Articles

AbstractOntology population from text is becoming increasingly important for NLP applications. Ontologies in OWL format provide for a standardized means of modeling, querying, and reasoning over large knowledge bases. Populated from natural language texts, they offer significant advantages over traditional export formats, such as plain XML. The development of text …...

AbstractThis paper presents the results of a terminological work conducted by the authors on a Digital Archives Net of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in the field of Computer Science. In particular, the research tends to analyse the use of certain terms in Computer Science in order to verify …...

AbstractResource-poor languages may suffer from a lack of any of the basic resources that are fundamental to computational linguistics, including an adequate digital lexicon. Given the relatively small corpus of texts that exists for such languages, extending the lexicon presents a challenge. Languages with complex morphology present a special case, …...

AbstractThis study attempts to pinpoint the factors that restrict reliable word sense annotation, focusing on the influence of the number of senses annotators use and the semantic granularity of those senses. Both of these factors may be possible causes of low interannotator agreement (ITA) when tagging with fine-grained word senses, …...

AbstractWe describe results of a word sense annotation task using WordNet, involving half a dozen well-trained annotators on ten polysemous words for three parts of speech. One hundred sentences for each word were annotated. Annotators had the same level of training and experience, but interannotator agreement (IA) varied across words. …...

AbstractAs the data for more and more languages is finding its way into digital form, with an increasing amount of this data being posted to the Web, it has become possible to collect language data from the Web and create large multilingual resources, covering hundreds or even thousands of languages. …...

AbstractThis paper presents two corpora produced within the RPM2 project: a multi-document summarization corpus and a sentence compression corpus. Both corpora are in French. The first one is the only one we know in this language. It contains 20 topics with 20 documents each. A first set of 10 documents …...

AbstractOver the last several years, speech-based question answering (QA) has become very popular in contrast to pure search engine based approaches on a desktop. Open-domain QA systems are now much more powerful and precise, and they can be used in speech applications. Speech-based question answering systems often rely on predefined …...

AbstractI describe the construction of a corpus for research on relative clause extraposition in German based on the treebank TüBa-D/Z. I also define an annotation scheme for the relations between relative clauses and their antecedents which is added as a second annotation level to the syntactic trees. This additional annotation …...

AbstractIdentification of transliterations is aimed at enriching multilingual lexicons and improving performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications including Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and Machine Translation (MT). This paper describes work aimed at using the widely applied graphical models approach of ‘Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) to transliteration identification. …...

AbstractIn natural language relationships between entities can asserted within a single sentence or over many sentences in a document. Many information extraction systems are constrained to extracting binary relations that are asserted within a single sentence (single-sentence relations) and this limits the proportion of relations they can extract since those …...

AbstractThis paper gives guidelines of how to annotate Propbank instances using a dedicated editor, Jubilee. Propbank is a corpus in which the arguments of each verb predicate are annotated with their semantic roles in relation to the predicate. Propbank annotation also requires the choice of a sense ID for each …...

AbstractWe present an evaluation framework to enable developers of information seeking, transaction based spoken dialogue systems to compare the robustness of natural language understanding (NLU) approaches across varying levels of word error rate and contrasting domains. We develop statistical and semantic parsing based approaches to dialogue act identification and concept …...

AbstractA variety of methods exist for extracting terms and relations between terms from a corpus, each of them having strengths and weaknesses. Rather than just using the joint results, we apply different extraction methods in a way that the results of one method are input to another. This gives us …...

AbstractAvailability of labeled language resources, such as annotated corpora and domain dependent labeled language resources is crucial for experiments in the field of Natural Language Processing. Most often, due to lack of resources, manual verification and annotation of electronic text material is a prerequisite for the development of NLP tools. …...

AbstractRecent years have brought a significant growth in the volume of research in sentiment analysis, mostly on highly subjective text types (movie or product reviews). The main difference these texts have with news articles is that their target is clearly defined and unique across the text. Following different annotation efforts …...

AbstractLanguages are born, evolve and, eventually, die. During this evolution their spelling rules (and sometimes the syntactic and semantic ones) change, putting old documents out of use. In Portugal, a pair of political agreements with Brazil forced relevant changes on the way the Portuguese language is written. In this article …...

AbstractEcoLexicon, a multilingual knowledge resource on the environment, provides an internally coherent information system covering a wide range of specialized linguistic and conceptual needs. Data in our terminological knowledge base (TKB) are primarily hosted in a relational database which is now linked to an ontology in order to apply reasoning …...

AbstractThe EC-funded project DICIT developed distant-talking interfaces for interactive TV. The final DICIT prototype system processes multimodal user input by speech and remote control. It was designed to understand both natural language and command-and-control-style speech input. We conducted an evaluation campaign to examine the usability and performance of the prototype. …...

AbstractThis article discusses the treatment of collocations in the context of a long-term project on the development of multilingual NLP tools. Besides “classical” two-word collocations, we will focus on the case of complex collocations (3 words or more) for which a recursive design is presented in the form of collocation …...