ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploitation of Co-reference in Distributional Semantics (2016)

The aim of distributional semantics is to model the similarity of the meaning of words via the words they occur with. Thereby, it relies on the distributional hypothesis implying that similar words have similar contexts. Deducing meaning from the distribution of words is interesting as it can be done automatically on large amounts of freely available raw text. It is because of this convenience that most current state-of-the-art-models of distributional semantics operate on raw text, although there have been successful attempts to integrate other kinds of{\textemdash}e.g., syntactic{\textemdash}information to improve distributional semantic models. In contrast, less attention has been paid to semantic information in the research community. One reason for this is that the extraction of semantic information from raw text is a complex, elaborate matter and in great parts not yet satisfyingly solved. Recently, however, there have been successful attempts to integrate a certain kind of semantic information, i.e., co-reference. Two basically different kinds of information contributed by co-reference with respect to the distribution of words will be identified. We will then focus on one of these and examine its general potential to improve distributional semantic models as well as certain more specific hypotheses.
Adapting an Entity Centric Model for Portuguese Coreference Resolution (2016)

This paper presents the adaptation of an Entity Centric Model for Portuguese coreference resolution, considering 10 named entity categories. The model was evaluated on named e using the HAREM Portuguese corpus and the results are 81.0{\%} of precision and 58.3{\%} of recall overall, the resulting system is freely available
IMS HotCoref DE: A Data-driven Co-reference Resolver for German (2016)

This paper presents a data-driven co-reference resolution system for German that has been adapted from IMS HotCoref, a co-reference resolver for English. It describes the difficulties when resolving co-reference in German text, the adaptation process and the features designed to address linguistic challenges brought forth by German. We report performance on the reference dataset T{\"u}Ba-D/Z and include a post-task SemEval 2010 evaluation, showing that the resolver achieves state-of-the-art performance. We also include ablation experiments that indicate that integrating linguistic features increases results. The paper also describes the steps and the format necessary to use the resolver on new texts. The tool is freely available for download.
Coreference Annotation Scheme and Relation Types for Hindi (2016)

This paper describes a coreference annotation scheme, coreference annotation specific issues and their solutions through our proposed annotation scheme for Hindi. We introduce different co-reference relation types between continuous mentions of the same coreference chain such as {\textquotedblleft}Part-of{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}Function-value pair{\textquotedblright} etc. We used Jaccard similarity based Krippendorff{\textquoteleft}s' alpha to demonstrate consistency in annotation scheme, annotation and corpora. To ease the coreference annotation process, we built a semi-automatic Coreference Annotation Tool (CAT). We also provide statistics of coreference annotation on Hindi Dependency Treebank (HDTB).
Coreference in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (2016)

We present coreference annotation on parallel Czech-English texts of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT). The paper describes innovations made to PCEDT 2.0 concerning coreference, as well as coreference information already present there. We characterize the coreference annotation scheme, give the statistics and compare our annotation with the coreference annotation in Ontonotes and Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech. We also present the experiments made using this corpus to improve the alignment of coreferential expressions, which helps us to collect better statistics of correspondences between types of coreferential relations in Czech and English. The corpus released as PCEDT 2.0 Coref is publicly available.
Sieve-based Coreference Resolution in the Biomedical Domain (2016)

We describe challenges and advantages unique to coreference resolution in the biomedical domain, and a sieve-based architecture that leverages domain knowledge for both entity and event coreference resolution. Domain-general coreference resolution algorithms perform poorly on biomedical documents, because the cues they rely on such as gender are largely absent in this domain, and because they do not encode domain-specific knowledge such as the number and type of participants required in chemical reactions. Moreover, it is difficult to directly encode this knowledge into most coreference resolution algorithms because they are not rule-based. Our rule-based architecture uses sequentially applied hand-designed {\textquotedblleft}sieves{\textquotedblright}, with the output of each sieve informing and constraining subsequent sieves. This architecture provides a 3.2{\%} increase in throughput to our Reach event extraction system with precision parallel to that of the stricter system that relies solely on syntactic patterns for extraction.
Annotating Characters in Literary Corpora: A Scheme, the CHARLES Tool, and an Annotated Novel (2016)

