Tools and Methodologies for Annotating Syntax and Named Entities in the National Corpus of Polish

Abstract-The on-going project aiming at the creation of the National Corpus of Polish assumes several levels of linguistic annotation. We present the technical environment and methodological background developed for the three upper annotation levels: the level of syntactic words and groups, and the level of named entities. We show how knowledge-based platforms Spejd and Sprout are used for the automatic pre-annotation of the corpus, and we discuss some particular problems faced during the elaboration of the syntactic grammar, which contains over 800 rules and is one of the largest chunking grammars for Polish. We also show how the tree editor TrEd has been customized for manual post-editing of annotations, and for further revision of discrepancies. Our XML format converters and customized archiving repository ensure the automatic data flow and efficient corpus file management. We believe that this environment or substantial parts of it can be reused in or adapted for other corpus annotation tasks

Representation and Processing of Composition, Variation and Approximation in Language Resources and Tools

In my habilitation dissertation, meant to validate my capacity of and maturity for directingresearch activities, I present a panorama of several topics in computational linguistics, linguisticsand computer science.Over the past decade, I was notably concerned with the phenomena of compositionalityand variability of linguistic objects. I illustrate the advantages of a compositional approachto the language in the domain of emotion detection and I explain how some linguistic objects,most prominently multi-word expressions, defy the compositionality principles. I demonstratethat the complex properties of MWEs, notably variability, are partially regular and partiallyidiosyncratic. This fact places the MWEs on the frontiers between different levels of linguisticprocessing, such as lexicon and syntax.I show the highly heterogeneous nature of MWEs by citing their two existing taxonomies.After an extensive state-of-the art study of MWE description and processing, I summarizeMultiflex, a formalism and a tool for lexical high-quality morphosyntactic description of MWUs.It uses a graph-based approach in which the inflection of a MWU is expressed in function ofthe morphology of its components, and of morphosyntactic transformation patterns. Due tounification the inflection paradigms are represented compactly. Orthographic, inflectional andsyntactic variants are treated within the same framework. The proposal is multilingual: it hasbeen tested on six European languages of three different origins (Germanic, Romance and Slavic),I believe that many others can also be successfully covered. Multiflex proves interoperable. Itadapts to different morphological language models, token boundary definitions, and underlyingmodules for the morphology of single words. It has been applied to the creation and enrichmentof linguistic resources, as well as to morphosyntactic analysis and generation. It can be integratedinto other NLP applications requiring the conflation of different surface realizations of the sameconcept.Another chapter of my activity concerns named entities, most of which are particular types ofMWEs. Their rich semantic load turned them into a hot topic in the NLP community, which isdocumented in my state-of-the art survey. I present the main assumptions, processes and resultsissued from large annotation tasks at two levels (for named entities and for coreference), parts ofthe National Corpus of Polish construction. I have also contributed to the development of bothrule-based and probabilistic named entity recognition tools, and to an automated enrichment ofProlexbase, a large multilingual database of proper names, from open sources.With respect to multi-word expressions, named entities and coreference mentions, I pay aspecial attention to nested structures. This problem sheds new light on the treatment of complexlinguistic units in NLP. When these units start being modeled as trees (or, more generally, asacyclic graphs) rather than as flat sequences of tokens, long-distance dependencies, discontinu-ities, overlapping and other frequent linguistic properties become easier to represent. This callsfor more complex processing methods which control larger contexts than what usually happensin sequential processing. Thus, both named entity recognition and coreference resolution comesvery close to parsing, and named entities or mentions with their nested structures are analogous3to multi-word expressions with embedded complements.My parallel activity concerns finite-state methods for natural language and XML processing.My main contribution in this field, co-authored with 2 colleagues, is the first full-fledged methodfor tree-to-language correction, and more precisely for correcting XML documents with respectto a DTD. We have also produced interesting results in incremental finite-state algorithmics,particularly relevant to data evolution contexts such as dynamic vocabularies or user updates.Multilingualism is the leitmotif of my research. I have applied my methods to several naturallanguages, most importantly to Polish, Serbian, English and French. I have been among theinitiators of a highly multilingual European scientific network dedicated to parsing and multi-word expressions. I have used multilingual linguistic data in experimental studies. I believethat it is particularly worthwhile to design NLP solutions taking declension-rich (e.g. Slavic)languages into account, since this leads to more universal solutions, at least as far as nominalconstructions (MWUs, NEs, mentions) are concerned. For instance, when Multiflex had beendeveloped with Polish in mind it could be applied as such to French, English, Serbian and Greek.Also, a French-Serbian collaboration led to substantial modifications in morphological modelingin Prolexbase in its early development stages. This allowed for its later application to Polishwith very few adaptations of the existing model. Other researchers also stress the advantages ofNLP studies on highly inflected languages since their morphology encodes much more syntacticinformation than is the case e.g. in English.In this dissertation I am also supposed to demonstrate my ability of playing an active rolein shaping the scientific landscape, on a local, national and international scale. I describemy: (i) various scientific collaborations and supervision activities, (ii) roles in over 10 regional,national and international projects, (iii) responsibilities in collective bodies such as program andorganizing committees of conferences and workshops, PhD juries, and the National UniversityCouncil (CNU), (iv) activity as an evaluator and a reviewer of European collaborative projects.The issues addressed in this dissertation open interesting scientific perspectives, in whicha special impact is put on links among various domains and communities. These perspectivesinclude: (i) integrating fine-grained language data into the linked open data, (ii) deep parsingof multi-word expressions, (iii) modeling multi-word expression identification in a treebank as atree-to-language correction problem, and (iv) a taxonomy and an experimental benchmark fortree-to-language correction approaches

Real-time Human Proxy : An Avatar-based Interaction System

Second International Workshop, IMTCI 2004, Warsaw, Poland, September 13-14, 2004This paper describes techniques to improve human representation on an avatar-based interaction system, using real-time motion sensing and human action symbolization. Avatar-based interaction systems with computer-generated virtual environments have difficulties in acquiring user\u27s information, i.e., enough information to represent the user as if he/she were in the environment. This mainly comes of high degrees of freedom of human body and causes the lack of reality. Since it is almost impossible to acquire all the detailed information of human actions or activities, we, instead, recognize, or estimate, what kind of actions have occurred from sensed human motion information and other available information and re-generate detailed and natural actions from the estimated results. In this paper, we describe our approach, Real-time Human Proxy, on both side of acquiring and representing human actions. Also we present experimental results

Real-time Human Proxy : An Avatar-based Interaction System

This paper describes techniques to improve human representation on an avatar-based interaction system, using real-time motion sensing and human action symbolization. Avatar-based interaction systems with computer-generated virtual environments have difficulties in acquiring user's information, i.e., enough information to represent the user as if he/she were in the environment. This mainly comes of high degrees of freedom of human body and causes the lack of reality. Since it is almost impossible to acquire all the detailed information of human actions or activities, we, instead, recognize, or estimate, what kind of actions have occurred from sensed human motion information and other available information and re-generate detailed and natural actions from the estimated results. In this paper, we describe our approach, Real-time Human Proxy, on both side of acquiring and representing human actions. Also we present experimental results.Second International Workshop, IMTCI 2004, Warsaw, Poland, September 13-14, 200