Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2010

This book contains state-of-the-art contributions to the 10th conference on Natural Language Processing, KONVENS 2010 (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache), with a focus on semantic processing. The KONVENS in general aims at offering a broad perspective on current research and developments within the interdisciplinary field of natural language processing. The central theme draws specific attention towards addressing linguistic aspects ofmeaning, covering deep as well as shallow approaches to semantic processing. The contributions address both knowledgebased and data-driven methods for modelling and acquiring semantic information, and discuss the role of semantic information in applications of language technology. The articles demonstrate the importance of semantic processing, and present novel and creative approaches to natural language processing in general. Some contributions put their focus on developing and improving NLP systems for tasks like Named Entity Recognition or Word Sense Disambiguation, or focus on semantic knowledge acquisition and exploitation with respect to collaboratively built ressources, or harvesting semantic information in virtual games. Others are set within the context of real-world applications, such as Authoring Aids, Text Summarisation and Information Retrieval. The collection highlights the importance of semantic processing for different areas and applications in Natural Language Processing, and provides the reader with an overview of current research in this field

Use and Evaluation of Controlled Languages in Industrial Environments and Feasibility Study for the Implementation of Machine Translation

El presente trabajo de investigación se enmarca en los estudios de doctorado en traducción y la sociedad del conocimiento de la Universidad de Valencia y, en concreto, en la línea de investigación en tecnologías de la traducción, terminología y localización. En este sentido, esta disertación surge por la necesidad de establecer una metodología de investigación y ofrecer resultados empíricos sobre el desarrollo, implementación y evaluación de lenguajes controlados en la documentación técnica y su efecto tanto en los textos originales como en las traducciones de estos documentos. Así pues, el objetivo ha sido desarrollar una metodología para evaluar el impacto de los lenguajes controlados en la producción de documentación técnica dentro de contextos industriales y, más en concreto, en la elaboración de documentación técnica para el vehículo. El impacto se ha concretado en la mejora de la traducibilidad automática, un concepto que hemos discutido ampliamente en el capítulo 4, así como de la calidad de los textos meta.This research is part of the doctoral studies program "La traducción y la sociedad del conocimiento" at the University of Valencia. In particular the area of ​​research is translation technology, terminology and localisation. In this sense, this dissertation arises from the need to establish a research methodology and to provide empirical results on the development, implementation and evaluation of controlled languages ​​in the technical documentation and its effect on both original texts and the translations of these documents. Thus, the aim has been to develop a methodology to assess the impact of controlled languages ​​in the production of technical documentation in industrial contexts, and more specifically in the technical documentation for the vehicle. The impact has resulted in improved automatic translatability, a concept we have discussed at length in Chapter 4, as well as in the quality of the target texts

Surface realization architecture for low-resourced African languages

There has been growing interest in building surface realization systems to support the automatic generation of text in African languages. Such tools focus on converting abstract representations of meaning to text. Since African languages are low-resourced, economical use of resources and general maintainability are key considerations. However, there is no existing surface realizer architecture that possesses most of the maintainability characteristics (e.g., modularity, reusability, and analyzability) that will lead to maintainable software that can be used for the languages. Moreover, there is no consensus surface realization architecture created for other languages that can be adapted for the languages in question. In this work, we solve this by creating a novel surface realizer architecture suitable for low-resourced African languages that abide by the features of maintainable software. Its design comes after a granular analysis, classification, and comparison of the architectures used by 77 existing NLG systems. We compare our architecture to existing architectures and show that it supports the most features of a maintainable software product.Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering through the HPI Research School at UCT and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africahttps://dl.acm.org/journal/tallipInformatic

2006-2007 Graduate Catalog

https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/g_cat/1039/thumbnail.jp

Human Reasoning and Description Logics: Applying Psychological Theory to Understand and Improve the Usability of Description Logics

Description Logics (DLs) are now the most commonly used ontology languages, in part because of the development of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards. Yet it is accepted that DLs are difficult to comprehend and work with, particularly for ontology users who are not computer scientists. The Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS) was developed to make DLs more accessible, by using English keywords in place of logic symbols or formal language. Nevertheless, DLs continue to present difficulties, even when represented in MOS. There has been some investigation of what features cause difficulties, specifically in the context of understanding how an entailment (i.e. an inference) follows from a justification (i.e. a minimal subset of the ontology that is sufficient for the entailment to hold), as is required when debugging an ontology. However, there has been little attempt to relate these difficulties to how people naturally reason and use language. This dissertation draws on theories of reasoning from cognitive psychology, and also insights from the philosophy of language, to understand the difficulties experienced with DLs and to make suggestions to mitigate those difficulties. The language features investigated were those known to be commonly used, both on the basis of analyses reported in the literature and after a survey of ontology users. Two experimental studies investigated participants’ ability to reason with DL statements. These studies demonstrate that insights from psychology and the philosophy of language can be used both to understand the difficulties experienced and to make proposals to mitigate those difficulties. The studies suggest that people reason using both the manipulation of syntax and the representation of semantics with mental models; both approaches can lead to errors. Particular difficulties were associated with: functional object properties; negated conjunction; the interaction of negation and the existential or universal restrictions; and nested restrictions. Proposals to mitigate these difficulties include the adoption of new language keywords; tool enhancement, e.g. to provide syntactically alternative expressions; and the introduction during training both of De Morgan’s Laws for conjunction and disjunction, and their analogues for existential and universal restrictions. A third study then investigated the effectiveness of the proposed new keywords; finding that these keywords could mitigate some of the difficulties experienced. Apart from the immediate applicability of these results to DLs, the approach taken in this dissertation could be extended widely to computer languages, including languages for interacting with databases and with Linked Data. Additionally, based on the experience of the three studies, the dissertation makes some methodological recommendations which are relevant to a range of human-computer interaction studies

Langage contrôlé pour la spécification des règles métier dans le contexte de la modélisation des systèmes d'information

Our thesis focuses on controlled natural languages (CNL) for software engineering. It aims at facilitating the adoption of the business rule approach (BRA) by companies by creating a CNL in order to help business experts in the specification of their business rules. Our solution will allow reducing the semantic gap between business experts and system experts to meet not only the need for mutual understanding between them but also to achieve an automatic transfer of the description of business rules to information systems (IS). The CNL that we have created will also ensure the consistency and the traceability of these rules together with their implementationNotre thèse s’inscrit dans le cadre des langages contrôlés pour le génie logiciel. Elle a pour but de faciliter l’adoption de l’approche par règles métier (ARM) par les entreprises en créant un langage contrôlé en vue d’aider à la spécification des règles métier par les experts métier. Notre solution va permettre de réduire la distance sémantique entre les experts métier et les experts système afin de répondre non seulement au besoin d’intercompréhension entre ces derniers mais aussi pour réaliser un transfert automatique de la description des règles métier vers les systèmes d’information (SI). Ce langage contrôlé que nous avons créé permettra d’assurer en plus la consistance et la traçabilité de ces règles avec leur implantatio