Characters form the focus of various studies of literary works, including social network analysis, archetype induction, and plot comparison. The recent rise in the computational modelling of literary works has produced a proportional rise in the demand for character-annotated literary corpora. However, automatically identifying characters is an open problem and there is low availability of literary texts with manually labelled characters. To address the latter problem, this work presents three contributions: (1) a comprehensive scheme for manually resolving mentions to characters in texts. (2) A novel collaborative annotation tool, CHARLES (CHAracter Resolution Label-Entry System) for character annotation and similiar cross-document tagging tasks. (3) The character annotations resulting from a pilot study on the novel Pride and Prejudice, demonstrating the scheme and tool facilitate the efficient production of high-quality annotations. We expect this work to motivate the further production of annotated literary corpora to help meet the demand of the community.
Error Typology and Remediation Strategies for Requirements Written in English by Non-Native Speakers (2016)

In most international industries, English is the main language of communication for technical documents. These documents are designed to be as unambiguous as possible for their users. For international industries based in non-English speaking countries, the professionals in charge of writing requirements are often non-native speakers of English, who rarely receive adequate training in the use of English for this task. As a result, requirements can contain a relatively large diversity of lexical and grammatical errors, which are not eliminated by the use of guidelines from controlled languages. This article investigates the distribution of errors in a corpus of requirements written in English by native speakers of French. Errors are defined on the basis of grammaticality and acceptability principles, and classified using comparable categories. Results show a high proportion of errors in the Noun Phrase, notably through modifier stacking, and errors consistent with simplification strategies. Comparisons with similar corpora in other genres reveal the specificity of the distribution of errors in requirements. This research also introduces possible applied uses, in the form of strategies for the automatic detection of errors, and in-person training provided by certification boards in requirements authoring.
Improving POS Tagging of German Learner Language in a Reading Comprehension Scenario (2016)

We present a novel method to automatically improve the accurracy of part-of-speech taggers on learner language. The key idea underlying our approach is to exploit the structure of a typical language learner task and automatically induce POS information for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we add manual POS and normalization information to an existing language learner corpus. Our evaluation shows an increase in accurracy from 72.4{\%} to 81.5{\%} on OOV words.
SweLL on the rise: Swedish Learner Language corpus for European Reference Level studies (2016)

We present a new resource for Swedish, SweLL, a corpus of Swedish Learner essays linked to learners' performance according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). SweLL consists of three subcorpora {\textemdash} SpIn, SW1203 and Tisus, collected from three different educational establishments. The common metadata for all subcorpora includes age, gender, native languages, time of residence in Sweden, type of written task. Depending on the subcorpus, learner texts may contain additional information, such as text genres, topics, grades. Five of the six CEFR levels are represented in the corpus: A1, A2, B1, B2 and C1 comprising in total 339 essays. C2 level is not included since courses at C2 level are not offered. The work flow consists of collection of essays and permits, essay digitization and registration, meta-data annotation, automatic linguistic annotation. Inter-rater agreement is presented on the basis of SW1203 subcorpus. The work on SweLL is still ongoing with more that 100 essays waiting in the pipeline. This article both describes the resource and the {\textquotedblleft}how-to{\textquotedblright} behind the compilation of SweLL.
SVALex: a CEFR-graded Lexical Resource for Swedish Foreign and Second Language Learners (2016)

The paper introduces SVALex, a lexical resource primarily aimed at learners and teachers of Swedish as a foreign and second language that describes the distribution of 15,681 words and expressions across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The resource is based on a corpus of coursebook texts, and thus describes receptive vocabulary learners are exposed to during reading activities, as opposed to productive vocabulary they use when speaking or writing. The paper describes the methodology applied to create the list and to estimate the frequency distribution. It also discusses some characteristics of the resulting resource and compares it to other lexical resources for Swedish. An interesting feature of this resource is the possibility to separate the wheat from the chaff, identifying the core vocabulary at each level, i.e. vocabulary shared by several coursebook writers at each level, from peripheral vocabulary which is used by the minority of the coursebook writers.
Detecting Word Usage Errors in Chinese Sentences for Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language (2016)

Automated grammatical error detection, which helps users improve their writing, is an important application in NLP. Recently more and more people are learning Chinese, and an automated error detection system can be helpful for the learners. This paper proposes n-gram features, dependency count features, dependency bigram features, and single-character features to determine if a Chinese sentence contains word usage errors, in which a word is written as a wrong form or the word selection is inappropriate. With marking potential errors on the level of sentence segments, typically delimited by punctuation marks, the learner can try to correct the problems without the assistant of a language teacher. Experiments on the HSK corpus show that the classifier combining all sets of features achieves an accuracy of 0.8423. By utilizing certain combination of the sets of features, we can construct a system that favors precision or recall. The best precision we achieve is 0.9536, indicating that our system is reliable and seldom produces misleading results.
LibN3L:A Lightweight Package for Neural NLP (2016)

