Discourse structure and language technology

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.An increasing number of researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Engineering face the prospect of having to work with entire texts, rather than individual sentences. While it is clear that text must have useful structure, its nature may be less clear, making it more difficult to exploit in applications. This survey of work on discourse structure thus provides a primer on the bases of which discourse is structured along with some of their formal properties. It then lays out the current state-of-the-art with respect to algorithms for recognizing these different structures, and how these algorithms are currently being used in Language Technology applications. After identifying resources that should prove useful in improving algorithm performance across a range of languages, we conclude by speculating on future discourse structure-enabled technology.Peer Reviewe

Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic Tweets Using Transformer Models

This thesis describes our approach toward the detection of sarcasm and its various types in English and Arabic Tweets through methods in deep learning. There are five problems we attempted: (1) detection of sarcasm in English Tweets, (2) detection of sarcasm in Arabic Tweets, (3) determining the type of sarcastic speech subcategory for English Tweets, (4) determining which of two semantically equivalent English Tweets is sarcastic, and (5) determining which of two semantically equivalent Arabic Tweets is sarcastic. All tasks were framed as classification problems, and our contributions are threefold: (a) we developed an English binary classifier system with RoBERTa, (b) an Arabic binary classifier with XLM-RoBERTa, and (c) an English multilabel classifier with BERT. Pre-processing steps are taken with labeled input data prior to tokenization, such as extracting and appending verbs/adjectives or representative/significant keywords to the end of an input tweet to help the models better understand and generalize sarcasm detection. We also discuss the results of simple data augmentation techniques to improve the quality of the given training dataset as well as an alternative approach to the question of multilabel sequence classification. Ultimately, our systems place us in the top 14 participants for each of the five tasks in a sarcasm detection competition

Arabic text summarization using pre-processing methodologies and techniques

Recently, one of the problems that has arisen due to the amount of information and its availability on the web, is the increased need for effective and powerful tools to automatically summarize text. For English and European languages an intensive works has been done with high performance and nowadays they look forward to multi-document and multi-language summarization. However, Arabic language still suffers from the little attention and research done in this field. In our research we propose a model to automatically summarize Arabic text using text extraction. Various steps are involved in the approach: preprocessing text, extract set of features from sentences, classify sentence based on scoring method, ranking sentences and finally generate an extract summary. The main difference between our proposed system and other Arabic summarization systems are the consideration of semantics, entity objects such as names and places, and similarity factors in our proposed system. In recent years, text summarization has seen renewed interest, and has been experiencing an increasing number of research and products especially in English language. However, in Arabic language, little work and limited research have been done in this field. will be adopted Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) as an evaluation measure to examine our proposed technique and compare it with state-of-the-art methods. Finally, an experiment on the Essex Arabic Summaries Corpus (EASC) using the ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 metrics showed promising results in comparison with existing methods

Discourse analysis of arabic documents and application to automatic summarization

