Aligning an Italian WordNet with a lexicographic dictionary: Coping with limited data

International audienceThis work describes the evaluations of two approaches, Lexical Matching and Sense Similarity, for word sense alignment between MultiWordNet and a lexicographic dictionary, Senso Comune De Mauro, when having few sense descriptions (MultiWordNet) and no structure over senses (Senso Comune De Mauro). The results obtained from the merging of the two approaches are satisfying, with F1 values of 0.47 for verbs and 0.64 for nouns

SALMA: Arabic Sense-Annotated Corpus and WSD Benchmarks

SALMA, the first Arabic sense-annotated corpus, consists of ~34K tokens, which are all sense-annotated. The corpus is annotated using two different sense inventories simultaneously (Modern and Ghani). SALMA novelty lies in how tokens and senses are associated. Instead of linking a token to only one intended sense, SALMA links a token to multiple senses and provides a score to each sense. A smart web-based annotation tool was developed to support scoring multiple senses against a given word. In addition to sense annotations, we also annotated the corpus using six types of named entities. The quality of our annotations was assessed using various metrics (Kappa, Linear Weighted Kappa, Quadratic Weighted Kappa, Mean Average Error, and Root Mean Square Error), which show very high inter-annotator agreement. To establish a Word Sense Disambiguation baseline using our SALMA corpus, we developed an end-to-end Word Sense Disambiguation system using Target Sense Verification. We used this system to evaluate three Target Sense Verification models available in the literature. Our best model achieved an accuracy with 84.2% using Modern and 78.7% using Ghani. The full corpus and the annotation tool are open-source and publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/salma/

Annotation en rôles sémantiques du français en domaine spécifique

In this Natural Language Processing Ph. D. Thesis, we aim to perform semantic role labeling on French domain-specific texts. This task first disambiguates the sense of predicates in a given text and annotates its child chunks with semantic roles such as Agent, Patient or Destination. The task helps many applications in domains where annotated corpora exist, but is difficult to use otherwise. We first evaluate on the FrameNet corpus an existing method based on VerbNet, which explains why the method is domain-independant. We show that substantial improvements can be obtained. We first use syntactic information by handling the passive voice. Next, we use semantic informations by taking advantage of the selectional restrictions present in VerbNet. To apply this method to French, we first translate lexical resources. We first translate the WordNet lexical database. Next, we translate the VerbNet lexicon which is organized semantically using syntactic information. We obtain its translation, VerbeNet, by reusing two French verb lexicons (the Lexique-Grammaire and Les Verbes Français) and by manually modifying and reorganizing the resulting lexicon. Finally, once those building blocks are in place, we evaluate the feasibility of semantic role labeling of French and English in three specific domains. We study the pros and cons of using VerbNet and VerbeNet to annotate those domains before explaining our future work.Cette thèse de Traitement Automatique des Langues a pour objectif l'annotation automatique en rôles sémantiques du français en domaine spécifique. Cette tâche désambiguïse le sens des prédicats d'un texte et annote les syntagmes liés avec des rôles sémantiques tels qu'Agent, Patient ou Destination. Elle aide de nombreuses applications dans les domaines où des corpus annotés existent, mais est difficile à utiliser quand ce n'est pas le cas. Nous avons d'abord évalué sur le corpus FrameNet une méthode existante d'annotation basée uniquement sur VerbNet et donc indépendante du domaine considéré. Nous montrons que des améliorations conséquentes peuvent être obtenues à la fois d'un point de vue syntaxique avec la prise en compte de la voix passive et d'un point de vue sémantique en utilisant les restrictions de sélection indiquées dans VerbNet. Pour utiliser cette méthode en français, nous traduisons deux ressources lexicales anglaises. Nous commençons par la base de données lexicales WordNet. Nous traduisons ensuite le lexique VerbNet dans lequel les verbes sont regroupés sémantiquement grâce à leurs traits syntaxiques. La traduction, VerbeNet, a été obtenue en réutilisant deux lexiques verbaux du français (le Lexique-Grammaire et Les Verbes Français) puis en modifiant manuellement l'ensemble des informations obtenues. Enfin, une fois ces briques en place, nous évaluons la faisabilité de l'annotation en rôles sémantiques en anglais et en français dans trois domaines spécifiques. Nous évaluons quels sont les avantages et inconvénients de se baser sur VerbNet et VerbeNet pour annoter ces domaines, avant d'indiquer nos perspectives pour poursuivre ces travaux

Investigating the universality of a semantic web-upper ontology in the context of the African languages

