Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping

We propose Quootstrap, a method for extracting quotations, as well as the names of the speakers who uttered them, from large news corpora. Whereas prior work has addressed this problem primarily with supervised machine learning, our approach follows a fully unsupervised bootstrapping paradigm. It leverages the redundancy present in large news corpora, more precisely, the fact that the same quotation often appears across multiple news articles in slightly different contexts. Starting from a few seed patterns, such as ["Q", said S.], our method extracts a set of quotation-speaker pairs (Q, S), which are in turn used for discovering new patterns expressing the same quotations; the process is then repeated with the larger pattern set. Our algorithm is highly scalable, which we demonstrate by running it on the large ICWSM 2011 Spinn3r corpus. Validating our results against a crowdsourced ground truth, we obtain 90% precision at 40% recall using a single seed pattern, with significantly higher recall values for more frequently reported (and thus likely more interesting) quotations. Finally, we showcase the usefulness of our algorithm's output for computational social science by analyzing the sentiment expressed in our extracted quotations.Comment: Accepted at the 12th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 201

A Dutch coreference resolution system with an evaluation on literary fiction

Coreference resolution is the task of identifying descriptions that refer to the same entity. In this paper we consider the task of entity coreference resolution for Dutch with a particular focus on literary texts. We make three main contributions. First, we propose a simplified annotation scheme to reduce annotation effort. This scheme is used for the annotation of a corpus of 107k tokens from 21 contemporary works of literature. Second, we present a rule-based coreference resolution system for Dutch based on the Stanford deterministic multi-sieve coreference architecture and heuristic rules for quote attribution. Our system (dutchcoref) forms a simple but strong baseline and improves on previous systems in shared task evaluations. Finally, we perform an evaluation and error analysis on literary texts which highlights difficult cases of coreference in general, and the literary domain in particular. The code of our system is made available at https://github.com/andreasvc/dutchcoref

The Gender Gap Tracker: Using Natural Language Processing To Measure Gender Bias in Media

We examine gender bias in media by tallying the number of men and women quoted in news text, using the Gender Gap Tracker, a software system we developed specifically for this purpose. The Gender Gap Tracker downloads and analyzes the online daily publication of seven English-language Canadian news outlets and enhances the data with multiple layers of linguistic information. We describe the Natural Language Processing technology behind this system, the curation of off-the-shelf tools and resources that we used to build it, and the parts that we developed. We evaluate the system in each language processing task and report errors using real-world examples. Finally, by applying the Tracker to the data, we provide valuable insights about the proportion of people mentioned and quoted, by gender, news organization, and author gender. Data collected between October 1, 2018 and September 30, 2020 shows that, in general, men are quoted about three times as frequently as women. While this proportion varies across news outlets and time intervals, the general pattern is consistent. We believe that, in a world with about 50% women, this should not be the case. Although journalists naturally need to quote newsmakers who are men, they also have a certain amount of control over who they approach as sources. The Gender Gap Tracker relies on the same principles as fitness or goal-setting trackers: By quantifying and measuring regular progress, we hope to motivate news organizations to provide a more diverse set of voices in their reporting

Narrative Information Extraction with Non-Linear Natural Language Processing Pipelines

Computational narrative focuses on methods to algorithmically analyze, model, and generate narratives. Most current work in story generation, drama management or even literature analysis relies on manually authoring domain knowledge in some specific formal representation language, which is expensive to generate. In this dissertation we explore how to automatically extract narrative information from unannotated natural language text, how to evaluate the extraction process, how to improve the extraction process, and how to use the extracted information in story generation applications. As our application domain, we use Vladimir Propp's narrative theory and the corresponding Russian and Slavic folktales as our corpus. Our hypothesis is that incorporating narrative-level domain knowledge (i.e., Proppian theory) to core natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction can improve the performance of tasks (such as coreference resolution), and the extracted narrative information. We devised a non-linear information extraction pipeline framework which we implemented in Voz, our narrative information extraction system. Finally, we studied how to map the output of Voz to an intermediate computational narrative model and use it as input for an existing story generation system, thus further connecting existing work in NLP and computational narrative. As far as we know, it is the first end-to-end computational narrative system that can automatically process a corpus of unannotated natural language stories, extract explicit domain knowledge from them, and use it to generate new stories. Our user study results show that specific error introduced during the information extraction process can be mitigated downstream and have virtually no effect on the perceived quality of the generated stories compared to generating stories using handcrafted domain knowledge.Ph.D., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 201