We present a light-weight machine learning tool for NLP research. The package supports operations on both discrete and dense vectors, facilitating implementation of linear models as well as neural models. It provides several basic layers which mainly aims for single-layer linear and non-linear transformations. By using these layers, we can conveniently implement linear models and simple neural models. Besides, this package also integrates several complex layers by composing those basic layers, such as RNN, Attention Pooling, LSTM and gated RNN. Those complex layers can be used to implement deep neural models directly.
Evaluating Lexical Simplification and Vocabulary Knowledge for Learners of French: Possibilities of Using the FLELex Resource (2016)

This study examines two possibilities of using the FLELex graded lexicon for the automated assessment of text complexity in French as a foreign language learning. From the lexical frequency distributions described in FLELex, we derive a single level of difficulty for each word in a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts. We then use this data to automatically address the lexical complexity of texts in two ways. On the one hand, we evaluate the degree of lexical simplification in manually simplified texts with respect to their original version. Our results show a significant simplification effect, both in the case of French narratives simplified for non-native readers and in the case of simplified Wikipedia texts. On the other hand, we define a predictive model which identifies the number of words in a text that are expected to be known at a particular learning level. We assess the accuracy with which these predictions are able to capture actual word knowledge as reported by Dutch-speaking learners of French. Our study shows that although the predictions seem relatively accurate in general (87.4{\%} to 92.3{\%}), they do not yet seem to cover the learners' lack of knowledge very well.
A Shared Task for Spoken CALL? (2016)

We argue that the field of spoken CALL needs a shared task in order to facilitate comparisons between different groups and methodologies, and describe a concrete example of such a task, based on data collected from a speech-enabled online tool which has been used to help young Swiss German teens practise skills in English conversation. Items are prompt-response pairs, where the prompt is a piece of German text and the response is a recorded English audio file. The task is to label pairs as {\textquotedblleft}accept{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}reject{\textquotedblright}, accepting responses which are grammatically and linguistically correct to match a set of hidden gold standard answers as closely as possible. Initial resources are provided so that a scratch system can be constructed with a minimal investment of effort, and in particular without necessarily using a speech recogniser. Training data for the task will be released in June 2016, and test data in January 2017.
Joining-in-type Humanoid Robot Assisted Language Learning System (2016)

Dialogue robots are attractive to people, and in language learning systems, they motivate learners and let them practice conversational skills in more realistic environment. However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) of the second language (L2) learners is still a challenge, because their speech contains not just pronouncing, lexical, grammatical errors, but is sometimes totally disordered. Hence, we propose a novel robot assisted language learning (RALL) system using two robots, one as a teacher and the other as an advanced learner. The system is designed to simulate multiparty conversation, expecting implicit learning and enhancement of predictability of learners' utterance through an alignment similar to {\textquotedblleft}interactive alignment{\textquotedblright}, which is observed in human-human conversation. We collected a database with the prototypes, and measured how much the alignment phenomenon observed in the database with initial analysis.
OSMAN \textemdash A Novel Arabic Readability Metric (2016)

We present OSMAN (Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives) - a novel open source Arabic readability metric and tool. It allows researchers to calculate readability for Arabic text with and without diacritics. OSMAN is a modified version of the conventional readability formulas such as Flesch and Fog. In our work we introduce a novel approach towards counting short, long and stress syllables in Arabic which is essential for judging readability of Arabic narratives. We also introduce an additional factor called {\textquotedblleft}Faseeh{\textquotedblright} which considers aspects of script usually dropped in informal Arabic writing. To evaluate our methods we used Spearman`s correlation metric to compare text readability for 73,000 parallel sentences from English and Arabic UN documents. The Arabic sentences were written with the absence of diacritics and in order to count the number of syllables we added the diacritics in using an open source tool called Mishkal. The results show that OSMAN readability formula correlates well with the English ones making it a useful tool for researchers and educators working with Arabic text.
Evaluating Interactive System Adaptation (2016)

