Articles

AbstractCreating language resources is expensive and time-consuming, and this forms a bottleneck in the development of language technology, for less-studied non-European languages in particular. The recent internet phenomenon of crowd-sourcing offers a cost-effective and potentially fast way of overcoming such language resource acquisition bottlenecks. We present a methodology that takes …...

AbstractIn the present paper we report on a recent effort that resulted in the establishment of a unique multimodal database, referred to as the PROMETHEUS database. This database was created in support of research and development activities, performed within the European Commission FP7 PROMETHEUS project, aiming at the creation of …...

AbstractIn previous work, we presented a preliminary study to identify paraphrases between technical and lay discourse types from medical corpora dedicated to the French language. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the same kinds of paraphrases as for French can be detected between English technical and lay discourse …...

AbstractIn this paper we present AhoTransf, a tool that enables analysis, visualization, modification and synthesis of speech. AhoTransf integrates a speech signal analysis model with a graphical user interface to allow visualization and modification of the parameters of the model. The synthesis capability allows hearing the modified signal thus providing …...

AbstractIn the POS tagging task, there are two kinds of statistical models: one is generative model, such as the HMM, the others are discriminative models, such as the Maximum Entropy Model (MEM). POS multi-tagging decoding method includes the N-best paths method and forward-backward method. In this paper, we use the …...

AbstractThis paper introduces the general features of Senso Comune, an open knowledge base for the Italian language, focusing on the interplay of lexical and ontological knowledge, and outlining our approach to conceptual knowledge elicitation. Senso Comune consists of a machine-readable lexicon constrained by an ontological infrastructure. The idea at the …...

AbstractThe idea that dictionaries are a good source for (computational) information has been around for a long while, and the extraction of taxonomic information from them is something that has been attempted several times. However, such information extraction was typically based on the systematic analysis of the text of a …...

AbstractIn ontology learning from texts, we have ontology-rich domains where we have large structured domain knowledge repositories or we have large general corpora with large general structured knowledge repositories such as WordNet (Miller, 1995). Ontology learning methods are more useful in ontology-poor domains. Yet, in these conditions, these methods have …...

AbstractHerein, we present the process of developing the first Hungarian Dependency TreeBank. First, short references are made to dependency grammars we considered important in the development of our Treebank. Second, mention is made of existing dependency corpora for other languages. Third, we present the steps of converting the Szeged Treebank …...

AbstractThe paper offers an overview of the key issues raised during the seven years’ activity of the Multilingual Question Answering Track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The general aim of the Multilingual Question Answering Track has been to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that …...

AbstractSpoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is a promising technology for enhancing the utility of spoken materials. After the spoken documents have been transcribed by using a Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) decoder, a text-based ad hoc retrieval method can be applied directly to the transcribed documents. However, recognition errors will …...

AbstractIn this paper, we present a system to aid human annotation of semantic information in the scope of the project AC/DC, called corte-e-costura. This system leverages on the human annotation effort, by providing the annotator with a simple system that applies rules incrementally. Our goal was twofold: first, to develop …...

AbstractThis paper describes the first TTS evaluation campaign designed for Spanish. Seven research institutions took part in the evaluation campaign and developed a voice from a common speech database provided by the organisation. Each participating team had a period of seven weeks to generate a voice. Next, a set of …...

AbstractIn this paper we describe a proof-of-concept for the bootstrapping of a Persian WordNet. This effort was motivated by previous work done at Stanford University on bootstrapping an Arabic WordNet using a parallel corpus and an English WordNet. The principle of that work is based on the premise that paradigmatic …...

AbstractThere is by now widespread agreement that the most realistic way to construct the large-scale commonsense knowledge repositories required by natural language and artificial intelligence applications is by letting machines learn such knowledge from large quantities of data, like humans do. A lot of attention has consequently been paid to …...

AbstractHuman language technologies (HLT) can play a vital role in bridging the digital divide and thus the HLT field has been recognised as a priority area by the South African government. We present our work on conducting a technology audit on the South African HLT landscape across the country’s eleven …...

AbstractThe intuition and basic hypothesis that this paper explores is that names are more characteristic of their language than common words are, and that a single name can have enough clues to confidently identify its language where random text of the same length wouldn't. To test this hypothesis, n-gramm modelling …...

AbstractExpert human input can contribute in various ways to facilitate automatic annotation of natural language text. For example, a part-of-speech tagger can be trained on labeled input provided offline by experts. In addition, expert input can be solicited by way of active learning to make the most of annotator expertise. …...

AbstractThis paper shows that a LAF/GrAF-based annotation schema can be used for the adequate representation of syntactic dependency structures possibly in many languages. We first argue that there are at least two types of textual units that can be annotated with dependency information: words/tokens and chunks/phrases. We especially focus on …...

AbstractConceptMapper is an open source tool we created for classifying mentions in an unstructured text document based on concept terminologies (dictionaries) and yielding named entities as output. It is implemented as a UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) annotator and is highly configurable: concepts can come from standardised or proprietary terminologies; …...