Exploring Metaphorical Senses and Word Representations for Identifying Metonyms

A metonym is a word with a figurative meaning, similar to a metaphor. Because metonyms are closely related to metaphors, we apply features that are used successfully for metaphor recognition to the task of detecting metonyms. On the ACL SemEval 2007 Task 8 data with gold standard metonym annotations, our system achieved 86.45% accuracy on the location metonyms. Our code can be found on GitHub.Comment: 9 pages, 8 pages conten

Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning

Herstellung eines Phaffia rhodozyma : Stamms mit verstärkter Astaxanthin-Synthese über gezielte genetische Modifikation chemisch mutagenisierter Stämme

Ziel dieser Arbeit war es erstmals durch eine Kombination aus chemischer Mutagenese und gezielter genetischer Modifikation (hier: „metabolic engineering“) einen Phaffia-Stamm herzustellen, welcher über die Mutagenese hinaus über eine weiter verstärkte Astaxanthin-Synthese verfügt. Die von „DSM Nutritional Products“ bereitgestellten chemischen Mutanten wurden analysiert und über einen Selektionsprozess auf Pigmentstabilität und Wachstum hin optimiert, da die Stämme aus cryogenisierter Dauerkultur starke Pigmentinstabilitäten und ein verzögertes Wachstum aufwiesen. Über eine exploratorische Phase wurde die Carotinoidsynthese analysiert und festgestellt, dass in den Mutanten keine Einzelreaktionen betroffen sind, welche für die Heraufregulierung der Carotinoidsynthese in den Mutanten verantwortlich sind. Hierbei wurden Limitierungen identifiziert und diese durch Transformation von Expressionsplasmiden mit geeigneten Genen aufgehoben, um damit eine noch effizientere Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen hin zu Astaxanthin zu erreichen. Eine Überexpression der Phytoensynthase/Lycopinzyklase crtYB resultierte in einem gesteigerten Carotinoidgehalt bei gleichbleibendem Astaxanthin- Anteil. Durch eine zweite Transformation mit einer Expressionskassette für die Astaxanthin-Synthase asy konnte der Carotinoidgehalt weiter gesteigert und zusätzlich eine Limitierung der Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen behoben werden, sodass die Transformante nahezu alle Intermediate der Astaxanthinsynthese zu Astaxanthin metabolisieren konnte (Gassel et al. 2013). Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass auch in den Mutanten, aus Experimenten mit dem Wildtyp bekannte, Limitierungen identifiziert und ausgeglichen werden konnten

Where are you talking about? Advances and Challenges of Geographic Analysis of Text with Application to Disease Monitoring

The Natural Language Processing task we focus on in this thesis is Geoparsing. Geoparsing is the process of extraction and grounding of toponyms (place names). Consider this sentence: "The victims of the Spanish earthquake off the coast of Malaga were of American and Mexican origin." Four toponyms will be extracted (called Geotagging) and grounded to their geographic coordinates (called Toponym Resolution). However, our research goes further than any previous work by showing how to distinguish the literal place(s) of the event (Spain, Malaga) from other linguistic types/uses such as nationalities (Mexican, American), improving downstream task accuracy. We consolidate and extend the Standard Evaluation Framework, discuss key research problems, then present concrete solutions in order to advance each stage of geoparsing. For geotagging, as well as training a SOTA neural Location-NER tagger, we simplify Metonymy Resolution with a novel minimalist feature extraction combined with an LSTM-based classifier, matching SOTA results. For toponym resolution, we deploy the latest deep learning methods to achieve SOTA performance by augmenting neural models with hitherto unused geographic features called Map Vectors. With each research project, we provide high-quality datasets and system prototypes, further building resources in this field. We then show how these geoparsing advances coupled with our proposed Intra-Document Analysis can be used to associate news articles with locations in order to monitor the spread of public health threats. To this end, we evaluate our research contributions with production data from a real-time downstream application to improve geolocation of news events for disease monitoring. The data was made available to us by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), which operates one such system called MediSys that processes incoming news articles in order to monitor threats to public health and make these available to a variety of governmental, business and non-profit organisations. We also discuss steps towards an end-to-end, automated news monitoring system and make actionable recommendations for future work. In summary, the thesis aims are twofold: (1) Generate original geoparsing research aimed at advancing each stage of the pipeline by addressing pertinent challenges with concrete solutions and actionable proposals. (2) Demonstrate how this research can be applied to news event monitoring to increase the efficacy of existing biosurveillance systems, e.g. European Commission’s MediSys.I was generously funded by DREAM CDT, which was funded by NERC of UKRI

German Perception Verbs: Automatic Classification of Prototypical and Multiple Non-literal Meanings

