ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Explicit Fine grained Syntactic and Semantic Annotation of the Idafa Construction in Arabic (2016)

Idafa in traditional Arabic grammar is an umbrella construction that covers several phenomena including what is expressed in English as noun-noun compounds and Saxon and Norman genitives. Additionally, Idafa participates in some other constructions, such as quantifiers, quasi-prepositions, and adjectives. Identifying the various types of the Idafa construction (IC) is of importance to Natural Language processing (NLP) applications. Noun-Noun compounds exhibit special behavior in most languages impacting their semantic interpretation. Hence distinguishing them could have an impact on downstream NLP applications. The most comprehensive syntactic representation of the Arabic language is the LDC Arabic Treebank (ATB). In the ATB, ICs are not explicitly labeled and furthermore, there is no distinction between ICs of noun-noun relations and other traditional ICs. Hence, we devise a detailed syntactic and semantic typification process of the IC phenomenon in Arabic. We target the ATB as a platform for this classification. We render the ATB annotated with explicit IC labels but with the further semantic characterization which is useful for syntactic, semantic and cross language processing. Our typification of IC comprises 3 main syntactic IC types: FIC, GIC, and TIC, and they are further divided into 10 syntactic subclasses. The TIC group is further classified into semantic relations. We devise a method for automatic IC labeling and compare its yield against the CATiB treebank. Our evaluation shows that we achieve the same level of accuracy, but with the additional fine-grained classification into the various syntactic and semantic types.
Compasses, Magnets, Water Microscopes: Annotation of Terminology in a Diachronic Corpus of Scientific Texts (2016)

The specialised lexicon belongs to the most prominent attributes of specialised writing: Terms function as semantically dense encodings of specialised concepts, which, in the absence of terms, would require lengthy explanations and descriptions. In this paper, we argue that terms are the result of diachronic processes on both the semantic and the morpho-syntactic level. Very little is known about these processes. We therefore present a corpus annotation project aiming at revealing how terms are coined and how they evolve to fit their function as semantically and morpho-syntactically dense encodings of specialised knowledge. The scope of this paper is two-fold: Firstly, we outline our methodology for annotating terminology in a diachronic corpus of scientific publications. Moreover, we provide a detailed analysis of our annotation results and suggest methods for improving the accuracy of annotations in a setting as difficult as ours. Secondly, we present results of a pilot study based on the annotated terms. The results suggest that terms in older texts are linguistically relatively simple units that are hard to distinguish from the lexicon of general language. We believe that this supports our hypothesis that terminology undergoes diachronic processes of densification and specialisation.
KorAP Architecture \textemdash Diving in the Deep Sea of Corpus Data (2016)

KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP`s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DeReKo for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.
Text Segmentation of Digitized Clinical Texts (2016)

In this paper, we present the experiments we made to recover the original page layout structure into two columns from layout damaged digitized files. We designed several CRF-based approaches, either to identify column separator or to classify each token from each line into left or right columns. We achieved our best results with a model trained on homogeneous corpora (only files composed of 2 columns) when classifying each token into left or right columns (overall F-measure of 0.968). Our experiments show it is possible to recover the original layout in columns of digitized documents with results of quality.
A Turkish Database for Psycholinguistic Studies Based on Frequency, Age of Acquisition, and Imageability (2016)

This study primarily aims to build a Turkish psycholinguistic database including three variables: word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability, where AoA and imageability information are limited to nouns. We used a corpus-based approach to obtain information about the AoA variable. We built two corpora: a child literature corpus (CLC) including 535 books written for 3-12 years old children, and a corpus of transcribed children`s speech (CSC) at ages 1;4-4;8. A comparison between the word frequencies of CLC and CSC gave positive correlation results, suggesting the usability of the CLC to extract AoA information. We assumed that frequent words of the CLC would correspond to early acquired words whereas frequent words of a corpus of adult language would correspond to late acquired words. To validate AoA results from our corpus-based approach, a rated AoA questionnaire was conducted on adults. Imageability values were collected via a different questionnaire conducted on adults. We conclude that it is possible to deduce AoA information for high frequency words with the corpus-based approach. The results about low frequency words were inconclusive, which is attributed to the fact that corpus-based AoA information is affected by the strong negative correlation between corpus frequency and rated AoA.
Domain-Specific Corpus Expansion with Focused Webcrawling (2016)

