A Word Sense-Oriented User Interface for Interactive Multilingual Text Retrieval

In this paper we present an interface for supporting a user in an interactive cross-language search process using semantic classes. In order to enable users to access multilingual information, different problems have to be solved: disambiguating and translating the query words, as well as categorizing and presenting the results appropriately. Therefore, we first give a brief introduction to word sense disambiguation, cross-language text retrieval and document categorization and finally describe recent achievements of our research towards an interactive multilingual retrieval system. We focus especially on the problem of browsing and navigation of the different word senses in one source and possibly several target languages. In the last part of the paper, we discuss the developed user interface and its functionalities in more detail

Integrating and conceptualizing heterogeneous ontologies on the web

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Semantically enhanced document clustering

This thesis advocates the view that traditional document clustering could be significantly improved by representing documents at different levels of abstraction at which the similarity between documents is considered. The improvement is with regard to the alignment of the clustering solutions to human judgement. The proposed methodology employs semantics with which the conceptual similarity be-tween documents is measured. The goal is to design algorithms which implement the meth-odology, in order to solve the following research problems: (i) how to obtain multiple deter-ministic clustering solutions; (ii) how to produce coherent large-scale clustering solutions across domains, regardless of the number of clusters; (iii) how to obtain clustering solutions which align well with human judgement; and (iv) how to produce specific clustering solu-tions from the perspective of the user’s understanding for the domain of interest. The developed clustering methodology enhances separation between and improved coher-ence within clusters generated across several domains by using levels of abstraction. The methodology employs a semantically enhanced text stemmer, which is developed for the pur-pose of producing coherent clustering, and a concept index that provides generic document representation and reduced dimensionality of document representation. These characteristics of the methodology enable addressing the limitations of traditional text document clustering by employing computationally expensive similarity measures such as Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD), which theoretically aligns the clustering solutions closer to human judgement. A threshold for similarity between documents that employs many-to-many similarity matching is proposed and experimentally proven to benefit the traditional clustering algorithms in pro-ducing clustering solutions aligned closer to human judgement. 4 The experimental validation demonstrates the scalability of the semantically enhanced document clustering methodology and supports the contributions: (i) multiple deterministic clustering solutions and different viewpoints to a document collection are obtained; (ii) the use of concept indexing as a document representation technique in the domain of document clustering is beneficial for producing coherent clusters across domains; (ii) SETS algorithm provides an improved text normalisation by using external knowledge; (iv) a method for measuring similarity between documents on a large scale by using many-to-many matching; (v) a semantically enhanced methodology that employs levels of abstraction that correspond to a user’s background, understanding and motivation. The achieved results will benefit the research community working in the area of document management, information retrieval, data mining and knowledge management

Improving Academic Natural Language Processing Infrastructures Utilizing Cluster Computation

In light of widespread digitization endeavors and ever-growing textual data generation, developing efficient academic Natural Language Processing (NLP) infrastructures, which can deal with large amounts of data, is of particular importance. Novel computation technologies allow tools that support big data and heavy computation while performing timely and cost-effective data processing. This development has led researchers to demand that knowledge be extracted from ever-increasing textual data before it is outdated. Cluster computation is a modern technology for handling big data efficiently. It provides distribution of computing and data over a number of machines in a cluster, as well as efficient use of resources, which are key requirements to process big data in a timely manner. It also assures applications’ high availability and fault tolerance, which are fundamental concerns when dealing with vast amounts of data. In addition, it provides load balancing of data during the execution of tasks, which results in optimal use of resources and enhances efficiency. Data-oriented parallelization is an effective solution to enable the currently available academic NLP infrastructures to process big data. This approach offers a solution to parallelize the NLP tools which comprise identical non-complicated tasks without the expense of changing NLP algorithms. This thesis presents the adaption of cluster computation technology to academic NLP infrastructures to address the notable features that are essential to process vast quantities of text materials efficiently, in terms of both resources and time. Apache Spark on top of Apache Hadoop and its ecosystem have been utilized to develop a set of NLP tools that provide a distributed environment to execute the NLP tasks. Many experiments were conducted to assess the functionality of the designated strategy. This thesis shows that using cluster computation technology and data-oriented parallelization enables academic NLP infrastructures to execute large amounts of textual data in a timely manner while improving the performance of the NLP tools. Moreover, these experiments provide information that brings a more realistic and transparent estimation of workflows’ costs (required hardware resources) and execution time, along with the fastest, optimum, or feasible resource configuration for each individual workflow. This knowledge can be employed by users to trade-off between run-time, size of data, and hardware, and it enables them to design a strategy for data storage, duration of data retention, and delivery time. This has the potential to enhance researchers’ satisfaction when using academic NLP infrastructures. The thesis also shows that a cluster computation approach provides the capacity to adapt NLP services with JIT delivery systems. The proposed strategy assures the reliability and predictability of the services, which are the main characteristics of the services in JIT delivery systems. Defining the relevant parameters, recording the behavior of the services, and analyzing the generated data resulted in the provision of knowledge that can be utilized to create a service catalog—a fundamental requirement for the services in JIT delivery systems—for each service offered. This knowledge also helps to generate the performance profiles for each item mentioned in the service catalog and to update them continuously to cover new experiments and improve service quality

