Thematic Annotation: extracting concepts out of documents

Contrarily to standard approaches to topic annotation, the technique used in this work does not centrally rely on some sort of -- possibly statistical -- keyword extraction. In fact, the proposed annotation algorithm uses a large scale semantic database -- the EDR Electronic Dictionary -- that provides a concept hierarchy based on hyponym and hypernym relations. This concept hierarchy is used to generate a synthetic representation of the document by aggregating the words present in topically homogeneous document segments into a set of concepts best preserving the document's content. This new extraction technique uses an unexplored approach to topic selection. Instead of using semantic similarity measures based on a semantic resource, the later is processed to extract the part of the conceptual hierarchy relevant to the document content. Then this conceptual hierarchy is searched to extract the most relevant set of concepts to represent the topics discussed in the document. Notice that this algorithm is able to extract generic concepts that are not directly present in the document.Comment: Technical report EPFL/LIA. 81 pages, 16 figure

Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy: An Information-Based Measure and its Application to Problems of Ambiguity in Natural Language

This article presents a measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy based on the notion of shared information content. Experimental evaluation against a benchmark set of human similarity judgments demonstrates that the measure performs better than the traditional edge-counting approach. The article presents algorithms that take advantage of taxonomic similarity in resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguity, along with experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness

Incorporating semantic and syntactic information into document representation for document clustering

Document clustering is a widely used strategy for information retrieval and text data mining. In traditional document clustering systems, documents are represented as a bag of independent words. In this project, we propose to enrich the representation of a document by incorporating semantic information and syntactic information. Semantic analysis and syntactic analysis are performed on the raw text to identify this information. A detailed survey of current research in natural language processing, syntactic analysis, and semantic analysis is provided. Our experimental results demonstrate that incorporating semantic information and syntactic information can improve the performance of our document clustering system for most of our data sets. A statistically significant improvement can be achieved when we combine both syntactic and semantic information. Our experimental results using compound words show that using only compound words does not improve the clustering performance for our data sets. When the compound words are combined with original single words, the combined feature set gets slightly better performance for most data sets. But this improvement is not statistically significant. In order to select the best clustering algorithm for our document clustering system, a comparison of several widely used clustering algorithms is performed. Although the bisecting K-means method has advantages when working with large datasets, a traditional hierarchical clustering algorithm still achieves the best performance for our small datasets

The Acquisition Of Lexical Knowledge From The Web For Aspects Of Semantic Interpretation

This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in semantic interpretation algorithms. The goal is to increase accuracy over other automatic semantic interpretation systems, and in turn enable stronger real world applications such as machine translation, advanced Web search, sentiment analysis, and question answering. The major contributions of this dissertation consist of two methods of acquiring lexical knowledge from the Web, namely a database of common sense knowledge and Web selectors. The first method is a framework for acquiring a database of concept relationships. To acquire this knowledge, relationships between nouns are found on the Web and analyzed over WordNet using information-theory, producing information about concepts rather than ambiguous words. For the second contribution, words called Web selectors are retrieved which take the place of an instance of a target word in its local context. The selectors serve for the system to learn the types of concepts that the sense of a target word should be similar. Web selectors are acquired dynamically as part of a semantic interpretation algorithm, while the relationships in the database are useful to iii stand-alone programs. A final contribution of this dissertation concerns a novel semantic similarity measure and an evaluation of similarity and relatedness measures on tasks of concept similarity. Such tasks are useful when applying acquired knowledge to semantic interpretation. Applications to word sense disambiguation, an aspect of semantic interpretation, are used to evaluate the contributions. Disambiguation systems which utilize semantically annotated training data are considered supervised. The algorithms of this dissertation are considered minimallysupervised; they do not require training data created by humans, though they may use humancreated data sources. In the case of evaluating a database of common sense knowledge, integrating the knowledge into an existing minimally-supervised disambiguation system significantly improved results – a 20.5% error reduction. Similarly, the Web selectors disambiguation system, which acquires knowledge directly as part of the algorithm, achieved results comparable with top minimally-supervised systems, an F-score of 80.2% on a standard noun disambiguation task. This work enables the study of many subsequent related tasks for improving semantic interpretation and its application to real-world technologies. Other aspects of semantic interpretation, such as semantic role labeling could utilize the same methods presented here for word sense disambiguation. As the Web continues to grow, the capabilities of the systems in this dissertation are expected to increase. Although the Web selectors system achieves great results, a study in this dissertation shows likely improvements from acquiring more data. Furthermore, the methods for acquiring a database of common sense knowledge could be applied in a more exhaustive fashion for other types of common sense knowledge. Finally, perhaps the greatest benefits from this work will come from the enabling of real world technologies that utilize semantic interpretation

Experimental Support for a Categorical Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning

Modelling compositional meaning for sentences using empirical distributional methods has been a challenge for computational linguists. We implement the abstract categorical model of Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) using data from the BNC and evaluate it. The implementation is based on unsupervised learning of matrices for relational words and applying them to the vectors of their arguments. The evaluation is based on the word disambiguation task developed by Mitchell and Lapata (2008) for intransitive sentences, and on a similar new experiment designed for transitive sentences. Our model matches the results of its competitors in the first experiment, and betters them in the second. The general improvement in results with increase in syntactic complexity showcases the compositional power of our model.Comment: 11 pages, to be presented at EMNLP 2011, to be published in Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processin

Normalized Google Distance for Collocation Extraction from Islamic Domain

This study investigates the properties of Arabic collocations, and classifies them according to their structural patterns on Islamic domain. Based on linguistic information, the patterns and the variation of the collocations have been identified.  Then, a system that extracts the collocations from Islamic domain based on statistical measures has been described. In candidate ranking, the normalized Google distance has been adapted to measure the associations between the words in the candidates set. Finally, the n-best evaluation that selects n-best lists for each association measure has been used to annotate all candidates in these lists manually. The following association measures (log-likelihood ratio, t-score, mutual information, and enhanced mutual information) have been utilized in the candidate ranking step to compare these measures with the normalized Google distance in Arabic collocation extraction. In the experiment of this work, the normalized Google distance achieved the highest precision value 93% compared with other association measures. In fact, this strengthens our motivation to utilize the normalized Google distance to measure the relatedness between the constituent words of the collocations instead of using the frequency-based association measures as in the state-of-the-art methods. Keywords: normalized Google distance, collocation extraction, Islamic domai