Discourse relations and conjoined VPs: automated sense recognition

Sense classification of discourse relations is a sub-task of shallow discourse parsing. Discourse relations can occur both across sentences (inter-sentential) and within sentences (intra-sentential), and more than one discourse relation can hold between the same units. Using a newly available corpus of discourse-annotated intra-sentential conjoined verb phrases, we demonstrate a sequential classification system for their multi-label sense classification. We assess the importance of each feature used in the classification, the feature scope, and what is lost in moving from gold standard manual parses to the output of an off-the-shelf parser

A computational approach to Zulu verb morphology within the context of lexical semantics

The central research question that is addressed in this article is: How can ZulMorph, a finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, be employed to add value to Zulu lexical semantics with specific reference to Zulu verbs? The verb is the most complex word category in Zulu. Due to the agglutinative nature of Zulu morphology, limited information can be computationally extracted from running Zulu text without the support of  sufficiently reliable computational mor-phological analysis by means of which the  essential meanings of, amongst others, verbs can be exposed. In this article we describe a corpus-based approach to adding the English meaning to Zulu extended verb roots, thereby enhancing ZulMorph as a lexical knowledge base.Keywords: Zulu Verb Morphology, Verb Extensions, Lexical Semantics, Computational Morphological Analysis, Zulmorph, Zulu Lexical Knowl-Edge Base, Bitext

More than Word Cooccurrence: Exploring Support and Opposition in International Climate Negotiations with Semantic Parsing

International audienceText analysis methods widely used in digital humanities often involve word co-occurrence, e.g. concept co-occurrence networks. These methods provide a useful corpus overview, but cannot determine the predicates that relate co-occurring concepts. Our goal was identifying propositions expressing the points supported or opposed by participants in international climate negotiations. Word co-occurrence methods were not sufficient, and an analysis based on open relation extraction had limited coverage for nominal predicates. We present a pipeline which identifies the points that different actors support and oppose, via a domain model with support/opposition predicates, and analysis rules that exploit the output of semantic role labelling, syntactic dependencies and anaphora resolution. Entity linking and keyphrase extraction are also performed on the propositions related to each actor. A user interface allows examining the main concepts in points supported or opposed by each participant, which participants agree or disagree with each other, and about which issues. The system is an example of tools that digital humanities scholars are asking for, to render rich textual information (beyond word co-occurrence) more amenable to quantitative treatment. An evaluation of the tool was satisfactory

Investigating and extending the methods in automated opinion analysis through improvements in phrase based analysis

Opinion analysis is an area of research which deals with the computational treatment of opinion statement and subjectivity in textual data. Opinion analysis has emerged over the past couple of decades as an active area of research, as it provides solutions to the issues raised by information overload. The problem of information overload has emerged with the advancements in communication technologies which gave rise to an exponential growth in user generated subjective data available online. Opinion analysis has a rich set of applications which are used to enable opportunities for organisations such as tracking user opinions about products, social issues in communities through to engagement in political participation etc.The opinion analysis area shows hyperactivity in recent years and research at different levels of granularity has, and is being undertaken. However it is observed that there are limitations in the state-of-the-art, especially as dealing with the level of granularities on their own does not solve current research issues. Therefore a novel sentence level opinion analysis approach utilising clause and phrase level analysis is proposed. This approach uses linguistic and syntactic analysis of sentences to understand the interdependence of words within sentences, and further uses rule based analysis for phrase level analysis to calculate the opinion at each hierarchical structure of a sentence. The proposed opinion analysis approach requires lexical and contextual resources for implementation. In the context of this Thesis the approach is further presented as part of an extended unifying framework for opinion analysis resulting in the design and construction of a novel corpus. The above contributions to the field (approach, framework and corpus) are evaluated within the Thesis and are found to make improvements on existing limitations in the field, particularly with regards to opinion analysis automation. Further work is required in integrating a mechanism for greater word sense disambiguation and in lexical resource development