ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO): Application and Evaluation (2016)

This paper presents the Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO), a manually constructed resource which formalizes the pre and post situations of events and the roles of the entities affected by an event. The ontology is built on top of existing resources such as WordNet, SUMO and FrameNet. The ontology is injected to the Predicate Matrix, a resource that integrates predicate and role information from amongst others FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank, NomBank and WordNet. We illustrate how these resources are used on large document collections to detect information that otherwise would have remained implicit. The ontology is evaluated on two aspects: recall and precision based on a manually annotated corpus and secondly, on the quality of the knowledge inferred by the situation assertions in the ontology. Evaluation results on the quality of the system show that 50{\%} of the events typed and enriched with ESO assertions are correct.
Combining Ontologies and Neural Networks for Analyzing Historical Language Varieties. A Case Study in Middle Low German (2016)

In this paper, we describe experiments on the morphosyntactic annotation of historical language varieties for the example of Middle Low German (MLG), the official language of the German Hanse during the Middle Ages and a dominant language around the Baltic Sea by the time. To our best knowledge, this is the first experiment in automatically producing morphosyntactic annotations for Middle Low German, and accordingly, no part-of-speech (POS) tagset is currently agreed upon. In our experiment, we illustrate how ontology-based specifications of projected annotations can be employed to circumvent this issue: Instead of training and evaluating against a given tagset, we decomponse it into independent features which are predicted independently by a neural network. Using consistency constraints (axioms) from an ontology, then, the predicted feature probabilities are decoded into a sound ontological representation. Using these representations, we can finally bootstrap a POS tagset capturing only morphosyntactic features which could be reliably predicted. In this way, our approach is capable to optimize precision and recall of morphosyntactic annotations simultaneously with bootstrapping a tagset rather than performing iterative cycles.
Ecological Gestures for HRI: the GEE Corpus (2016)

As part of a human-robot interaction project, we are interested by gestural modality as one of many ways to communicate. In order to develop a relevant gesture recognition system associated to a smart home butler robot. Our methodology is based on an IQ game-like Wizard of Oz experiment to collect spontaneous and implicitly produced gestures in an ecological context. During the experiment, the subject has to use non-verbal cues (i.e. gestures) to interact with a robot that is the referee. The subject is unaware that his gestures will be the focus of our study. In the second part of the experiment, we asked the subjects to do the gestures he had produced in the experiment, those are the explicit gestures. The implicit gestures are compared with explicitly produced ones to determine a relevant ontology. This preliminary qualitative analysis will be the base to build a big data corpus in order to optimize acceptance of the gesture dictionary in coherence with the {\textquotedblleft}socio-affective glue{\textquotedblright} dynamics.
A Taxonomy of Spanish Nouns, a Statistical Algorithm to Generate it and its Implementation in Open Source Code (2016)

In this paper we describe our work in progress in the automatic development of a taxonomy of Spanish nouns, we offer the Perl implementation we have so far, and we discuss the different problems that still need to be addressed. We designed a statistically-based taxonomy induction algorithm consisting of a combination of different strategies not involving explicit linguistic knowledge. Being all quantitative, the strategies we present are however of different nature. Some of them are based on the computation of distributional similarity coefficients which identify pairs of sibling words or co-hyponyms, while others are based on asymmetric co-occurrence and identify pairs of parent-child words or hypernym-hyponym relations. A decision making process is then applied to combine the results of the previous steps, and finally connect lexical units to a basic structure containing the most general categories of the language. We evaluate the quality of the taxonomy both manually and also using Spanish Wordnet as a gold-standard. We estimate an average of 89.07{\%} precision and 25.49{\%} recall considering only the results which the algorithm presents with high degree of certainty, or 77.86{\%} precision and 33.72{\%} recall considering all results.
FOLK-Gold \textemdash A Gold Standard for Part-of-Speech-Tagging of Spoken German (2016)

In this paper, we present a GOLD standard of part-of-speech tagged transcripts of spoken German. The GOLD standard data consists of four annotation layers {\textemdash} transcription (modified orthography), normalization (standard orthography), lemmatization and POS tags {\textemdash} all of which have undergone careful manual quality control. It comes with guidelines for the manual POS annotation of transcripts of German spoken data and an extended version of the STTS (Stuttgart T{\"u}bingen Tagset) which accounts for phenomena typically found in spontaneous spoken German. The GOLD standard was developed on the basis of the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, FOLK, and is, to our knowledge, the first such dataset based on a wide variety of spontaneous and authentic interaction types. It can be used as a basis for further development of language technology and corpus linguistic applications for German spoken language.
Fast and Robust POS tagger for Arabic Tweets Using Agreement-based Bootstrapping (2016)

