourse, and potentially provides extensive linguistic and cultural information to scientists from various disciplines. However, pop songs play a rather subordinate role in empirical language research so far - most likely due to the absence of scientifically valid and sustainable resources. The present paper introduces a multiply annotated corpus of German lyrics as a publicly available basis for multidisciplinary research. The resource contains three types of data for the investigation and evaluation of quite distinct phenomena: TEI-compliant song lyrics as primary data, linguistically and literary motivated annotations, and extralinguistic metadata. It promotes empirically/statistically grounded analyses of genre-specific features, systemic-structural correlations and tendencies in the texts of contemporary pop music. The corpus has been stratified into thematic and author-specific archives; the paper presents some basic descriptive statistics, as well as the public online frontend with its built-in evaluation forms and live visualisations.
The BDCam\~oes Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents: a Research Resource for Digital Humanities and Language Technology (2020)

This paper presents the BDCam{\~o}es Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents, a new corpus of literary texts written in Portuguese that in its inaugural version includes close to 4 million words from over 200 complete documents from 83 authors in 14 genres, covering a time span from the 16th to the 21st century, and adhering to different orthographic conventions. Many of the texts in the corpus have also been automatically parsed with state-of-the-art language processing tools, forming the BDCam{\~o}es Treebank subcorpus. This set of characteristics makes of BDCam{\~o}es an invaluable resource for research in language technology (e.g. authorship detection, genre classification, etc.) and in language science and digital humanities (e.g. comparative literature, diachronic linguistics, etc.).
Dataset for Temporal Analysis of English-French Cognates (2020)

Languages change over time and, thanks to the abundance of digital corpora, their evolutionary analysis using computational techniques has recently gained much research attention. In this paper, we focus on creating a dataset to support investigating the similarity in evolution between different languages. We look in particular into the similarities and differences between the use of corresponding words across time in English and French, two languages from different linguistic families yet with shared syntax and close contact. For this we select a set of cognates in both languages and study their frequency changes and correlations over time. We propose a new dataset for computational approaches of synchronized diachronic investigation of language pairs, and subsequently show novel findings stemming from the cognate-focused diachronic comparison of the two chosen languages. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first in the literature to use computational approaches and large data to make a cross-language diachronic analysis.
Material Philology Meets Digital Onomastic Lexicography: The NordiCon Database of Medieval Nordic Personal Names in Continental Sources (2020)

We present NordiCon, a database containing medieval Nordic personal names attested in Continental sources. The database combines formally interpreted and richly interlinked onomastic data with digitized versions of the medieval manuscripts from which the data originate and information on the tokens' context. The structure of NordiCon is inspired by other online historical given name dictionaries. It takes up challenges reported on in previous works, such as how to cover material properties of a name token and how to define lemmatization principles, and elaborates on possible solutions. The lemmatization principles for NordiCon are further developed in order to facilitate the connection to other name dictionaries and corpuses, and the integration of the database into Spr{\r{a}}kbanken Text, an infrastructure containing modern and historical written data.
NLP Scholar: A Dataset for Examining the State of NLP Research (2020)

Google Scholar is the largest web search engine for academic literature that also provides access to rich metadata associated with the papers. The ACL Anthology (AA) is the largest repository of articles on Natural Language Processing (NLP). We extracted information from AA for about 44 thousand NLP papers and identified authors who published at least three papers there. We then extracted citation information from Google Scholar for all their papers (not just their AA papers). This resulted in a dataset of 1.1 million papers and associated Google Scholar information. We aligned the information in the AA and Google Scholar datasets to create the NLP Scholar Dataset {--} a single unified source of information (from both AA and Google Scholar) for tens of thousands of NLP papers. It can be used to identify broad trends in productivity, focus, and impact of NLP research. We present here initial work on analyzing the volume of research in NLP over the years and identifying the most cited papers in NLP. We also list a number of additional potential applications.
The DReaM Corpus: A Multilingual Annotated Corpus of Grammars for the World`s Languages (2020)

There exist as many as 7000 natural languages in the world, and a huge number of documents describing those languages have been produced over the years. Most of those documents are in paper format. Any attempts to use modern computational techniques and tools to process those documents will require them to be digitized first. In this paper, we report a multilingual digitized version of thousands of such documents searchable through some well-established corpus infrastructures. The corpus is annotated with various meta, word, and text level attributes to make searching and analysis easier and more useful.
LiViTo: Linguistic and Visual Features Tool for Assisted Analysis of Historic Manuscripts (2020)

We propose a mixed methods approach to the identification of scribes and authors in handwritten documents, and present LiViTo, a software tool which combines linguistic insights and computer vision techniques in order to assist researchers in the analysis of handwritten historical documents. Our research shows that it is feasible to train neural networks for the automatic transcription of handwritten documents and to use these transcriptions as input for further learning processes. Hypotheses about scribes can be tested effectively by extracting visual handwriting features and clustering them appropriately. Methods from linguistics and from computer vision research integrate into a mixed methods system, with benefits on both sides. LiViTo was trained with historical Czech texts by 18th century immigrants to Berlin, a total of 564 pages from a corpus of about 5000 handwritten pages without indication of author or scribe. We provide an overview of the three-year development of LiViTo and an introduction into its methodology and its functions. We then present our findings concerning the corpus of Berlin Czech manuscripts and discuss possible further usage scenarios.
TextAnnotator: A UIMA Based Tool for the Simultaneous and Collaborative Annotation of Texts (2020)

The annotation of texts and other material in the field of digital humanities and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a common task of research projects. At the same time, the annotation of corpora is certainly the most time- and cost-intensive component in research projects and often requires a high level of expertise according to the research interest. However, for the annotation of texts, a wide range of tools is available, both for automatic and manual annotation. Since the automatic pre-processing methods are not error-free and there is an increasing demand for the generation of training data, also with regard to machine learning, suitable annotation tools are required. This paper defines criteria of flexibility and efficiency of complex annotations for the assessment of existing annotation tools. To extend this list of tools, the paper describes TextAnnotator, a browser-based, multi-annotation system, which has been developed to perform platform-independent multimodal annotations and annotate complex textual structures. The paper illustrates the current state of development of TextAnnotator and demonstrates its ability to evaluate annotation quality (inter-annotator agreement) at runtime. In addition, it will be shown how annotations of different users can be performed simultaneously and collaboratively on the same document from different platforms using UIMA as the basis for annotation.
Deduplication of Scholarly Documents using Locality Sensitive Hashing and Word Embeddings (2020)

Deduplication is the task of identifying near and exact duplicate data items in a collection. In this paper, we present a novel method for deduplication of scholarly documents. We develop a hybrid model which uses structural similarity (locality sensitive hashing) and meaning representation (word embeddings) of document texts to determine (near) duplicates. Our collection constitutes a subset of multidisciplinary scholarly documents aggregated from research repositories. We identify several issues causing data inaccuracies in such collections and motivate the need for deduplication. In lack of existing dataset suitable for study of deduplication of scholarly documents, we create a ground truth dataset of $100K$ scholarly documents and conduct a series of experiments to empirically establish optimal values for the parameters of our deduplication method. Experimental evaluation shows that our method achieves a macro F1-score of 0.90. We productionise our method as a publicly accessible web API service serving deduplication of scholarly documents in real time.