Towards Better Understanding Researcher Strategies in Cross-Lingual Event Analytics

With an increasing amount of information on globally important events, there is a growing demand for efficient analytics of multilingual event-centric information. Such analytics is particularly challenging due to the large amount of content, the event dynamics and the language barrier. Although memory institutions increasingly collect event-centric Web content in different languages, very little is known about the strategies of researchers who conduct analytics of such content. In this paper we present researchers' strategies for the content, method and feature selection in the context of cross-lingual event-centric analytics observed in two case studies on multilingual Wikipedia. We discuss the influence factors for these strategies, the findings enabled by the adopted methods along with the current limitations and provide recommendations for services supporting researchers in cross-lingual event-centric analytics.Comment: In Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 201

Generating a 3D Simulation of a Car Accident from a Written Description in Natural Language: the CarSim System

This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a 3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2001, Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processin

The syntax of manner quotative constructions in English and Dutch

This paper proposes an account of some properties of the manner quotative constructions be like [Quote] in English and hebben (zo)iets van [Quote] in Dutch. We make two main claims about these constructions. First, in the spirit of Rothstein’s (1999) proposal for adjectival predicates of copula be, we propose that eventive direct speech interpretations of these quotatives are derived via a coercion mechanism akin to those that make count readings out of mass nouns in the nominal domain. Second, adapting a proposal for be like originally made by Kayne (2007), we propose that some exceptional syntactic properties of be like as a quote introducer in English are explained by the presence of a silent something quantifier, which takes a like-headed PP as its complement. We compare English be like quotatives with innovative (zo)iets van quotative constructions in Dutch, which contain an overt something quantifier and behave similarly