Part-of-Speech(POS) tagging is a key step in many NLP algorithms. However, tweets are difficult to POS tag because they are short, are not always written maintaining formal grammar and proper spelling, and abbreviations are often used to overcome their restricted lengths. Arabic tweets also show a further range of linguistic phenomena such as usage of different dialects, romanised Arabic and borrowing foreign words. In this paper, we present an evaluation and a detailed error analysis of state-of-the-art POS taggers for Arabic when applied to Arabic tweets. On the basis of this analysis, we combine normalisation and external knowledge to handle the domain noisiness and exploit bootstrapping to construct extra training data in order to improve POS tagging for Arabic tweets. Our results show significant improvements over the performance of a number of well-known taggers for Arabic.
Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging in German and Latin: A Comparison and a Survey of the State-of-the-art (2016)

This paper relates to the challenge of morphological tagging and lemmatization in morphologically rich languages by example of German and Latin. We focus on the question what a practitioner can expect when using state-of-the-art solutions out of the box. Moreover, we contrast these with old(er) methods and implementations for POS tagging. We examine to what degree recent efforts in tagger development are reflected by improved accuracies {\textemdash} and at what cost, in terms of training and processing time. We also conduct in-domain vs. out-domain evaluation. Out-domain evaluations are particularly insightful because the distribution of the data which is being tagged by a user will typically differ from the distribution on which the tagger has been trained. Furthermore, two lemmatization techniques are evaluated. Finally, we compare pipeline tagging vs. a tagging approach that acknowledges dependencies between inflectional categories.
TLT-CRF: A Lexicon-supported Morphological Tagger for Latin Based on Conditional Random Fields (2016)

We present a morphological tagger for Latin, called TTLab Latin Tagger based on Conditional Random Fields (TLT-CRF) which uses a large Latin lexicon. Beyond Part of Speech (PoS), TLT-CRF tags eight inflectional categories of verbs, adjectives or nouns. It utilizes a statistical model based on CRFs together with a rule interpreter that addresses scenarios of sparse training data. We present results of evaluating TLT-CRF to answer the question what can be learnt following the paradigm of 1st order CRFs in conjunction with a large lexical resource and a rule interpreter. Furthermore, we investigate the contigency of representational features and targeted parts of speech to learn about selective features.
Cross-lingual and Supervised Models for Morphosyntactic Annotation: a Comparison on Romanian (2016)

Because of the small size of Romanian corpora, the performance of a PoS tagger or a dependency parser trained with the standard supervised methods fall far short from the performance achieved in most languages. That is why, we apply state-of-the-art methods for cross-lingual transfer on Romanian tagging and parsing, from English and several Romance languages. We compare the performance with monolingual systems trained with sets of different sizes and establish that training on a few sentences in target language yields better results than transferring from large datasets in other languages.
Corpus vs. Lexicon Supervision in Morphosyntactic Tagging: the Case of Slovene (2016)

In this paper we present a tagger developed for inflectionally rich languages for which both a training corpus and a lexicon are available. We do not constrain the tagger by the lexicon entries, allowing both for lexicon incompleteness and noisiness. By using the lexicon indirectly through features we allow for known and unknown words to be tagged in the same manner. We test our tagger on Slovene data, obtaining a 25{\%} error reduction of the best previous results both on known and unknown words. Given that Slovene is, in comparison to some other Slavic languages, a well-resourced language, we perform experiments on the impact of token (corpus) vs. type (lexicon) supervision, obtaining useful insights in how to balance the effort of extending resources to yield better tagging results.
Challenges and Solutions for Consistent Annotation of Vietnamese Treebank (2016)

Treebanks are important resources for researchers in natural language processing, speech recognition, theoretical linguistics, etc. To strengthen the automatic processing of the Vietnamese language, a Vietnamese treebank has been built. However, the quality of this treebank is not satisfactory and is a possible source for the low performance of Vietnamese language processing. We have been building a new treebank for Vietnamese with about 40,000 sentences annotated with three layers: word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and bracketing. In this paper, we describe several challenges of Vietnamese language and how we solve them in developing annotation guidelines. We also present our methods to improve the quality of the annotation guidelines and ensure annotation accuracy and consistency. Experiment results show that inter-annotator agreement ratios and accuracy are higher than 90{\%} which is satisfactory.
Correcting Errors in a Treebank Based on Tree Mining (2016)

