Predicting the Law Area and Decisions of French Supreme Court Cases

In this paper, we investigate the application of text classification methods to predict the law area and the decision of cases judged by the French Supreme Court. We also investigate the influence of the time period in which a ruling was made over the textual form of the case description and the extent to which it is necessary to mask the judge's motivation for a ruling to emulate a real-world test scenario. We report results of 96% f1 score in predicting a case ruling, 90% f1 score in predicting the law area of a case, and 75.9% f1 score in estimating the time span when a ruling has been issued using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained on lexical features.Comment: RANLP 201

Deep Learning for Period Classification of Historical Texts

In this study, we address the interesting task of classifying historical texts by their assumed period of writing. This task is useful in digital humanity studies where many texts have unidentified publication dates. For years, the typical approach for temporal text classification was supervised using machine-learning algorithms. These algorithms require careful feature engineering and considerable domain expertise to design a feature extractor to transform the raw text into a feature vector from which the classifier could learn to classify any unseen valid input. Recently, deep learning has produced extremely promising results for various tasks in natural language processing (NLP). The primary advantage of deep learning is that human engineers did not design the feature layers, but the features were extrapolated from data with a general-purpose learning procedure. We investigated deep learning models for period classification of historical texts. We compared three common models: paragraph vectors, convolutional neural networks (CNN), and recurrent neural networks (RNN). We demonstrate that the CNN and RNN models outperformed the paragraph vector model and supervised machine-learning algorithms. In addition, we constructed word embeddings for each time period and analyzed semantic changes of word meanings over time

The Translation of Allusions in Poetry : Translation of the cultural and historical allusions in the poems of Endre Ady

In my thesis I have studied the translation of the allusions in the poetry of the Hungarian poet Endre Ady (1877-1919). Ady’s poetry was rich in allusions intertwined with the history and culture of Hungary and in my thesis I have sought to examine how transla-tors try to translate these allusions into English, Finnish, German, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Dutch and Portuguese and which factors affect the process of translating them. As main factors affecting the process, I have chosen the geographical and cultural distance between the cultures, the poetic form and the assumed use of the target text. As theoretical background I draw on the translation theories by Eugene Nida and the Skopos theory created by Hans Vermeer and Katherine Reiss. For classification and analysis of allusions I have applied the studies by Ritva Leppihalme and for the classification of translations I have relied on a system by Ildikó Pusztai-Varga. For the special problems attached to the translation of poetry I have used the study by Barbara Folkart. In my thesis I show that in the translation of allusions of Ady’s poetry there are two factors that complicate the process, namely the geographical/cultural distance, which makes the allusions more difficult to understand, and the compactness of the poetic form, which does not allow explaining. Beside these the assumed purpose of the target text is also of great importance, as the requirements of the poetic form may be abandoned, if the purpose is to convey only the information, not poetry.Opinnäytetyössäni olen tutkinut unkarilaisen Endre Adyn (1877-1919) runojen sisältämien alluusioiden kääntämistä. Adyn runous on täynnä Unkarin historiaan ja kulttuuriin liittyviä alluusioita ja olen tarkastellut sitä, miten kääntäjät kääntävät näitä alluusioita eri kielille (englanti, suomi, saksa, tsekki, slovakki, romania, hollanti ja portugali) ja mitkä tekijät vaikuttavat käännösprosessiin. Tärkeimmiksi käännösprosessiin vaikuttaviksi tekijöiksi olen valinnut maantieteellisen ja kulttuurisen etäisyyden lähtö- ja kohdekulttuurin välillä, runon muotoon liittyvät tekijät sekä kohdetekstin käyttötarkoituksen. Opinnäytetyöni teoriapohja tukeutuu Eugene Nidan käännösteorioihin sekä Hans Vermeerin ja Katherine Reissin luomaan skoposteoriaan. Alluusioiden luokittelussa ja analyysissa olen soveltanut Ritva Leppihalmeen tutkimuksia, käännösten luokittelussa taas olen turvautunut Ildikó Pusztai-Vargan kehittämään ryhmittelyyn. Runouden kääntämiseen liittyvissä erityiskysymyksissä olen käyttänyt apuna Barbara Folkartin tutkimuksia. Tutkimuksessani päädytään siihen tulokseen, että käännettäessä Adyn runouden sisältämiä alluusioita ennen kaikkea kaksi tekijää monimutkaistaa prosessia: toisaalta maantieteellis-kulttuurinen etäisyys, joka tekee alluusioista vaikeampia ymmärtää kohdeyleisölle, toisaalta runouden tiivis muoto, joka ei mahdollista selitysten tai lisäysten liittämistä tekstiin. Näiden lisäksi myös merkitystä on myös kohdetekstin käyttötarkoituksella. Jos tarkoituksena on välittää yksinomaan lähtötekstin informaatiota eikä esteettisiä arvoja, koko runomuoto voidaan hylätä kohdetekstissä

One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective

From simple predicators to clausal functors : The english modals through time and the primitives of modality

The ultimate goal of this paper is to find a representation of modality compatible with some basic conditions on the syntax-semantic interface. Such conditions are anchored, for instance, in Chomsky's (1995) principle of full interpretation (FI). Abstract interpretation of modality is, however - be it "only" in semantic terms - already a hard nut to crack, way too vast to be dealt with in any comprehensive way here. What is pursued instead is a case-study-centered analysis. The case in point are the English modals (EM) viewed in their development through time - a locus classicus for a number of linguistic theories and frameworks. The idea will be to start out from two lines of research - continuous grammaticalization vs. cataclysmic change - and to explain some of their incongruities. The first non-trivial point here consists in deriving more fundamental questions from this research. The second, possibly even less trivial one consists in answering them. Specifically, I will argue that regardless of the actual numerical rate of change, there is an underlying and more structured way to account for the notions of change and continuity within the modal system, respectively

Exile as severance

Exile is a phenomenon probably as ancient as humanity itself, and one of the oldest topics in universal literature. The great majority of its variants (political, economical, social,) are founded on the idea of forced displacement. Consequently, most often exile is reflected in literary creations in discourses dominated by a sentiment of loss. However, in some cases exile is not seen as a tragic event, but rather as an opportunity for intellectual growth - as attested by a number of authors who have chosen voluntarily to exile themselves. The rationale behind this occurrence is a mental process I called severance. The first chapter of this study is an overview of the phenomenon of exile from historical and theoretical perspectives, followed by a number of examples where the subject\u27s stance vis-à-vis their exile diverges from the classic definition of the subject. Based on these examples, severance is defined as a distinct issue among the various forms of exile, and the term is analyzed from linguistic and psychological perspectives. The following three chapters are case studies of instances of severance reflected in the works of Tristan Tzara, Gregor von Rezzori, and Vintilă Horia. The comparative analysis of these author\u27s texts provide an extensive examination of the phenomenon, highlighting its importance and supporting the idea about the necessity of marking out severance as a new and distinct subject matter in exile studies. Tzara\u27s works are arguably the ideal illustration of the concept; Gregor von Rezzori\u27s creations reflect a similar intellectual evolution, with the added benefit of several extremely lucid self-analyses directly related to the phenomenon in question. Finally, the study of Vintilă Horia\u27s case allows the discussion of an additional number of issues related to the concept of severance. The last chapter begins with a brief re-evaluation of the phenomenon, based on a retrospective, comparative overview of the analyzed writings; its closing section focuses on two prior works related to the idea of severance, their main points being contrasted with the conclusions of the current inquiry in order to highlight the original elements contributed by this dissertation to the field of literary criticism