Knowledge Sharing from Domain-specific Documents

Recently, collaborative discussions based on the participant generated documents, e.g., customer questionnaires, aviation reports and medical records, are required in various fields such as marketing, transport facilities and medical treatment, in order to share useful knowledge which is crucial to maintain various kind of securities, e.g., avoiding air-traffic accidents and malpractice. We introduce several techniques in natural language processing for extracting information from such text data and verify the validity of such techniques by using aviation documents as an example. We automatically and statistically extract from the documents related words that have not only taxonomical relations like synonyms but also thematic (non-taxonomical) relations including causal and entailment relations. These related words are useful for sharing information among participants. Moreover, we acquire domain-specific terms and phrases from the documents in order to pick up and share important topics from such reports

Rising Tide 2017

Research and scholarship highlights from University of New England community members. This issue highlights student and faculty research and projects within UNE\u27s College of Arts and Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Westbrook College of Health Professions, College of Pharmacy, College of Dental Medicine, and projects and research from UNE\u27s Centers of Excellence.https://dune.une.edu/risingtide/1006/thumbnail.jp

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

Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community

In the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit, people anonymously share first person narratives that contain some moral dilemma or conflict and ask the community to judge who is at fault (i.e., who is "the asshole"). In general, first person narratives are a unique storytelling domain where the author is the narrator (the person telling the story) but can also be a character (the person living the story) and, thus, the author has two distinct voices presented in the story. In this study, we identify linguistic and narrative features associated with the author as the character or as a narrator. We use these features to answer the following questions: (1) what makes an asshole character and (2) what makes an asshole narrator? We extract both Author-as-Character features (e.g., demographics, narrative event chain, and emotional arc) and Author-as-Narrator features (i.e., the style and emotion of the story as a whole) in order to identify which aspects of the narrative are correlated with the final moral judgment. Our work shows that "assholes" as Characters frame themselves as lacking agency with a more positive personal arc, while "assholes" as Narrators will tell emotional and opinionated stories.Comment: Accepted to the 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 202