COSPO/CENDI Industry Day Conference

The conference's objective was to provide a forum where government information managers and industry information technology experts could have an open exchange and discuss their respective needs and compare them to the available, or soon to be available, solutions. Technical summaries and points of contact are provided for the following sessions: secure products, protocols, and encryption; information providers; electronic document management and publishing; information indexing, discovery, and retrieval (IIDR); automated language translators; IIDR - natural language capabilities; IIDR - advanced technologies; IIDR - distributed heterogeneous and large database support; and communications - speed, bandwidth, and wireless

Advanced document data extraction techniques to improve supply chain performance

In this thesis, a novel machine learning technique to extract text-based information from scanned images has been developed. This information extraction is performed in the context of scanned invoices and bills used in financial transactions. These financial transactions contain a considerable amount of data that must be extracted, refined, and stored digitally before it can be used for analysis. Converting this data into a digital format is often a time-consuming process. Automation and data optimisation show promise as methods for reducing the time required and the cost of Supply Chain Management (SCM) processes, especially Supplier Invoice Management (SIM), Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) and Supply Chain procurement processes. This thesis uses a cross-disciplinary approach involving Computer Science and Operational Management to explore the benefit of automated invoice data extraction in business and its impact on SCM. The study adopts a multimethod approach based on empirical research, surveys, and interviews performed on selected companies.The expert system developed in this thesis focuses on two distinct areas of research: Text/Object Detection and Text Extraction. For Text/Object Detection, the Faster R-CNN model was analysed. While this model yields outstanding results in terms of object detection, it is limited by poor performance when image quality is low. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model is proposed in response to this limitation. The GAN model is a generator network that is implemented with the help of the Faster R-CNN model and a discriminator that relies on PatchGAN. The output of the GAN model is text data with bonding boxes. For text extraction from the bounding box, a novel data extraction framework consisting of various processes including XML processing in case of existing OCR engine, bounding box pre-processing, text clean up, OCR error correction, spell check, type check, pattern-based matching, and finally, a learning mechanism for automatizing future data extraction was designed. Whichever fields the system can extract successfully are provided in key-value format.The efficiency of the proposed system was validated using existing datasets such as SROIE and VATI. Real-time data was validated using invoices that were collected by two companies that provide invoice automation services in various countries. Currently, these scanned invoices are sent to an OCR system such as OmniPage, Tesseract, or ABBYY FRE to extract text blocks and later, a rule-based engine is used to extract relevant data. While the system’s methodology is robust, the companies surveyed were not satisfied with its accuracy. Thus, they sought out new, optimized solutions. To confirm the results, the engines were used to return XML-based files with text and metadata identified. The output XML data was then fed into this new system for information extraction. This system uses the existing OCR engine and a novel, self-adaptive, learning-based OCR engine. This new engine is based on the GAN model for better text identification. Experiments were conducted on various invoice formats to further test and refine its extraction capabilities. For cost optimisation and the analysis of spend classification, additional data were provided by another company in London that holds expertise in reducing their clients' procurement costs. This data was fed into our system to get a deeper level of spend classification and categorisation. This helped the company to reduce its reliance on human effort and allowed for greater efficiency in comparison with the process of performing similar tasks manually using excel sheets and Business Intelligence (BI) tools.The intention behind the development of this novel methodology was twofold. First, to test and develop a novel solution that does not depend on any specific OCR technology. Second, to increase the information extraction accuracy factor over that of existing methodologies. Finally, it evaluates the real-world need for the system and the impact it would have on SCM. This newly developed method is generic and can extract text from any given invoice, making it a valuable tool for optimizing SCM. In addition, the system uses a template-matching approach to ensure the quality of the extracted information