This work presents a straightforward method for extending or creating in-domain web corpora by focused webcrawling. The focused webcrawler uses statistical N-gram language models to estimate the relatedness of documents and weblinks and needs as input only N-grams or plain texts of a predefined domain and seed URLs as starting points. Two experiments demonstrate that our focused crawler is able to stay focused in domain and language. The first experiment shows that the crawler stays in a focused domain, the second experiment demonstrates that language models trained on focused crawls obtain better perplexity scores on in-domain corpora. We distribute the focused crawler as open source software.
Corpus-Based Diacritic Restoration for South Slavic Languages (2016)

In computer-mediated communication, Latin-based scripts users often omit diacritics when writing. Such text is typically easily understandable to humans but very difficult for computational processing because many words become ambiguous or unknown. Letter-level approaches to diacritic restoration generalise better and do not require a lot of training data but word-level approaches tend to yield better results. However, they typically rely on a lexicon which is an expensive resource, not covering non-standard forms, and often not available for less-resourced languages. In this paper we present diacritic restoration models that are trained on easy-to-acquire corpora. We test three different types of corpora (Wikipedia, general web, Twitter) for three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Serbian and Slovene) and evaluate them on two types of text: standard (Wikipedia) and non-standard (Twitter). The proposed approach considerably outperforms charlifter, so far the only open source tool available for this task. We make the best performing systems freely available.
Automatic Recognition of Linguistic Replacements in Text Series Generated from Keystroke Logs (2016)

This paper introduces a toolkit used for the purpose of detecting replacements of different grammatical and semantic structures in ongoing text production logged as a chronological series of computer interaction events (so-called keystroke logs). The specific case we use involves human translations where replacements can be indicative of translator behaviour that leads to specific features of translations that distinguish them from non-translated texts. The toolkit uses a novel CCG chart parser customised so as to recognise grammatical words independently of space and punctuation boundaries. On the basis of the linguistic analysis, structures in different versions of the target text are compared and classified as potential equivalents of the same source text segment by {\textquoteleft}equivalence judges'. In that way, replacements of grammatical and semantic structures can be detected. Beyond the specific task at hand the approach will also be useful for the analysis of other types of spaceless text such as Twitter hashtags and texts in agglutinative or spaceless languages like Finnish or Chinese.
Automatic Corpus Extension for Data-driven Natural Language Generation (2016)

As data-driven approaches started to make their way into the Natural Language Generation (NLG) domain, the need for automation of corpus building and extension became apparent. Corpus creation and extension in data-driven NLG domain traditionally involved manual paraphrasing performed by either a group of experts or with resort to crowd-sourcing. Building the training corpora manually is a costly enterprise which requires a lot of time and human resources. We propose to automate the process of corpus extension by integrating automatically obtained synonyms and paraphrases. Our methodology allowed us to significantly increase the size of the training corpus and its level of variability (the number of distinct tokens and specific syntactic structures). Our extension solutions are fully automatic and require only some initial validation. The human evaluation results confirm that in many cases native speakers favor the outputs of the model built on the extended corpus.
Bilbo-Val: Automatic Identification of Bibliographical Zone in Papers (2016)

In this paper, we present the automatic annotation of bibliographical references' zone in papers and articles of XML/TEI format. Our work is applied through two phases: first, we use machine learning technology to classify bibliographical and non-bibliographical paragraphs in papers, by means of a model that was initially created to differentiate between the footnotes containing or not containing bibliographical references. The previous description is one of BILBO`s features, which is an open source software for automatic annotation of bibliographic reference. Also, we suggest some methods to minimize the margin of error. Second, we propose an algorithm to find the largest list of bibliographical references in the article. The improvement applied on our model results an increase in the model`s efficiency with an Accuracy equal to 85.89. And by testing our work, we are able to achieve 72.23{\%} as an average for the percentage of success in detecting bibliographical references' zone.
Guidelines and Framework for a Large Scale Arabic Diacritized Corpus (2016)

This paper presents the annotation guidelines developed as part of an effort to create a large scale manually diacritized corpus for various Arabic text genres. The target size of the annotated corpus is 2 million words. We summarize the guidelines and describe issues encountered during the training of the annotators. We also discuss the challenges posed by the complexity of the Arabic language and how they are addressed. Finally, we present the diacritization annotation procedure and detail the quality of the resulting annotations.
Applying the Cognitive Machine Translation Evaluation Approach to Arabic (2016)

