Dealing with Metonymic Readings of Named Entities

The aim of this paper is to propose a method for tagging named entities (NE), using natural language processing techniques. Beyond their literal meaning, named entities are frequently subject to metonymy. We show the limits of current NE type hierarchies and detail a new proposal aiming at dynamically capturing the semantics of entities in context. This model can analyze complex linguistic phenomena like metonymy, which are known to be difficult for natural language processing but crucial for most applications. We present an implementation and some test using the French ESTER corpus and give significant results

UP13: Knowledge poor methods (sometimes) perform poorly

International audienceThis short paper presents the system developed at the Université Paris 13 for the Metonymy resolution task, during Semeval 2007 (location name track). We developed a basic strategy only based on plain word forms to see how far one can go using only surface cues. We then discuss the relevance of this approach and compare it with more complex ones

Text as scene: discourse deixis and bridging relations

En este artículo se presenta un nuevo marco, “el texto como escena”, que establece las bases para la anotación de dos relaciones de correferencia: la deixis discursiva y las relaciones de bridging. La incorporación de lo que llamamos escenas textuales y contextuales proporciona unas directrices de anotación más flexibles, que diferencian claramente entre tipos de categorías generales. Un marco como éste, capaz de tratar la deixis discursiva y las relaciones de bridging desde una perspectiva común, tiene como objetivo mejorar el bajo grado de acuerdo entre anotadores obtenido por esquemas de anotación anteriores, que son incapaces de captar las referencias vagas inherentes a estos dos tipos de relaciones. Las directrices aquí presentadas completan el esquema de anotación diseñado para enriquecer el corpus español CESS-ECE con información correferencial y así construir el corpus CESS-Ancora.This paper presents a new framework, “text as scene”, which lays the foundations for the annotation of two coreferential links: discourse deixis and bridging relations. The incorporation of what we call textual and contextual scenes provides more flexible annotation guidelines, broad type categories being clearly differentiated. Such a framework that is capable of dealing with discourse deixis and bridging relations from a common perspective aims at improving the poor reliability scores obtained by previous annotation schemes, which fail to capture the vague references inherent in both these links. The guidelines presented here complete the annotation scheme designed to enrich the Spanish CESS-ECE corpus with coreference information, thus building the CESS-Ancora corpus.This paper has been supported by the FPU grant (AP2006-00994) from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. It is based on work supported by the CESS-ECE (HUM2004-21127), Lang2World (TIN2006- 15265-C06-06), and Praxem (HUM2006- 27378-E) projects

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

What’s missing in geographical parsing?

Geographical data can be obtained by converting place names from free-format text into geographical coordinates. The ability to geo-locate events in textual reports represents a valuable source of information in many real-world applications such as emergency responses, real-time social media geographical event analysis, understanding location instructions in auto-response systems and more. However, geoparsing is still widely regarded as a challenge because of domain language diversity, place name ambiguity, metonymic language and limited leveraging of context as we show in our analysis. Results to date, whilst promising, are on laboratory data and unlike in wider NLP are often not cross-compared. In this study, we evaluate and analyse the performance of a number of leading geoparsers on a number of corpora and highlight the challenges in detail. We also publish an automatically geotagged Wikipedia corpus to alleviate the dearth of (open source) corpora in this domain.We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Ph.D. Studentship NE/M009009/1 (MG) and EPSRC (NC and NL: Grant No. EP/M005089/1

An Investigation of the Sculpture/Language Homology

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/691 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)This research is concerned with the implications of reading sculpture as a mode of communication that is indicative of an art/language homology. An investigation of the inter-relationship of the functions of ‘Language’ and 'Conventions of Visual Communication' is viewed against contemporary redefinitions of the role of sculpture, its character of presentation and mode of engagement with respondents. Theoretical investigation examines models of communication and identifies corresponding systems in an art that is exemplified by the sculpture of Tony Cragg. Cragg's significantly organised collections of commonplace objects, presenting the visual assertiveness of the 'ready-made' prompt a reconsideration of the object as a semantic commodity that embodies narrative. The artifact itself is viewed as a visual reference that induces a sequence of complex associations. A reading of the sculpture's multi-layered mimetic, metaphorical and metonymic indices implies the acceptance of paradigmatic conventions of signification within a communication system frequently described as a 'language of sculpture'. The connotative and denotative nature of a materialised, but idealised, presentation of object imagery suggests that Cragg's sculpture is the vehicle of a dialectic process. It is the art of the 'bricoleur' that embodies a readily accessible lexical and semantic content constructed from the readily available signifiers 'to hand'. The exploratory and reflective investigations of the integral studio projects are concerned with the communication values of contiguous object-entities, in a visual process that links associations in the manner of rhetorical tropes. In a polysemic interaction of visual identities this semantic transposition of a sculptural aesthetic aims to expose relationships connecting expressive material form, image semiosis and object/word associations. The sculptural processes of making-to-reading reveal a systematic structuring of meaning, as the mechanisms of perception are directed by the conceptual modelling of cognitive thought patterns.Theoretical exploration of the notions of a `Language' of Sculpture, a Sculpture/Language homology and the relationship of language functions to visual systems of communication. A critical reading of Cragg's work and practice identifying modes of communication that function as language.A reflexive practical exploration of sculptural object-entities pared down to basic elements to expose the homologous `language' functions of a communicative content

Mechanisms of Change in English and Latin Lexicon - A Comparison

The aim of my work is to show the mechanisms of semantic change and the way they affected some of the words when they were borrowed from Latin into the English lexicon in the sixteenth century. The analysis of the words is based on the cognitive theories about prototypical categories and mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy which act as forces expanding categories and creating new meanings and senses of words. The analyzed words were chosen from The Proheme of The Boke named the Gouernour by Sir Thomas Elyot. The research shows the importance of historical, political, and social circumstances and their impact on language

American Studies in Scandinavia, 54:1

Anders Bo Rasmussen et al

From icon to naturalised icon:a linguistic analysis of media representations of the BP Deepwater Horizon crisis

This research explores how news media reports construct representations of a business crisis through language. In an innovative approach to dealing with the vast pool of potentially relevant texts, media texts concerning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are gathered from three different time points: immediately after the explosion in 2010, one year later in 2011 and again in 2012. The three sets of 'BP texts' are investigated using discourse analysis and semi-quantitative methods within a semiotic framework that gives an account of language at the semiotic levels of sign, code, mythical meaning and ideology. The research finds in the texts three discourses of representation concerning the crisis that show a movement from the ostensibly representational to the symbolic and conventional: a discourse of 'objective factuality', a discourse of 'positioning' and a discourse of 'redeployment'. This progression can be shown to have useful parallels with Peirce's sign classes of Icon, Index and Symbol, with their implied movement from a clear motivation by the Object (in this case the disaster events), to an arbitrary, socially-agreed connection. However, the naturalisation of signs, whereby ideologies are encoded in ways of speaking and writing that present them as 'taken for granted' is at its most complete when it is least discernible. The findings suggest that media coverage is likely to move on from symbolic representation to a new kind of iconicity, through a fourth discourse of 'naturalisation'. Here the representation turns back towards ostensible factuality or iconicity, to become the 'naturalised icon'. This work adds to the study of media representation a heuristic for understanding how the meaning-making of a news story progresses. It offers a detailed account of what the stages of this progression 'look like' linguistically, and suggests scope for future research into both language characteristics of phases and different news-reported phenomena