Enabling users of intelligent systems to enhance the system performance by providing feedback on their errors is an important need. However, the ability of systems to learn from user feedback is difficult to evaluate in an objective and comparative way. Indeed, the involvement of real users in the adaptation process is an impediment to objective evaluation. This issue can be solved by using an oracle approach, where users are simulated by oracles having access to the reference test data. Another difficulty is to find a meaningful metric despite the fact that system improvements depend on the feedback provided and on the system itself. A solution is to measure the minimal amount of information needed to correct all system errors. It can be shown that for any well defined non interactive task, the interactively supervised version of the task can be evaluated by combining such an oracle-based approach and a minimum supervision rate metric. This new evaluation protocol for adaptive systems is not only expected to drive progress for such systems, but also to pave the way for a specialisation of actors along the value chain of their technological development.
Complementarity, F-score, and NLP Evaluation (2016)

This paper addresses the problem of quantifying the differences between entity extraction systems, where in general only a small proportion a document should be selected. Comparing overall accuracy is not very useful in these cases, as small differences in accuracy may correspond to huge differences in selections over the target minority class. Conventionally, one may use per-token complementarity to describe these differences, but it is not very useful when the set is heavily skewed. In such situations, which are common in information retrieval and entity recognition, metrics like precision and recall are typically used to describe performance. However, precision and recall fail to describe the differences between sets of objects selected by different decision strategies, instead just describing the proportional amount of correct and incorrect objects selected. This paper presents a method for measuring complementarity for precision, recall and F-score, quantifying the difference between entity extraction approaches.
DRANZIERA: An Evaluation Protocol For Multi-Domain Opinion Mining (2016)

Opinion Mining is a topic which attracted a lot of interest in the last years. By observing the literature, it is often hard to replicate system evaluation due to the unavailability of the data used for the evaluation or to the lack of details about the protocol used in the campaign. In this paper, we propose an evaluation protocol, called DRANZIERA, composed of a multi-domain dataset and guidelines allowing both to evaluate opinion mining systems in different contexts (Closed, Semi-Open, and Open) and to compare them to each other and to a number of baselines.
Evaluating a Topic Modelling Approach to Measuring Corpus Similarity (2016)

Web corpora are often constructed automatically, and their contents are therefore often not well understood. One technique for assessing the composition of such a web corpus is to empirically measure its similarity to a reference corpus whose composition is known. In this paper we evaluate a number of measures of corpus similarity, including a method based on topic modelling which has not been previously evaluated for this task. To evaluate these methods we use known-similarity corpora that have been previously used for this purpose, as well as a number of newly-constructed known-similarity corpora targeting differences in genre, topic, time, and region. Our findings indicate that, overall, the topic modelling approach did not improve on a chi-square method that had previously been found to work well for measuring corpus similarity.
User, who art thou? User Profiling for Oral Corpus Platforms (2016)

This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.
Building a Corpus of Errors and Quality in Machine Translation: Experiments on Error Impact (2016)

In this paper we describe a corpus of automatic translations annotated with both error type and quality. The 300 sentences that we have selected were generated by Google Translate, Systran and two in-house Machine Translation systems that use Moses technology. The errors present on the translations were annotated with an error taxonomy that divides errors in five main linguistic categories (Orthography, Lexis, Grammar, Semantics and Discourse), reflecting the language level where the error is located. After the error annotation process, we accessed the translation quality of each sentence using a four point comprehension scale from 1 to 5. Both tasks of error and quality annotation were performed by two different annotators, achieving good levels of inter-annotator agreement. The creation of this corpus allowed us to use it as training data for a translation quality classifier. We concluded on error severity by observing the outputs of two machine learning classifiers: a decision tree and a regression model.
Evaluating the Readability of Text Simplification Output for Readers with Cognitive Disabilities (2016)

This paper presents an approach for automatic evaluation of the readability of text simplification output for readers with cognitive disabilities. First, we present our work towards the development of the EasyRead corpus, which contains easy-to-read documents created especially for people with cognitive disabilities. We then compare the EasyRead corpus to the simplified output contained in the LocalNews corpus (Feng, 2009), the accessibility of which has been evaluated through reading comprehension experiments including 20 adults with mild intellectual disability. This comparison is made on the basis of 13 disability-specific linguistic features. The comparison reveals that there are no major differences between the two corpora, which shows that the EasyRead corpus is to a similar reading level as the user-evaluated texts. We also discuss the role of Simple Wikipedia (Zhu et al., 2010) as a widely-used accessibility benchmark, in light of our finding that it is significantly more complex than both the EasyRead and the LocalNews corpora.