Dans un discours, les textes et les conversations ne sont pas seulement une juxtaposition de mots et de phrases. Ils sont plutôt organisés en une structure dans laquelle des unités de discours sont liées les unes aux autres de manière à assurer à la fois la cohérence et la cohésion du discours. La structure du discours a montré son utilité dans de nombreuses applications TALN, y compris la traduction automatique, la génération de texte et le résumé automatique. L'utilité du discours dans les applications TALN dépend principalement de la disponibilité d'un analyseur de discours performant. Pour aider à construire ces analyseurs et à améliorer leurs performances, plusieurs ressources ont été annotées manuellement par des informations de discours dans des différents cadres théoriques. La plupart des ressources disponibles sont en anglais. Récemment, plusieurs efforts ont été entrepris pour développer des ressources discursives pour d'autres langues telles que le chinois, l'allemand, le turc, l'espagnol et le hindi. Néanmoins, l'analyse de discours en arabe standard moderne (MSA) a reçu moins d'attention malgré le fait que MSA est une langue de plus de 422 millions de locuteurs dans 22 pays. Le sujet de thèse s'intègre dans le cadre du traitement automatique de la langue arabe, plus particulièrement, l'analyse de discours de textes arabes. Cette thèse a pour but d'étudier l'apport de l'analyse sémantique et discursive pour la génération de résumé automatique de documents en langue arabe. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous proposons d'étudier la théorie de la représentation discursive segmentée (SDRT) qui propose un cadre logique pour la représentation sémantique de phrases ainsi qu'une représentation graphique de la structure du texte où les relations de discours sont de nature sémantique plutôt qu'intentionnelle. Cette théorie a été étudiée pour l'anglais, le français et l'allemand mais jamais pour la langue arabe. Notre objectif est alors d'adapter la SDRT à la spécificité de la langue arabe afin d'analyser sémantiquement un texte pour générer un résumé automatique. Nos principales contributions sont les suivantes : Une étude de la faisabilité de la construction d'une structure de discours récursive et complète de textes arabes. En particulier, nous proposons : Un schéma d'annotation qui couvre la totalité d'un texte arabe, dans lequel chaque constituant est lié à d'autres constituants. Un document est alors représenté par un graphe acyclique orienté qui capture les relations explicites et les relations implicites ainsi que des phénomènes de discours complexes, tels que l'attachement, la longue distance du discours pop-ups et les dépendances croisées. Une nouvelle hiérarchie des relations de discours. Nous étudions les relations rhétoriques d'un point de vue sémantique en se concentrant sur leurs effets sémantiques et non pas sur la façon dont elles sont déclenchées par des connecteurs de discours, qui sont souvent ambigües en arabe. o une analyse quantitative (en termes de connecteurs de discours, de fréquences de relations, de proportion de relations implicites, etc.) et une analyse qualitative (accord inter-annotateurs et analyse des erreurs) de la campagne d'annotation. Un outil d'analyse de discours où nous étudions à la fois la segmentation automatique de textes arabes en unités de discours minimales et l'identification automatique des relations explicites et implicites du discours. L'utilisation de notre outil pour résumer des textes arabes. Nous comparons la représentation de discours en graphes et en arbres pour la production de résumés.Within a discourse, texts and conversations are not just a juxtaposition of words and sentences. They are rather organized in a structure in which discourse units are related to each other so as to ensure both discourse coherence and cohesion. Discourse structure has shown to be useful in many NLP applications including machine translation, natural language generation and language technology in general. The usefulness of discourse in NLP applications mainly depends on the availability of powerful discourse parsers. To build such parsers and improve their performances, several resources have been manually annotated with discourse information within different theoretical frameworks. Most available resources are in English. Recently, several efforts have been undertaken to develop manually annotated discourse information for other languages such as Chinese, German, Turkish, Spanish and Hindi. Surprisingly, discourse processing in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has received less attention despite the fact that MSA is a language with more than 422 million speakers in 22 countries. Computational processing of Arabic language has received a great attention in the literature for over twenty years. Several resources and tools have been built to deal with Arabic non concatenative morphology and Arabic syntax going from shallow to deep parsing. However, the field is still very vacant at the layer of discourse. As far as we know, the sole effort towards Arabic discourse processing was done in the Leeds Arabic Discourse Treebank that extends the Penn Discourse TreeBank model to MSA. In this thesis, we propose to go beyond the annotation of explicit relations that link adjacent units, by completely specifying the semantic scope of each discourse relation, making transparent an interpretation of the text that takes into account the semantic effects of discourse relations. In particular, we propose the first effort towards a semantically driven approach of Arabic texts following the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). Our main contributions are: A study of the feasibility of building a recursive and complete discourse structures of Arabic texts. In particular, we propose: An annotation scheme for the full discourse coverage of Arabic texts, in which each constituent is linked to other constituents. A document is then represented by an oriented acyclic graph, which captures explicit and implicit relations as well as complex discourse phenomena, such as long-distance attachments, long-distance discourse pop-ups and crossed dependencies. A novel discourse relation hierarchy. We study the rhetorical relations from a semantic point of view by focusing on their effect on meaning and not on how they are lexically triggered by discourse connectives that are often ambiguous, especially in Arabic. A thorough quantitative analysis (in terms of discourse connectives, relation frequencies, proportion of implicit relations, etc.) and qualitative analysis (inter-annotator agreements and error analysis) of the annotation campaign. An automatic discourse parser where we investigate both automatic segmentation of Arabic texts into elementary discourse units and automatic identification of explicit and implicit Arabic discourse relations. An application of our discourse parser to Arabic text summarization. We compare tree-based vs. graph-based discourse representations for producing indicative summaries and show that the full discourse coverage of a document is definitively a plus

Evaluation in Discourse: a Corpus-Based Study

This paper describes the CASOAR corpus, the first manually annotated corpus that explores the impact of discourse structure on sentiment analysis with a study of movie reviews in French and in English as well as letters to the editor in French. While annotating opinions at the expression, the sentence or the document level is a well-established task and relatively straightforward, discourse annotation remains difficult, especially for non-experts. Therefore, combining both annotations poses several methodological problems that we address here. We propose a multi-layered annotation scheme that includes: the complete discourse structure according to the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the opinion orientation of elementary discourse units and opinion expressions, and their associated features. We detail each layer, explore the interactions between them and discuss our results. In particular, we examine the correlation between discourse and semantic category of opinion expressions, the impact of discourse relations on both subjectivity and polarity analysis and the impact of discourse on the determination of the overall opinion of a document. Our results demonstrate that discourse is an important cue for sentiment analysis, at least for the corpus genres we have studied

Utilizing graph-based representation of text in a hybrid approach to multiple documents summarization

The aim of automatic text summarization is to process text with the purpose of identifying and presenting the most important information appearing in the text. In this research, we aim to investigate automatic multiple document summarization using a hybrid approach of extractive and “shallow abstractive methods. We aim to utilize the graph-based representation approach proposed in [1] and [2] as part of our method to multiple document summarization aiming to provide concise, informative and coherent summaries. We start by scoring sentences based on significance to extract top scoring ones from each document of the set of documents being summarized. In this step, we look into different criteria of scoring sentences, which include: the presence of highly frequent words of the document, the presence of highly frequent words of the set of documents and the presence of words found in the first and last sentence of the document and the different combination of such features. Upon running our experiments we found that the best combination of features to use is utilizing the presence of highly frequent words of the document and presence of words found in the first and last sentences of the document. The average f-score of those features had an average of 7.9% increase to other features\u27 f-scores. Secondly, we address the issue of redundancy of information through clustering sentences of same or similar information into one cluster that will be compressed into one sentence, thus avoiding redundancy of information as much as possible. We investigated clustering the extracted sentences based on two criteria for similarity, the first of which uses word frequency vector for similarity measure and the second of which uses word semantic similarity. Through our experiment, we found that the use of the word vector features yields much better clusters in terms of sentence similarity. The word feature vector had a 20% more number of clusters labeled to contain similar sentences as opposed to those of the word semantic feature. We then adopted a graph-based representation of text proposed in [1] and [2] to represent each sentence in a cluster, and using the k-shortest paths we found the shortest path to represent the final compressed sentence and use it as a final sentence in the summary. Human evaluator scored sentences based on grammatical correctness and almost 74% of 51 sentences evaluated got a perfect score of 2 which is a perfect or near perfect sentence. We finally propose a method for scoring the compressed sentences according to the order in which they should appear in the final summary. We used the Document Understanding Conference dataset for year 2014 as the evaluating dataset for our final system. We used the ROUGE system for evaluation which stands for Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation. This system compare the automatic summaries to “ideal human references. We also compared our summaries ROUGE scores to those of summaries generated using the MEAD summarization tool. Our system provided better precision and f-score as well as comparable recall scores. On average our system has a percentage increase of 2% for precision and 1.6% increase in f-score than those of MEAD while MEAD has an increase of 0.8% in recall. In addition, our system provided more compressed version of the summary as opposed to that generated by MEAD. We finally ran an experiment to evaluate the order of sentences in the final summary and its comprehensibility where we show that our ordering method produced a comprehensible summary. On average, summaries that scored a perfect score in term of comprehensibility constitute 72% of the evaluated summaries. Evaluators were also asked to count the number of ungrammatical and incomprehensible sentences in the evaluated summaries and on average they were only 10.9% of the summaries sentences. We believe our system provide a \u27shallow abstractive summary to multiple documents that does not require intensive Natural Language Processing.

PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

A Pattern-Growth Sentence Compression Technique For Malay Text Summarizer

Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) has benefited users in terms of identifying and extracting the most salient information from a given text with less effort. The application of Sentence Compression (SC) in ATS is to remove unimportant constituents from a summary sentence while preserving the salient ones by keeping the sentence’s grammar intact. Most previous SC techniques have a high dependency on syntactic rules and knowledge applied to individual word or phrase to cater the removal decision. Despite the ability to produce a new grammatical compressed sentence, prior approaches still suffer several drawbacks including the failure to include some significant and relevant sentences in constructing the final summary sentence