Head to head: Semantic similarity of multi-word terms

Terms are linguistic signifiers of domain–specific concepts. Semantic similarity between terms refers to the corresponding distance in the conceptual space. In this study, we use lexico–syntactic information to define a vector space representation in which cosine similarity closely approximates semantic similarity between the corresponding terms. Given a multi–word term, each word is weighed in terms of its defining properties. In this context, the head noun is given the highest weight. Other words are weighed depending on their relations to the head noun. We formalized the problem as that of determining a topological ordering of a direct acyclic graph, which is based on constituency and dependency relations within a noun phrase. To counteract the errors associated with automatically inferred constituency and dependency relations, we implemented a heuristic approach to approximating the topological ordering. Different weights are assigned to different words based on their positions. Clustering experiments performed on such a vector space representation showed considerable improvement over the conventional bag–of–word representation. Specifically, it more consistently reflected semantic similarity between the terms. This was established by analyzing the differences between automatically generated dendrograms and manually constructed taxonomies. In conclusion, our method can be used to semi–automate taxonomy construction

Re-discovering the Quechua adjective

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a “flexible” noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison

Learning Language from a Large (Unannotated) Corpus

A novel approach to the fully automated, unsupervised extraction of dependency grammars and associated syntax-to-semantic-relationship mappings from large text corpora is described. The suggested approach builds on the authors' prior work with the Link Grammar, RelEx and OpenCog systems, as well as on a number of prior papers and approaches from the statistical language learning literature. If successful, this approach would enable the mining of all the information needed to power a natural language comprehension and generation system, directly from a large, unannotated corpus.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, research proposa

Natural language analysis of online health forums

Despite advances in concept extraction from free text, finding meaningful health related information from online patient forums still poses a significant challenge. Here we demonstrate how structured information can be extracted from posts found in such online health related forums by forming relationships between a drug/treatment and a symptom or side effect, including the polarity/sentiment of the patient. In particular, a rule-based natural language processing (NLP) system is deployed, where information in sentences is linked together though anaphora resolution. Our NLP relationship extraction system provides a strong baseline, achieving an F1 score of over 80% in discovering the said relationships that are present in the posts we analysed

Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the Entity Describer

Semantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial. While automated techniques certainly facilitate the process, manual annotation remains the gold standard in most domains. In this manuscript, we describe a prototype mass-collaborative semantic annotation system that, by distributing the annotation workload across the broad community of biomedical researchers, may help to produce the volume of meaningful annotations needed by modern biomedical science. We present E.D., the Entity Describer, a mashup of the Connotea social tagging system, an index of semantic web-accessible controlled vocabularies, and a new public RDF database for storing social semantic annotations

Using nurses’ natural language entries to build a concept-oriented terminology for patients’ chief complaints in the emergency department

Information about the chief complaint (CC), also known as the patient's reason for seeking emergency care, is critical for patient prioritization for treatment and determination of patient flow through the emergency department (ED). Triage nurses document the CC at the start of the ED visit, and the data are increasingly available in electronic form. Despite the clinical and operational significance of the CC to the ED, there is no standard CC terminology. We propose the construction of concept-oriented nursing terminologies from the actual language used by experts. We use text analysis to extract CC concepts from triage nurses' natural language entries. Our methodology for building the nursing terminology utilizes natural language processing techniques and the Unified Medical Language System

Evaluation of the DEFINDER System for Fully Automatic Glossary Construction

In this paper we present a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of DEFINDER, a rule-based system that mines consumer-oriented full text articles in order to extract definitions and the terms they define. The quantitative evaluation shows that in terms of precision and recall as measured against human performance, DEFINDER obtained 87% and 75% respectively, thereby revealing the incompleteness of existing resources and the ability of DEFINDER to address these gaps. Our basis for comparison is definitions from on-line dictionaries, including the UMLS Metathesaurus. Qualitative evaluation shows that the definitions extracted by our system are ranked higher in terms of user-centered criteria of usability and readability than are definitions from on-line specialized dictionaries. The output of DEFINDER can be used to enhance these dictionaries. DEFINDER output is being incorporated in a system to clarify technical terms for non-specialist users in understandable non-technical language

Using Linguistic Analysis to Translate Arabic Natural Language Queries to SPARQL

The logic-based machine-understandable framework of the Semantic Web often challenges naive users when they try to query ontology-based knowledge bases. Existing research efforts have approached this problem by introducing Natural Language (NL) interfaces to ontologies. These NL interfaces have the ability to construct SPARQL queries based on NL user queries. However, most efforts were restricted to queries expressed in English, and they often benefited from the advancement of English NLP tools. However, little research has been done to support querying the Arabic content on the Semantic Web by using NL queries. This paper presents a domain-independent approach to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL by leveraging linguistic analysis. Based on a special consideration on Noun Phrases (NPs), our approach uses a language parser to extract NPs and the relations from Arabic parse trees and match them to the underlying ontology. It then utilizes knowledge in the ontology to group NPs into triple-based representations. A SPARQL query is finally generated by extracting targets and modifiers, and interpreting them into SPARQL. The interpretation of advanced semantic features including negation, conjunctive and disjunctive modifiers is also supported. The approach was evaluated by using two datasets consisting of OWL test data and queries, and the obtained results have confirmed its feasibility to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL.Comment: Journal Pape

