Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs

The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close and a Distant Reading of the collection.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Enhancing a role and reference grammar approach to English motion constructions in a Natural Language Processing environment

This paper puts forward a finer-grained computational treatment of the English caused-motion construction (e.g. He kicked the ball into the net) within a knowledge base for natural language processing systems called FunGramKB. This computational project is largely based on Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which is a functional projectionist theory of language. We argue that the RRG-based characterization of the caused-motion construction in FunGramKB is insufficient to account for the semantic and syntactic complexity of realizations such as He walked the dog to the park, I will show you out, or Mac flew Continental to Bush International Airport. Thus, drawing on insights from Constructions Grammars, three minimally distinct transitive motion sub-constructions are formalized within FunGramKB. It is through the inclusion of additional constructional schemas that the machine will be able to capture the various ways in which verbs and constructions interact to yield different input textsEste artículo presenta un tratamiento computacional más fino de la construcción de movimiento causado en inglés (por ejemplo, He kicked the ball into the net, “metió de una patada la pelota en la red”) en una base de conocimientos para sistemas de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural llamada FunGramKB. Este proyecto computacional se basa en gran medida en la Gramática del Papel y la Referencia (RRG), que es una teoría funcionalista del lenguaje. Argumentamos que la caracterización basada en la RRG de la construcción de movimiento causado en FunGramKB es insuficiente para explicar la complejidad semántica y sintáctica de realizaciones tales como He walked the dog to the park, I will show you out, or Mac flew Continental to Bush International Airport , “Sacó a pasear al perro al parque, Te enseño la salida, Mac voló Continental al Aeropuerto Internacional Bush”. Así, basándose en las propuestas de las Gramáticas de Construcciones, se formalizan dentro de FunGramKB tres sub-construcciones de movimiento transitivas ligeramente distintas. A través de la de esquemas constructivos adicionales la máquina será capaz de dar cuenta de las diversas formas en que interactúan los verbos y las construcciones para producir diferentes textos de entradaThe research projects on which this paper is based have received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grants no. FFI2013- 43593-P and FFI2014-53788-C3-1-

DataDriven and Ontological Analysis of FrameNet for Natural Language Reasoning. In

Abstract This paper focuses on the improvement of the conceptual structure of FrameNet for the sake of applying this resource to knowledgeintensive NLP tasks requiring reasoning, such as question answering, information extraction etc. Ontological analysis supported by data-driven methods is used for axiomatizing, enriching and cleaning up frame relations. The impact of the achieved axiomatization is investigated on recognizing textual entailment