Ontologies are foundational to, and upper ontologies provide semantic integration across, the Semantic Web. Multilingualism has been shown to be a key challenge to the development of the Semantic Web, and is a particular challenge to the universality requirement of upper ontologies. Universality implies a qualitative mapping from lexical ontologies, like WordNet, to an upper ontology, such as SUMO. Are a given natural language family's core concepts currently included in an existing, accepted upper ontology? Does SUMO preserve an ontological non-bias with respect to the multilingual challenge, particularly in the context of the African languages? The approach to developing WordNets mapped to shared core concepts in the non-Indo-European language families has highlighted these challenges and this is examined in a unique new context: the Southern African languages. This is achieved through a new mapping from African language core concepts to SUMO. It is shown that SUMO has no signi ficant natural language ontology bias.ComputingM. Sc. (Computer Science

Eesti keele üldvaldkonna tekstide laia kattuvusega automaatne sündmusanalüüs

Seoses tekstide suuremahulise digitaliseerimisega ning digitaalse tekstiloome järjest laiema levikuga on tohutul hulgal loomuliku keele tekste muutunud ja muutumas masinloetavaks. Masinloetavus omab potentsiaali muuta tekstimassiivid inimeste jaoks lihtsamini hallatavaks, nt lubada rakendusi nagu automaatne sisukokkuvõtete tegemine ja tekstide põhjal küsimustele vastamine, ent paraku ei ulatu praegused automaatanalüüsi võimalused tekstide sisu tegeliku mõistmiseni. Oletatakse, tekstide sisu mõistvale automaatanalüüsile viib meid lähemale sündmusanalüüs – kuna paljud tekstid on narratiivse ülesehitusega, tõlgendatavad kui „sündmuste kirjeldused”, peaks tekstidest sündmuste eraldamine ja formaalsel kujul esitamine pakkuma alust mitmete „teksti mõistmist” nõudvate keeletehnoloogia rakenduste loomisel. Käesolevas väitekirjas uuritakse, kuivõrd saab eestikeelsete tekstide sündmusanalüüsi käsitleda kui avatud sündmuste hulka ja üldvaldkonna tekste hõlmavat automaatse lingvistilise analüüsi ülesannet. Probleemile lähenetakse eesti keele automaatanalüüsi kontekstis uudsest, sündmuste ajasemantikale keskenduvast perspektiivist. Töös kohandatakse eesti keelele TimeML märgendusraamistik ja luuakse raamistikule toetuv automaatne ajaväljendite tuvastaja ning ajasemantilise märgendusega (sündmusviidete, ajaväljendite ning ajaseoste märgendusega) tekstikorpus; analüüsitakse korpuse põhjal inimmärgendajate kooskõla sündmusviidete ja ajaseoste määramisel ning lõpuks uuritakse võimalusi ajasemantika-keskse sündmusanalüüsi laiendamiseks geneeriliseks sündmusanalüüsiks sündmust väljendavate keelendite samaviitelisuse lahendamise näitel. Töö pakub suuniseid tekstide ajasemantika ja sündmusstruktuuri märgenduse edasiarendamiseks tulevikus ning töös loodud keeleressurssid võimaldavad nii konkreetsete lõpp-rakenduste (nt automaatne ajaküsimustele vastamine) katsetamist kui ka automaatsete märgendustööriistade edasiarendamist.  Due to massive scale digitalisation processes and a switch from traditional means of written communication to digital written communication, vast amounts of human language texts are becoming machine-readable. Machine-readability holds a potential for easing human effort on searching and organising large text collections, allowing applications such as automatic text summarisation and question answering. However, current tools for automatic text analysis do not reach for text understanding required for making these applications generic. It is hypothesised that automatic analysis of events in texts leads us closer to the goal, as many texts can be interpreted as stories/narratives that are decomposable into events. This thesis explores event analysis as broad-coverage and general domain automatic language analysis problem in Estonian, and provides an investigation starting from time-oriented event analysis and tending towards generic event analysis. We adapt TimeML framework to Estonian, and create an automatic temporal expression tagger and a news corpus manually annotated for temporal semantics (event mentions, temporal expressions, and temporal relations) for the language; we analyse consistency of human annotation of event mentions and temporal relations, and, finally, provide a preliminary study on event coreference resolution in Estonian news. The current work also makes suggestions on how future research can improve Estonian event and temporal semantic annotation, and the language resources developed in this work will allow future experimentation with end-user applications (such as automatic answering of temporal questions) as well as provide a basis for developing automatic semantic analysis tools

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal