107 research outputs found
Concept and entity grounding using indirect supervision
Extracting and disambiguating entities and concepts is a crucial step toward understanding natural language text. In this thesis, we consider the problem of grounding concepts and entities mentioned in text to one or more knowledge bases (KBs). A well-studied scenario of this problem is the one in which documents are given in English and the goal is to identify concept and entity mentions, and find the corresponding entries the mentions refer to in Wikipedia. We extend this problem in two directions: First, we study identifying and grounding entities written in any language to the English Wikipedia. Second, we investigate using multiple KBs which do not contain rich textual and structural information Wikipedia does.
These more involved settings pose a few additional challenges beyond those addressed in the standard English Wikification problem. Key among them is that no supervision is available to facilitate training machine learning models. The first extension, cross-lingual Wikification, introduces problems such as recognizing multilingual named entities mentioned in text, translating non-English names into English, and computing word similarity across languages. Since it is impossible to acquire manually annotated examples for all languages, building models for all languages in Wikipedia requires exploring indirect or incidental supervision signals which already exist in Wikipedia. For the second setting, we need to deal with the fact that most KBs do not contain the rich information Wikipedia has; consequently, the main supervision signal used to train Wikification rankers does not exist anymore. In this thesis, we show that supervision signals can be obtained by carefully examining the redundancy and relations between multiple KBs. By developing algorithms and models which harvest these incidental signals, we can achieve better performance on these tasks
Evaluating Scoped Meaning Representations
Semantic parsing offers many opportunities to improve natural language
understanding. We present a semantically annotated parallel corpus for English,
German, Italian, and Dutch where sentences are aligned with scoped meaning
representations in order to capture the semantics of negation, modals,
quantification, and presupposition triggers. The semantic formalism is based on
Discourse Representation Theory, but concepts are represented by WordNet
synsets and thematic roles by VerbNet relations. Translating scoped meaning
representations to sets of clauses enables us to compare them for the purpose
of semantic parser evaluation and checking translations. This is done by
computing precision and recall on matching clauses, in a similar way as is done
for Abstract Meaning Representations. We show that our matching tool for
evaluating scoped meaning representations is both accurate and efficient.
Applying this matching tool to three baseline semantic parsers yields F-scores
between 43% and 54%. A pilot study is performed to automatically find changes
in meaning by comparing meaning representations of translations. This
comparison turns out to be an additional way of (i) finding annotation mistakes
and (ii) finding instances where our semantic analysis needs to be improved.Comment: Camera-ready for LREC 201
Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!
Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse
structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this
work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for
assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity.
We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine)
translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into
German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection
and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for
cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and
almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that
annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or
cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at
\url{http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining}.Comment: Accepted at Coling 201
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