TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF

Stabilizing knowledge through standards - A perspective for the humanities

It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences

A Lightweight Regression Method to Infer Psycholinguistic Properties for Brazilian Portuguese

Psycholinguistic properties of words have been used in various approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks, such as text simplification and readability assessment. Most of these properties are subjective, involving costly and time-consuming surveys to be gathered. Recent approaches use the limited datasets of psycholinguistic properties to extend them automatically to large lexicons. However, some of the resources used by such approaches are not available to most languages. This study presents a method to infer psycholinguistic properties for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using regressors built with a light set of features usually available for less resourced languages: word length, frequency lists, lexical databases composed of school dictionaries and word embedding models. The correlations between the properties inferred are close to those obtained by related works. The resulting resource contains 26,874 words in BP annotated with concreteness, age of acquisition, imageability and subjective frequency.Comment: Paper accepted for TSD201

A Unified Multilingual Handwriting Recognition System using multigrams sub-lexical units

We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time. While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongly reduces the lexicon size and thus decreases the language model complexity. This makes pos- sible the design of an end-to-end unified multilingual recognition system where both a single optical model and a single language model are trained on all the languages. We discuss the impact of the language unification on each model and show that our system reaches state-of-the-art methods perfor- mance with a strong reduction of the complexity.Comment: preprin