This paper provides a new method to correct annotation errors in a treebank. The previous error correction method constructs a pseudo parallel corpus where incorrect partial parse trees are paired with correct ones, and extracts error correction rules from the parallel corpus. By applying these rules to a treebank, the method corrects errors. However, this method does not achieve wide coverage of error correction. To achieve wide coverage, our method adopts a different approach. In our method, we consider that an infrequent pattern which can be transformed to a frequent one is an annotation error pattern. Based on a tree mining technique, our method seeks such infrequent tree patterns, and constructs error correction rules each of which consists of an infrequent pattern and a corresponding frequent pattern. We conducted an experiment using the Penn Treebank. We obtained 1,987 rules which are not constructed by the previous method, and the rules achieved good precision.
4Couv: A New Treebank for French (2016)

The question of the type of text used as primary data in treebanks is of certain importance. First, it has an influence at the discourse level: an article is not organized in the same way as a novel or a technical document. Moreover, it also has consequences in terms of semantic interpretation: some types of texts can be easier to interpret than others. We present in this paper a new type of treebank which presents the particularity to answer to specific needs of experimental linguistic. It is made of short texts (book backcovers) that presents a strong coherence in their organization and can be rapidly interpreted. This type of text is adapted to short reading sessions, making it easy to acquire physiological data (e.g. eye movement, electroencepholagraphy). Such a resource offers reliable data when looking for correlations between computational models and human language processing.
CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM - A Corpus of Grammatical Dependencies for Portuguese (2016)

This paper presents a new linguistic resource for the study and computational processing of Portuguese. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM is a corpus of Portuguese news text, accurately manually annotated with a wide range of linguistic information (morpho-syntax, named-entities, syntactic function and semantic roles), making it an invaluable resource specially for the development and evaluation of data-driven natural language processing tools. The corpus is under active development, reaching 4,000 sentences in its current version. The paper also reports on the training and evaluation of a dependency parser over this corpus. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM is freely-available for research purposes through META-SHARE.
Estonian Dependency Treebank: from Constraint Grammar tagset to Universal Dependencies (2016)

This paper presents the first version of Estonian Universal Dependencies Treebank which has been semi-automatically acquired from Estonian Dependency Treebank and comprises ca 400,000 words (ca 30,000 sentences) representing the genres of fiction, newspapers and scientific writing. Article analyses the differences between two annotation schemes and the conversion procedure to Universal Dependencies format. The conversion has been conducted by manually created Constraint Grammar transfer rules. As the rules enable to consider unbounded context, include lexical information and both flat and tree structure features at the same time, the method has proved to be reliable and flexible enough to handle most of transformations. The automatic conversion procedure achieved LAS 95.2{\%}, UAS 96.3{\%} and LA 98.4{\%}. If punctuation marks were excluded from the calculations, we observed LAS 96.4{\%}, UAS 97.7{\%} and LA 98.2{\%}. Still the refinement of the guidelines and methodology is needed in order to re-annotate some syntactic phenomena, e.g. inter-clausal relations. Although automatic rules usually make quite a good guess even in obscure conditions, some relations should be checked and annotated manually after the main conversion.
The Universal Dependencies Treebank of Spoken Slovenian (2016)

This paper presents the construction of an open-source dependency treebank of spoken Slovenian, the first syntactically annotated collection of spontaneous speech in Slovenian. The treebank has been manually annotated using the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme, a one-layer syntactic annotation scheme with a high degree of cross-modality, cross-framework and cross-language interoperability. In this original application of the scheme to spoken language transcripts, we address a wide spectrum of syntactic particularities in speech, either by extending the scope of application of existing universal labels or by proposing new speech-specific extensions. The initial analysis of the resulting treebank and its comparison with the written Slovenian UD treebank confirms significant syntactic differences between the two language modalities, with spoken data consisting of shorter and more elliptic sentences, less and simpler nominal phrases, and more relations marking disfluencies, interaction, deixis and modality.
Introducing the Asian Language Treebank (ALT) (2016)

This paper introduces the ALT project initiated by the Advanced Speech Translation Research and Development Promotion Center (ASTREC), NICT, Kyoto, Japan. The aim of this project is to accelerate NLP research for Asian languages such as Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Laos, Malay, Myanmar, Philippine, Thai and Vietnamese. The original resource for this project was English articles that were randomly selected from Wikinews. The project has so far created a corpus for Myanmar and will extend in scope to include other languages in the near future. A 20000-sentence corpus of Myanmar that has been manually translated from an English corpus has been word segmented, word aligned, part-of-speech tagged and constituency parsed by human annotators. In this paper, we present the implementation steps for creating the treebank in detail, including a description of the ALT web-based treebanking tool. Moreover, we report statistics on the annotation quality of the Myanmar treebank created so far.
Universal Dependencies for Norwegian (2016)

