Translation Alignment Applied to Historical Languages: methods, evaluation, applications, and visualization

Translation alignment is an essential task in Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, and it aims to link words/phrases in the source text with their translation equivalents in the translation. In addition to its importance in teaching and learning historical languages, translation alignment builds bridges between ancient and modern languages through which various linguistics annotations can be transferred. This thesis focuses on word-level translation alignment applied to historical languages in general and Ancient Greek and Latin in particular. As the title indicates, the thesis addresses four interdisciplinary aspects of translation alignment. The starting point was developing Ugarit, an interactive annotation tool to perform manual alignment aiming to gather training data to train an automatic alignment model. This effort resulted in more than 190k accurate translation pairs that I used for supervised training later. Ugarit has been used by many researchers and scholars also in the classroom at several institutions for teaching and learning ancient languages, which resulted in a large, diverse crowd-sourced aligned parallel corpus allowing us to conduct experiments and qualitative analysis to detect recurring patterns in annotators’ alignment practice and the generated translation pairs. Further, I employed the recent advances in NLP and language modeling to develop an automatic alignment model for historical low-resourced languages, experimenting with various training objectives and proposing a training strategy for historical languages that combines supervised and unsupervised training with mono- and multilingual texts. Then, I integrated this alignment model into other development workflows to project cross-lingual annotations and induce bilingual dictionaries from parallel corpora. Evaluation is essential to assess the quality of any model. To ensure employing the best practice, I reviewed the current evaluation procedure, defined its limitations, and proposed two new evaluation metrics. Moreover, I introduced a visual analytics framework to explore and inspect alignment gold standard datasets and support quantitative and qualitative evaluation of translation alignment models. Besides, I designed and implemented visual analytics tools and reading environments for parallel texts and proposed various visualization approaches to support different alignment-related tasks employing the latest advances in information visualization and best practice. Overall, this thesis presents a comprehensive study that includes manual and automatic alignment techniques, evaluation methods and visual analytics tools that aim to advance the field of translation alignment for historical languages

Natural Language Processing for Technology Foresight Summarization and Simplification: the case of patents

Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts.Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov

Modeling Non-Standard Text Classification Tasks

Text classification deals with discovering knowledge in texts and is used for extracting, filtering, or retrieving information in streams and collections. The discovery of knowledge is operationalized by modeling text classification tasks, which is mainly a human-driven engineering process. The outcome of this process, a text classification model, is used to inductively learn a text classification solution from a priori classified examples. The building blocks of modeling text classification tasks cover four aspects: (1) the way examples are represented, (2) the way examples are selected, (3) the way classifiers learn from examples, and (4) the way models are selected. This thesis proposes methods that improve the prediction quality of text classification solutions for unseen examples, especially for non-standard tasks where standard models do not fit. The original contributions are related to the aforementioned building blocks: (1) Several topic-orthogonal text representations are studied in the context of non-standard tasks and a new representation, namely co-stems, is introduced. (2) A new active learning strategy that goes beyond standard sampling is examined. (3) A new one-class ensemble for improving the effectiveness of one-class classification is proposed. (4) A new model selection framework to cope with subclass distribution shifts that occur in dynamic environments is introduced

Corpus approaches to issues in second language acquisition: three studies

This dissertation demonstrates how advancements in corpus approaches to linguistic inquiry can be used to improve the methodological rigour, reliability, and general usefulness of findings in various areas of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. Although these studies primarily focus on improvements in areas where corpus approaches are already commonplace, this dissertation also demonstrates how corpus methods can be usefully applied to new areas. Through the use of these methods, the presented studies highlight issues learners face when attempting to gain proficiency in second language (L2) English. Study 1 investigated the usefulness of transitional probability as a way of improving the extraction of formulaic sequences (e.g., on the other hand) from large scale corpora. Since current methods of identification often lead to lists of overlapping structures that lack psycholinguistic validity and pedagogical usefulness (Liu, 2012; Nekrasova, 2009; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010), this study evaluated the effectiveness of a new statistical measure in this area, transitional probability, as a way of improving the psycholinguistic status of corpus derived formulaic sequences. Using a sequence completion task, results revealed that corpus derived formulaic sequences with higher transitional probabilities were more accurately completed by first language (L1) and L2 English users, leading to the conclusion that these sequences are more likely to be stored as prefabricated units. Study 2 used a corpus approach to investigate the relationship between L1 background and the lexical choices made by L2 English writers. Looking specifically at L2 English writers of L1 Arabic, Chinese, and French backgrounds, a corpus of 150 argumentative essays written as part of an English for Academic Purposes program at a large English-medium university in North America was used to identify production tendencies in the use of linking adverbials by each L1 group. Results revealed important L1 differences for the use of specific linking adverbials and broader functional categories. Study 3 investigated lexical dimensions of L2 English speech associated with differences in perceived linguistic ability as judged by naïve L1 English raters. Using a corpus of transcribed speech samples from 97 L2 English users across two tasks (194 speech samples), naïve L1 English raters evaluated each sample for perceived comprehensibility and nativeness. Variables associated with factors related to dimensions of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity were targeted for potential correlations with L1 rater judgements of each construct. Results indicated important linguistic measures significantly correlated with each construct as well as task-based differences

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown

Semi-automated Ontology Generation for Biocuration and Semantic Search

Background: In the life sciences, the amount of literature and experimental data grows at a tremendous rate. In order to effectively access and integrate these data, biomedical ontologies – controlled, hierarchical vocabularies – are being developed. Creating and maintaining such ontologies is a difficult, labour-intensive, manual process. Many computational methods which can support ontology construction have been proposed in the past. However, good, validated systems are largely missing. Motivation: The biocuration community plays a central role in the development of ontologies. Any method that can support their efforts has the potential to have a huge impact in the life sciences. Recently, a number of semantic search engines were created that make use of biomedical ontologies for document retrieval. To transfer the technology to other knowledge domains, suitable ontologies need to be created. One area where ontologies may prove particularly useful is the search for alternative methods to animal testing, an area where comprehensive search is of special interest to determine the availability or unavailability of alternative methods. Results: The Dresden Ontology Generator for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DOG4DAG) developed in this thesis is a system which supports the creation and extension of ontologies by semi-automatically generating terms, definitions, and parent-child relations from text in PubMed, the web, and PDF repositories. The system is seamlessly integrated into OBO-Edit and Protégé, two widely used ontology editors in the life sciences. DOG4DAG generates terms by identifying statistically significant noun-phrases in text. For definitions and parent-child relations it employs pattern-based web searches. Each generation step has been systematically evaluated using manually validated benchmarks. The term generation leads to high quality terms also found in manually created ontologies. Definitions can be retrieved for up to 78% of terms, child ancestor relations for up to 54%. No other validated system exists that achieves comparable results. To improve the search for information on alternative methods to animal testing an ontology has been developed that contains 17,151 terms of which 10% were newly created and 90% were re-used from existing resources. This ontology is the core of Go3R, the first semantic search engine in this field. When a user performs a search query with Go3R, the search engine expands this request using the structure and terminology of the ontology. The machine classification employed in Go3R is capable of distinguishing documents related to alternative methods from those which are not with an F-measure of 90% on a manual benchmark. Approximately 200,000 of the 19 million documents listed in PubMed were identified as relevant, either because a specific term was contained or due to the automatic classification. The Go3R search engine is available on-line under www.Go3R.org