The goal of the cognitive machine translation (MT) evaluation approach is to build classifiers which assign post-editing effort scores to new texts. The approach helps estimate fair compensation for post-editors in the translation industry by evaluating the cognitive difficulty of post-editing MT output. The approach counts the number of errors classified in different categories on the basis of how much cognitive effort they require in order to be corrected. In this paper, we present the results of applying an existing cognitive evaluation approach to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). We provide a comparison of the number of errors and categories of errors in three MSA texts of different MT quality (without any language-specific adaptation), as well as a comparison between MSA texts and texts from three Indo-European languages (Russian, Spanish, and Bulgarian), taken from a previous experiment. The results show how the error distributions change passing from the MSA texts of worse MT quality to MSA texts of better MT quality, as well as a similarity in distinguishing the texts of better MT quality for all four languages.
A Reading Comprehension Corpus for Machine Translation Evaluation (2016)

Effectively assessing Natural Language Processing output tasks is a challenge for research in the area. In the case of Machine Translation (MT), automatic metrics are usually preferred over human evaluation, given time and budget constraints. However, traditional automatic metrics (such as BLEU) are not reliable for absolute quality assessment of documents, often producing similar scores for documents translated by the same MT system. For scenarios where absolute labels are necessary for building models, such as document-level Quality Estimation, these metrics can not be fully trusted. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of reading comprehension tests based on machine translated documents, where we evaluate documents based on answers to questions by fluent speakers of the target language. We describe the process of creating such a resource, the experiment design and agreement between the test takers. Finally, we discuss ways to convert the reading comprehension test into document-level quality scores.
B2SG: a TOEFL-like Task for Portuguese (2016)

Resources such as WordNet are useful for NLP applications, but their manual construction consumes time and personnel, and frequently results in low coverage. One alternative is the automatic construction of large resources from corpora like distributional thesauri, containing semantically associated words. However, as they may contain noise, there is a strong need for automatic ways of evaluating the quality of the resulting resource. This paper introduces a gold standard that can aid in this task. The BabelNet-Based Semantic Gold Standard (B2SG) was automatically constructed based on BabelNet and partly evaluated by human judges. It consists of sets of tests that present one target word, one related word and three unrelated words. B2SG contains 2,875 validated relations: 800 for verbs and 2,075 for nouns; these relations are divided among synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy. They can be used as the basis for evaluating the accuracy of the similarity relations on distributional thesauri by comparing the proximity of the target word with the related and unrelated options and observing if the related word has the highest similarity value among them. As a case study two distributional thesauri were also developed: one using surface forms from a large (1.5 billion word) corpus and the other using lemmatized forms from a smaller (409 million word) corpus. Both distributional thesauri were then evaluated against B2SG, and the one using lemmatized forms performed slightly better.
MoBiL: A Hybrid Feature Set for Automatic Human Translation Quality Assessment (2016)

In this paper we introduce MoBiL, a hybrid Monolingual, Bilingual and Language modelling feature set and feature selection and evaluation framework. The set includes translation quality indicators that can be utilized to automatically predict the quality of human translations in terms of content adequacy and language fluency. We compare MoBiL with the QuEst baseline set by using them in classifiers trained with support vector machine and relevance vector machine learning algorithms on the same data set. We also report an experiment on feature selection to opt for fewer but more informative features from MoBiL. Our experiments show that classifiers trained on our feature set perform consistently better in predicting both adequacy and fluency than the classifiers trained on the baseline feature set. MoBiL also performs well when used with both support vector machine and relevance vector machine algorithms.
MARMOT: A Toolkit for Translation Quality Estimation at the Word Level (2016)

We present Marmot{\textasciitilde}{\textemdash} a new toolkit for quality estimation (QE) of machine translation output. Marmot contains utilities targeted at quality estimation at the word and phrase level. However, due to its flexibility and modularity, it can also be extended to work at the sentence level. In addition, it can be used as a framework for extracting features and learning models for many common natural language processing tasks. The tool has a set of state-of-the-art features for QE, and new features can easily be added. The tool is open-source and can be downloaded from \url{https://github.com/qe-team/marmot/}
RankDCG: Rank-Ordering Evaluation Measure (2016)

Ranking is used for a wide array of problems, most notably information retrieval (search). Kendall`s {\ensuremath{\tau}}, Average Precision, and nDCG are a few popular approaches to the evaluation of ranking. When dealing with problems such as user ranking or recommendation systems, all these measures suffer from various problems, including the inability to deal with elements of the same rank, inconsistent and ambiguous lower bound scores, and an inappropriate cost function. We propose a new measure, a modification of the popular nDCG algorithm, named rankDCG, that addresses these problems. We provide a number of criteria for any effective ranking algorithm and show that only rankDCG satisfies them all. Results are presented on constructed and real data sets. We release a publicly available rankDCG evaluation package.
Spanish Word Vectors from Wikipedia (2016)

