On the Use of Parsing for Named Entity Recognition

[Abstract] Parsing is a core natural language processing technique that can be used to obtain the structure underlying sentences in human languages. Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying the entities that appear in a text. NER is a challenging natural language processing task that is essential to extract knowledge from texts in multiple domains, ranging from financial to medical. It is intuitive that the structure of a text can be helpful to determine whether or not a certain portion of it is an entity and if so, to establish its concrete limits. However, parsing has been a relatively little-used technique in NER systems, since most of them have chosen to consider shallow approaches to deal with text. In this work, we study the characteristics of NER, a task that is far from being solved despite its long history; we analyze the latest advances in parsing that make its use advisable in NER settings; we review the different approaches to NER that make use of syntactic information; and we propose a new way of using parsing in NER based on casting parsing itself as a sequence labeling task.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2020/11Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01This work has been funded by MINECO, AEI and FEDER of UE through the ANSWER-ASAP project (TIN2017-85160-C2-1-R); and by Xunta de Galicia through a Competitive Reference Group grant (ED431C 2020/11). CITIC, as Research Center of the Galician University System, is funded by the Consellería de Educación, Universidade e Formación Profesional of the Xunta de Galicia through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER) with 80%, the Galicia ERDF 2014-20 Operational Programme, and the remaining 20% from the Secretaría Xeral de Universidades (Ref. ED431G 2019/01). Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (FASTPARSE, Grant No. 714150)

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian Proceedings of the Final Workshop

Editor of the proceedings of EVALITA 2016

Neural Sequence Labeling on Social Media Text

As social media (SM) brings opportunities to study societies across the world, it also brings a variety of challenges to automate the processing of SM language. In particular, most of the textual content in SM is considered noisy; it does not always stick to the rules of the written language, and it tends to have misspellings, arbitrary abbreviations, orthographic inconsistencies, and flexible grammar. Additionally, SM platforms provide a unique space for multilingual content. This polyglot environment requires modern systems to adapt to a diverse range of languages, imposing another linguistic barrier to processing and understanding of text from SM domains. This thesis aims at providing novel sequence labeling approaches to handle noise and linguistic code-switching (i.e., the alternation of languages in the same utterance) in SM text. In particular, the first part of this thesis focuses on named entity recognition for English SM text, where I propose linguistically-inspired methods to address phonological writing and flexible syntax. Besides, I investigate whether the performance of current state-of-the-art models relies on memorization or contextual generalization of entities. In the second part of this thesis, I focus on three sequence labeling tasks for code-switched SM text: language identification, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Specifically, I propose transfer learning methods from state-of-the-art monolingual and multilingual models, such as ELMo and BERT, to the code-switching setting for sequence labeling. These methods reduce the demand for code-switching annotations and resources while exploiting multilingual knowledge from large pre-trained unsupervised models. The methods presented in this thesis are meant to benefit higher-level NLP applications oriented to social media domains, including but not limited to question-answering, conversational systems, and information extraction

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

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