Current trends

Deep parsing is the fundamental process aiming at the representation of the syntactic structure of phrases and sentences. In the traditional methodology this process is based on lexicons and grammars representing roughly properties of words and interactions of words and structures in sentences. Several linguistic frameworks, such as Headdriven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), etc., offer different structures and combining operations for building grammar rules. These already contain mechanisms for expressing properties of Multiword Expressions (MWE), which, however, need improvement in how they account for idiosyncrasies of MWEs on the one hand and their similarities to regular structures on the other hand. This collaborative book constitutes a survey on various attempts at representing and parsing MWEs in the context of linguistic theories and applications

Representation and parsing of multiword expressions

This book consists of contributions related to the definition, representation and parsing of MWEs. These reflect current trends in the representation and processing of MWEs. They cover various categories of MWEs such as verbal, adverbial and nominal MWEs, various linguistic frameworks (e.g. tree-based and unification-based grammars), various languages including English, French, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian), and various applications (namely MWE detection, parsing, automatic translation) using both symbolic and statistical approaches

CoDiAJe - the Annotated Diachronic Corpus of Judeo-spanish : Description of a Multi-alphabetic Corpus and its Textual and Linguistic Annotations

Judeo-Spanish differs from late 15th-century Spanish and modern Spanish in several respects, such as its morphology, syntax, and semantics, but the most visible difference is in the alphabet. From the end of the 19th century, Judeo-Spanish has been written in various alphabets -Greek, Cyrillic, and especially Latin-. However, the Hebrew alphabet had been used since ancient times, before it was abandoned finally only in the 1940s. This means that the majority of Judeo-Spanish texts are written in Hebrew characters. CoDiAJe is an annotated diachronic corpus that includes documents produced from the 16th century up to the present day, developed in TEITOK. The significance of its development is that this tool processes linguistic data in the alphabets mentioned above, allowing users to visualize each text in five orthographic forms (the original version in which it was written, its transcription in Latin characters, an expanded form to complete abbreviations or to correct defective writing, a version in modern Judeo-Spanish, and a version in orthographic modern Spanish). CoDiAJe enables the user to conduct searches not only for a specific word, but also for all its linguistic and orthographic variants in the different alphabets. During the annotation process, tags from the EAGLES tagset for Spanish were modified, and others were created: these are simply steps towards the creation of an accurate tagset for Judeo-Spanish. The digitized texts are also enriched with semantic-conceptual information and information on the affiliation of all non-Romance elements.El judeoespañol se diferencia del español de finales del siglo XV y del español moderno en varios aspectos que afectan a la fonética y fonología, morfología, sintaxis y semántica. Sin embargo, la diferencia más fácilmente apreciable está en el alfabeto. A finales del siglo XIX se comenzó a escribir con diferentes alfabetos: griego, cirílico y, sobre todo, latino en diferentes versiones. Sin embargo, desde tiempos remotos se utilizó el alfabeto hebreo, y su abandono definitivo solo ocurrió en la década de los cuarenta del siglo pasado, por lo que la mayor parte de los textos escritos en esta lengua están en caracteres hebreos. CoDiAJe es un corpus diacrónico anotado que incluye documentos creados desde el siglo XVI hasta nuestros días, desarrollado en TEITOK. La importancia de su desarrollo está en que procesa datos lingüísticos en los alfabetos mencionados anteriormente, da al usuario la opción de visualizar cada texto en cinco formas gráficas (la versión original independientemente del alfabeto en el que fue escrita, su transcripción en caracteres latinos, una forma expandida para completar las abreviaturas o corregir la escritura defectuosa, una versión en judeoespañol moderno y una versión en la ortografía del español moderno), y permite realizar búsquedas no solo de una palabra específica sino de todas sus variantes lingüísticas y ortográficas en textos escritos en los diferentes alfabetos. Durante el proceso de anotación se fueron modificando las etiquetas de EAGLES para el español y se crearon algunas nuevas. Significa que, a medida que se van anotando los textos, vamos creando un etiquetador para el judeoespañol. Los textos digitalizados también se enriquecen con información semántico-conceptual e información sobre la filiación de todos los elementos no románicos que se detectan en los textos

Multiword expressions at length and in depth

The annual workshop on multiword expressions takes place since 2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences and attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on a variety of languages, linguistic phenomena and related computational processing issues. MWE 2017 took place in Valencia, Spain, and represented a vibrant panorama of the current research landscape on the computational treatment of multiword expressions, featuring many high-quality submissions. Furthermore, MWE 2017 included the first shared task on multilingual identification of verbal multiword expressions. The shared task, with extended communal work, has developed important multilingual resources and mobilised several research groups in computational linguistics worldwide. This book contains extended versions of selected papers from the workshop. Authors worked hard to include detailed explanations, broader and deeper analyses, and new exciting results, which were thoroughly reviewed by an internationally renowned committee. We hope that this distinctly joint effort will provide a meaningful and useful snapshot of the multilingual state of the art in multiword expressions modelling and processing, and will be a point point of reference for future work

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 268 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891

FinnFN 1.0: The Finnish frame semantic database

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.Peer reviewe

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online

We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online