Misunderstandings during gameplay of Dungeons and Dragons

Abstract. The goal of this study was to locate misunderstandings, their causes and ways of resolving them during the gameplay of Dungeons and Dragons, in hopes of discovering what causes misunderstandings that disrupt the game and make it less enjoyable for players. Along with a short history of the development of the game, key terminology, core of gameplay, and the three main aspects of gameplay were also introduced. Dungeons and Dragons was inspected as a game and a co-operatively constructed narrative, thus narrative theory was included in the theoretical framework of this study, in addition to theory of miscommunication. The study was conducted by analysing extracts of a video recording of a single gameplay session of Dungeons and Dragons. The extracts under analysis were categorised under one of the three aspects of gameplay (combat, exploration, social interaction). The extracts were then presented with an amount of context, after which the causes of misunderstandings present in the extract were analysed and discussed. Collective discussion of the extracts and linguistic elements that caused misunderstanding followed the analysis section. During the discussion, the extracts were comparatively discussed and related to the specific elements that seemed to cause misunderstanding. Finally, the results of the study were summarized in the concluding section of the study. Most of the misunderstandings that were present in the data occurred during the combat aspect of the game and were caused by, or closely related to rules of the game. Misunderstandings that occurred during exploration and social interaction were found to be less disruptive, as they could occasionally be tied to the surrounding narrative, which would arguably reduce their disruptiveness. The misunderstandings that occurred were most commonly resolved by negotiating an understanding between the communicants, or by way of repair. Because of the small sample size, generalizable ways to counteract or avoid misunderstandings were not discovered. Nevertheless, tentative speculation of ways to avoid misunderstandings was provided on occasions where possible. Further research of role-playing games might be directed towards the effects that a dungeon master’s actions have on a game. Alternatively, focus could be directed towards the functions that table-top role-playing games might have outside of entertainment, such as educational functions for example.Tiivistelmä. Tutkimuksen kohteena olivat väärinymmärrykset Dungeons and Dragons pöytäroolipelissä. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli paikallistaa mikä aiheuttaa väärinymmärryksiä, miten väärinymmärrykset ratkaistiin, sekä miten väärinymmärryksiä voidaan välttää, jotta peliä häiritsevien elementtien syyt saataisiin selville ja siten häiriötekijät voitaisiin minimoida. Pelin kehityshistoria sekä sen terminologia ja perusteet esiteltiin lyhyesti tutkimuksen yhteydessä. Perusteista tärkeimpinä mainittakoon pelin toimintaperiaate sekä sen kolme peruspilaria (taistelu, tutkinta, ja sosiaalinen kanssakäynti). Dungeons and Dragons -peliä analysoitiin yhteisesti luotuna narratiivina, minkä takia kommunikaatiovaikeuksien teorian lisäksi tutkimuksen viitekehykseen kuului myös narratiivintutkimus. Tutkimuksen aineistona toimivat otteet yhden kokonaisen pelisession videonauhoitteesta. Otteet lajiteltiin pelin kolmen peruspilarin mukaan, jonka jälkeen ne esitettiin lukijalle ja analysoitiin yksitellen, keskittyen väärinymmärrystä aiheuttaviin tekijöihin. Analyysia seuraavassa osiossa keskustelu keskittyi otteita yhdistäviin tekijöihin ja väärinymmärrystä aiheuttaviin elementteihin kollektiivisesti. Tutkimuksen päätteeksi analyysin ja keskustelun pohjalta esitettiin yhteenveto. Suurin osa väärinymmärryksistä tapahtui taistelujaksojen yhteydessä ja johtui säännöistä. Säännöistä johtuvat väärinymmärrykset haittasivat pelin etenemistä myös eniten, verrattuna väärinymmärryksiin pelin kahden muun aspektin aikana. Muiden peruspilarien aikana tapatuvat väärinymmärrykset sidottiin usein pelin narratiiviin, mikä vähensi niiden haittavaikutusta ainakin säännöistä johtuviin väärinymmärryksiin verrattuna. Väärinymmärrykset ratkaistiin useimmiten neuvottelemalla yhteisymmärrys keskusteluun osallistuvien osapuolien kesken. Yleistettäviä keinoja torjua ja välttää väärinymmärrystä ei kyetty johtamaan tutkimusmateriaalin rajatusta koosta johtuen. Siitä huolimatta muutamia hypoteettisia keinoja esiteltiin silloin kun niitä kyettiin johtamaan analysoitavista otteista. Pöytäroolipelien tutkimusta voitaisiin tulevaisuudessa suunnata kohti vaikutuksia, joita pelinjohtajan roolia täyttävällä pelaajalla ja hänen teoillaan on peliin kokonaisuudessaan. Tulevaisuudessa tutkimus voisi myös suuntautua pöytäroolipelien eri tarkoituksiin viihteen lisäksi, kuten esimerkiksi pöytäroolipeleihin opetustyökaluna