Lexical database enrichment through semi-automated morphological analysis

Derivational morphology proposes meaningful connections between words and is largely unrepresented in lexical databases. This thesis presents a project to enrich a lexical database with morphological links and to evaluate their contribution to disambiguation. A lexical database with sense distinctions was required. WordNet was chosen because of its free availability and widespread use. Its suitability was assessed through critical evaluation with respect to specifications and criticisms, using a transparent, extensible model. The identification of serious shortcomings suggested a portable enrichment methodology, applicable to alternative resources. Although 40% of the most frequent words are prepositions, they have been largely ignored by computational linguists, so addition of prepositions was also required. The preferred approach to morphological enrichment was to infer relations from phenomena discovered algorithmically. Both existing databases and existing algorithms can capture regular morphological relations, but cannot capture exceptions correctly; neither of them provide any semantic information. Some morphological analysis algorithms are subject to the fallacy that morphological analysis can be performed simply by segmentation. Morphological rules, grounded in observation and etymology, govern associations between and attachment of suffixes and contribute to defining the meaning of morphological relationships. Specifying character substitutions circumvents the segmentation fallacy. Morphological rules are prone to undergeneration, minimised through a variable lexical validity requirement, and overgeneration, minimised by rule reformulation and restricting monosyllabic output. Rules take into account the morphology of ancestor languages through co-occurrences of morphological patterns. Multiple rules applicable to an input suffix need their precedence established. The resistance of prefixations to segmentation has been addressed by identifying linking vowel exceptions and irregular prefixes. The automatic affix discovery algorithm applies heuristics to identify meaningful affixes and is combined with morphological rules into a hybrid model, fed only with empirical data, collected without supervision. Further algorithms apply the rules optimally to automatically pre-identified suffixes and break words into their component morphemes. To handle exceptions, stoplists were created in response to initial errors and fed back into the model through iterative development, leading to 100% precision, contestable only on lexicographic criteria. Stoplist length is minimised by special treatment of monosyllables and reformulation of rules. 96% of words and phrases are analysed. 218,802 directed derivational links have been encoded in the lexicon rather than the wordnet component of the model because the lexicon provides the optimal clustering of word senses. Both links and analyser are portable to an alternative lexicon. The evaluation uses the extended gloss overlaps disambiguation algorithm. The enriched model outperformed WordNet in terms of recall without loss of precision. Failure of all experiments to outperform disambiguation by frequency reflects on WordNet sense distinctions

Ensemble Morphosyntactic Analyser for Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic (CA) is an influential language for Muslim lives around the world. It is the language of two sources of Islamic laws: the Quran and the Sunnah, the collection of traditions and sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed. However, classical Arabic in general, and the Sunnah, in particular, is underexplored and under-resourced in the field of computational linguistics. This study examines the possible directions for adapting existing tools, specifically morphological analysers, designed for modern standard Arabic (MSA) to classical Arabic. Morphological analysers of CA are limited, as well as the data for evaluating them. In this study, we adapt existing analysers and create a validation data-set from the Sunnah books. Inspired by the advances in deep learning and the promising results of ensemble methods, we developed a systematic method for transferring morphological analysis that is capable of handling different labelling systems and various sequence lengths. In this study, we handpicked the best four open access MSA morphological analysers. Data generated from these analysers are evaluated before and after adaptation through the existing Quranic Corpus and the Sunnah Arabic Corpus. The findings are as follows: first, it is feasible to analyse under-resourced languages using existing comparable language resources given a small sufficient set of annotated text. Second, analysers typically generate different errors and this could be exploited. Third, an explicit alignment of sequences and the mapping of labels is not necessary to achieve comparable accuracies given a sufficient size of training dataset. Adapting existing tools is easier than creating tools from scratch. The resulting quality is dependent on training data size and number and quality of input taggers. Pipeline architecture performs less well than the End-to-End neural network architecture due to error propagation and limitation on the output format. A valuable tool and data for annotating classical Arabic is made freely available