This paper presents a token-based automatic classification of German perception verbs into literal vs. multiple non-literal senses. Based on a corpus-based dataset of German perception verbs and their systematic meaning shifts, we identify one verb of each of the four perception classes optical, acoustic, olfactory, haptic, and use Decision Trees relying on syntactic and semantic corpus-based features to classify the verb uses into 3-4 senses each. Our classifier reaches accuracies between 45.5% and 69.4%, in comparison to baselines between 27.5% and 39.0%. In three out of four cases analyzed our classifier’s accuracy is significantly higher than the according baseline

A pragmatic guide to geoparsing evaluation

Abstract: Empirical methods in geoparsing have thus far lacked a standard evaluation framework describing the task, metrics and data used to compare state-of-the-art systems. Evaluation is further made inconsistent, even unrepresentative of real world usage by the lack of distinction between the different types of toponyms, which necessitates new guidelines, a consolidation of metrics and a detailed toponym taxonomy with implications for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and beyond. To address these deficiencies, our manuscript introduces a new framework in three parts. (Part 1) Task Definition: clarified via corpus linguistic analysis proposing a fine-grained Pragmatic Taxonomy of Toponyms. (Part 2) Metrics: discussed and reviewed for a rigorous evaluation including recommendations for NER/Geoparsing practitioners. (Part 3) Evaluation data: shared via a new dataset called GeoWebNews to provide test/train examples and enable immediate use of our contributions. In addition to fine-grained Geotagging and Toponym Resolution (Geocoding), this dataset is also suitable for prototyping and evaluating machine learning NLP models

An investigation into figurative language in the ‘LOLITA' NLP system

The classical and folk theory view on metaphor and figurative language assumes that metaphor is a rare occurrence, restricted to the realms of poetry and rhetoric. Recent results have, however, unarguably shown that figurative language of various complexity exhibits great systematicity and is pervasive in everyday language and texts. If the ubiquity of figurative language cannot be disputed, however, any natural language processing (NLP) system aiming at processing text beyond a restricted scope has to be able to deal with figurative language. This is particularly true if the processing is to be based on deep techniques, where a deep analysis of the input is performed. The LOLITA NLP system employs deep techniques and, therefore, must be capable of dealing with figurative input. The task of natural language (NL) generation is affected by the naturalness of figurative language, too. For if metaphors are frequent and natural, NL generation not capable of handling figurative language will seem restricted and its output unnatural. This thesis describes the work undertaken to examine the options for extending the LOLITA system in the direction of figurative language processing and the results of this project. The work critically examines previous approaches and their contribution to the field, before outlining a solution which follows the principles of natural language engineering

Too female to be ruthless i too pregnant to argue: rješavanje značenjskog konflikta u konstrukciji [too ADJ to V]

Taking usage–based construction grammar as its theoretical framework, this paper addresses the interplay between construal operations and semantic conflict resolution in anomalous instances of the relatively unexplored English [too ADJ to V]–construction. Drawing on an open–ended questionnaire analysis in which native–speaker respondents offer their readings of anomalous instances of the construction, the paper discusses strategies of semantic construction–lexeme conflict resolution with a view to inferring construal operations involved therein.U ovome radu istražuje se međudjelovanje procesa gradbe značenja i rješavanja značenjskog konflikta u nepravilnim primjerima relativno neistražene engleske konstrukcije [too ADJ to V] uz pomoć teorijskog okvira konstrukcijske gramatike utemeljene na jezičnoj uporabi. Raspravlja se o strategijama rješavanja značenjskog konflikta između konstrukcije i leksema na temelju kvalitativne analize upitnika s otvorenim pitanjima. Izvorni su govornici u odgovorima ponudili vlastito tumačenje nepravilnih primjera konstrukcije [too ADJ to V]. U istraživanju se navode rezultati ranijih istraživanja (Jensen 2013) kao pokazatelji tipičnih i nepravilnih uporaba. Osam pridjeva analizira se u ovome istraživanju: real, full, correct, impossible, Catholic, female, pregnant, innocent. Glavni je zadatak ispitanicima bio da ponude svoje tumačenje pridjeva u zadanim primjerima uporabe i da svojim riječima opišu značenje pridjeva u zadanim primjerima uporabe. Odgovori ispitanika ponudili su određeni broj strategija kojima su se koristili pri tumačenju nepravilnih primjera s naglaskom na Talmyjev model strategija rješavanja značenjskog konflikta (2000b) i na model procesa gradbe značenja (Croft i Wood 2000; Croft i Cruse 2004). S obzirom na odgovore dobivene iz neformalnog upitnika s otvorenim pitanjima, preporučuje se da se u budućim istraživanjima značenjskih konflikata u odnosu konstrukcije i leksema svakako dijelom istraže spomenuta dva modela. Ovim radom želi se pridonijeti potencijalno bitnim istraživanjima sprege konstrukcije i primatelja u slučajevima konflikta između konstrukcije i leksema