Contents analisys from text data requires semantic representations that are difficult to obtain automatically, as they may require large handcrafted knowledge bases or manually annotated examples. Unsupervised autonomous methods for generating semantic representations are of greatest interest in face of huge volumes of text to be exploited in all kinds of applications. In this work we describe the generation and validation of semantic representations in the vector space paradigm for Spanish. The method used is GloVe (Pennington, 2014), one of the best performing reported methods , and vectors were trained over Spanish Wikipedia. The learned vectors evaluation is done in terms of word analogy and similarity tasks (Pennington, 2014; Baroni, 2014; Mikolov, 2013a). The vector set and a Spanish version for some widely used semantic relatedness tests are made publicly available.
Analyzing Pre-processing Settings for Urdu Single-document Extractive Summarization (2016)

Preprocessing is a preliminary step in many fields including IR and NLP. The effect of basic preprocessing settings on English for text summarization is well-studied. However, there is no such effort found for the Urdu language (with the best of our knowledge). In this study, we analyze the effect of basic preprocessing settings for single-document text summarization for Urdu, on a benchmark corpus using various experiments. The analysis is performed using the state-of-the-art algorithms for extractive summarization and the effect of stopword removal, lemmatization, and stemming is analyzed. Results showed that these pre-processing settings improve the results.
Semantic Annotation of the ACL Anthology Corpus for the Automatic Analysis of Scientific Literature (2016)

This paper describes the process of creating a corpus annotated for concepts and semantic relations in the scientific domain. A part of the ACL Anthology Corpus was selected for annotation, but the annotation process itself is not specific to the computational linguistics domain and could be applied to any scientific corpora. Concepts were identified and annotated fully automatically, based on a combination of terminology extraction and available ontological resources. A typology of semantic relations between concepts is also proposed. This typology, consisting of 18 domain-specific and 3 generic relations, is the result of a corpus-based investigation of the text sequences occurring between concepts in sentences. A sample of 500 abstracts from the corpus is currently being manually annotated with these semantic relations. Only explicit relations are taken into account, so that the data could serve to train or evaluate pattern-based semantic relation classification systems.
GATE-Time: Extraction of Temporal Expressions and Events (2016)

GATE is a widely used open-source solution for text processing with a large user community. It contains components for several natural language processing tasks. However, temporal information extraction functionality within GATE has been rather limited so far, despite being a prerequisite for many application scenarios in the areas of natural language processing and information retrieval. This paper presents an integrated approach to temporal information processing. We take state-of-the-art tools in temporal expression and event recognition and bring them together to form an openly-available resource within the GATE infrastructure. GATE-Time provides annotation in the form of TimeML events and temporal expressions complying with this mature ISO standard for temporal semantic annotation of documents. Major advantages of GATE-Time are (i) that it relies on HeidelTime for temporal tagging, so that temporal expressions can be extracted and normalized in multiple languages and across different domains, (ii) it includes a modern, fast event recognition and classification tool, and (iii) that it can be combined with different linguistic pre-processing annotations, and is thus not bound to license restricted preprocessing components.
Distributional Thesauri for Information Retrieval and vice versa (2016)

Distributional thesauri are useful in many tasks of Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we address the problem of building and evaluating such thesauri with the help of Information Retrieval (IR) concepts. Two main contributions are proposed. First, following the work of [8], we show how IR tools and concepts can be used with success to build a thesaurus. Through several experiments and by evaluating directly the results with reference lexicons, we show that some IR models outperform state-of-the-art systems. Secondly, we use IR as an applicative framework to indirectly evaluate the generated thesaurus. Here again, this task-based evaluation validates the IR approach used to build the thesaurus. Moreover, it allows us to compare these results with those from the direct evaluation framework used in the literature. The observed differences bring these evaluation habits into question.
Parallel Chinese-English Entities, Relations and Events Corpora (2016)

This paper introduces the parallel Chinese-English Entities, Relations and Events (ERE) corpora developed by Linguistic Data Consortium under the DARPA Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) Program. Original Chinese newswire and discussion forum documents are annotated for two versions of the ERE task. The texts are manually translated into English and then annotated for the same ERE tasks on the English translation, resulting in a rich parallel resource that has utility for performers within the DEFT program, for participants in NIST`s Knowledge Base Population evaluations, and for cross-language projection research more generally.