This article describes the conversion of the Norwegian Dependency Treebank to the Universal Dependencies scheme. This paper details the mapping of PoS tags, morphological features and dependency relations and provides a description of the structural changes made to NDT analyses in order to make it compliant with the UD guidelines. We further present PoS tagging and dependency parsing experiments which report first results for the processing of the converted treebank. The full converted treebank was made available with the 1.2 release of the UD treebanks.
Fostering the Next Generation of European Language Technology: Recent Developments \textemdash Emerging Initiatives \textemdash Challenges and Opportunities (2016)

META-NET is a European network of excellence, founded in 2010, that consists of 60 research centres in 34 European countries. One of the key visions and goals of META-NET is a truly multilingual Europe, which is substantially supported and realised through language technologies. In this article we provide an overview of recent developments around the multilingual Europe topic, we also describe recent and upcoming events as well as recent and upcoming strategy papers. Furthermore, we provide overviews of two new emerging initiatives, the CEF.AT and ELRC activity on the one hand and the Cracking the Language Barrier federation on the other. The paper closes with several suggested next steps in order to address the current challenges and to open up new opportunities.
Yes, We Care! Results of the Ethics and Natural Language Processing Surveys (2016)

We present here the context and results of two surveys (a French one and an international one) concerning Ethics and NLP, which we designed and conducted between June and September 2015. These surveys follow other actions related to raising concern for ethics in our community, including a Journ{\'e}e d'{\'e}tudes, a workshop and the Ethics and Big Data Charter. The concern for ethics shows to be quite similar in both surveys, despite a few differences which we present and discuss. The surveys also lead to think there is a growing awareness in the field concerning ethical issues, which translates into a willingness to get involved in ethics-related actions, to debate about the topic and to see ethics be included in major conferences themes. We finally discuss the limits of the surveys and the means of action we consider for the future. The raw data from the two surveys are freely available online.
Open Data Vocabularies for Assigning Usage Rights to Data Resources from Translation Projects (2016)

An assessment of the intellectual property requirements for data used in machine-aided translation is provided based on a recent EC-funded legal review. This is compared against the capabilities offered by current linked open data standards from the W3C for publishing and sharing translation memories from translation projects, and proposals for adequately addressing the intellectual property needs of stakeholders in translation projects using open data vocabularies are suggested.
Language Resource Citation: the ISLRN Dissemination and Further Developments (2016)

This article presents the latest dissemination activities and technical developments that were carried out for the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) service. It also recalls the main principle and submission process for providers to obtain their 13-digit ISLRN identifier. Up to March 2016, 2100 Language Resources were allocated an ISLRN number, not only ELRA`s and LDC`s catalogued Language Resources, but also the ones from other important organisations like the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Resource Management Agency (RMA) who expressed their strong support to this initiative. In the research field, not only assigning a unique identification number is important, but also referring to a Language Resource as an object \textit{per se} (like publications) has now become an obvious requirement. The ISLRN could also become an important parameter to be considered to compute a Language Resource Impact Factor (LRIF) in order to recognize the merits of the producers of Language Resources. Integrating the ISLRN number into a LR-oriented bibliographical reference is thus part of the objective. The idea is to make use of a BibTeX entry that would take into account Language Resources items, including ISLRN.The ISLRN being a requested field within the LREC 2016 submission, we expect that several other LRs will be allocated an ISLRN number by the conference date. With this expansion, this number aims to be a spreadly-used LR citation instrument within works referring to LRs.
Trends in HLT Research: A Survey of LDC`s Data Scholarship Program (2016)

Since its inception in 2010, the Linguistic Data Consortium`s data scholarship program has awarded no cost grants in data to 64 recipients from 26 countries. A survey of the twelve cycles to date {\textemdash} two awards each in the Fall and Spring semesters from Fall 2010 through Spring 2016 {\textemdash} yields an interesting view into graduate program research trends in human language technology and related fields and the particular data sets deemed important to support that research. The survey also reveals regions in which such activity appears to be on a rise, including in Arabic-speaking regions and portions of the Americas and Asia.
Tweeting and Being Ironic in the Debate about a Political Reform: the French Annotated Corpus TWitter-MariagePourTous (2016)

The paper introduces a new annotated French data set for Sentiment Analysis, which is a currently missing resource. It focuses on the collection from Twitter of data related to the socio-political debate about the reform of the bill for wedding in France. The design of the annotation scheme is described, which extends a polarity label set by making available tags for marking target semantic areas and figurative language devices. The annotation process is presented and the disagreement discussed, in particular, in the perspective of figurative language use and in that of the semantic oriented annotation, which are open challenges for NLP systems.
Towards a Corpus of Violence Acts in Arabic Social Media (2016)

In this paper we present a new corpus of Arabic tweets that mention some form of violent event, developed to support the automatic identification of Human Rights Abuse. The dataset was manually labelled for seven classes of violence using crowdsourcing.