Query Expansion of Zero-Hit Subject Searches: Using a Thesaurus in Conjunction with NLP Techniques

The focus of our study is zero-hit queries in keyword subject searches and the effort of increasing recall in these cases by reformulating and, then, expanding the initial queries using an external source of knowledge, namely a thesaurus. To this end, the objectives of this study are twofold. First, we perform the mapping of query terms to the thesaurus terms. Second, we use the matched terms to expand the user’s initial query by taking advantage of the thesaurus relations and implementing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We report on the overall procedure and elaborate on key points and considerations of each step of the process

LIME: Towards a Metadata Module for Ontolex

The OntoLex W3C Community Group has been working for more than a year on realizing a proposal for a standard ontol-ogy lexicon model. As the core-specification of the model is almost com-plete, the group started development of additional modules for specific tasks and use cases. We think that in many usage scenarios (e.g. linguistic enrichment, lo-calization and alignment of ontologies) the discovery and exploitation of linguis-tically grounded datasets may benefit from summarizing information about their linguistic expressivity. While the VoID vocabulary covers the need for general metadata about linked datasets, this more specific information demands a dedicated extension. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing LIME (Linguistic Metadata), a new vocabulary aiming at completing the OntoLex standard with specifications for linguistic metadata.

Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

An overview of portuguese wordnets

Semantic relations between words are key to building systems that aim to understand and manipulate language. For En- glish, the “de facto” standard for representing this kind of knowledge is Princeton’s WordNet. Here, we describe the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese: their origins, methods of creation, sizes, and usage restrictions. We start tackling the problem of comparing them, but only in quantitative terms. Finally, we sketch ideas for potential collaboration between some of the projects.(undefined

Rječnik suvremenoga slovenskog jezika: od slovenske leksičke baze do digitalne rječničke baze

The ability to process language data has become fundamental to the development of technologies in various areas of human life in the digital world. The development of digitally readable linguistic resources, methods, and tools is, therefore, also a key challenge for the contemporary Slovene language. This challenge has been recognized in the Slovene language community both at the professional and state level and has been the subject of many activities over the past ten years, which will be presented in this paper. The idea of a comprehensive dictionary database covering all levels of linguistic description in modern Slovene, from the morphological and lexical levels to the syntactic level, has already formulated within the framework of the European Social Fund’s Communication in Slovene (2008-2013) project; the Slovene Lexical Database was also created within the framework of this project. Two goals were pursued in designing the Slovene Lexical Database (SLD): creating linguistic descriptions of Slovene intended for human users that would also be useful for the machine processing of Slovene. Ever since the construction of the first Slovene corpus, it has become evident that there is a need for a description of modern Slovene based on real language data, and that it is necessary to understand the needs of language users to create useful language reference works. It also became apparent that only the digital medium enables the comprehensiveness of language description and that the design of the database must be adapted to it from the start. Also, the description must follow best practices as closely as possible in terms of formats and international standards, as this enables the inclusion of Slovene into a wider network of resources, such as Open Linked Data, babelNet and ELExIS. Due to time pressures and trends in lexicography, procedures to automate the extraction of linguistic data from corpora and the inclusion of crowdsourcing into the lexicographic process were taken into consideration. Following the essential idea of creating an all-inclusive digital dictionary database for Slovene, a few independent databases have been created over the past two years: the Collocations Dictionary of Modern Slovene, and the automatically generated Thesaurus of Modern Slovene, both of which also exist as independent online dictionary portals. One of the novelties that we put forward together with both dictionaries is the ‘responsive dictionary’ concept, which includes crowdsourcing methods. Ultimately, the Digital Dictionary Database provides all (other) levels of linguistic description: the morphological level with the Sloleks database upgrade, the phraseological level with the construction of a multi-word expressions lexicon, and the syntactic level with the formalization of Slovene verb valency patterns. Each of these databases contains its specific language data that will ultimately be included in the comprehensive Slovene Digital Dictionary Database, which will represent basic linguistic descriptions of Slovene both for the human and machine user.Ideja sveobuhvatne rječničke baze koja uključuje sve razine jezičnoga opisa suvremenoga slovenskog jezika od morfološke i leksičke do sintaktičke prvotno je formulirana u okviru projekta Sporazumijevanje na slovenskomu jeziku (2008. – 2013.). U cilju ostvarenja ideje o stvaranju sveobuhvatne digitalne rječničke baze stvorene su dvije neovisne baze podataka: Kolokacijski rječnik suvremenoga slovenskoga jezika i automatski generiran Tezaurus modernoga slovenskoga jezika. Jedna od novina u obama rječnicima koncept je responzivnoga rječnika, koji uključuje masovnu podršku. Digitalna rječnička baza sadržava sve razine jezičnoga opisa: morfološku nadograđenu Sloleksom, izraznu s opisom konstrukcija višerječnih jedinica te sintaktičku s formalizacijom modela glagolskih valencija. Svaka od postojećih baza podataka sadržava specifične jezične podatke koji će biti uključeni u sveobuhvatnu Slovensku digitalnu rječničku bazu podataka, koja će sadržavati temeljni jezikoslovni opis slovenskoga jezika čiji korisnici mogu biti ljudi i strojevi

Sharing Semantic Resources

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information, so far created for human consumption, becomes machine readable, “enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. To turn into reality this vision several challenges are still open among which the most important is to share meaning formally represented with ontologies or more generally with semantic resources. This Semantic Web long-term goal has many convergences with the activities in the field of Human Language Technology and in particular in the development of Natural Language Processing applications where there is a great need of multilingual lexical resources. For instance, one of the most important lexical resources, WordNet, is also commonly regarded and used as an ontology. Nowadays, another important phenomenon is represented by the explosion of social collaboration, and Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, is object of research as an up to date omni comprehensive semantic resource. The main topic of this thesis is the management and exploitation of semantic resources in a collaborative way, trying to use the already available resources as Wikipedia and Wordnet. This work presents a general environment able to turn into reality the vision of shared and distributed semantic resources and describes a distributed three-layer architecture to enable a rapid prototyping of cooperative applications for developing semantic resources

Towards an Automatic Measurement of Verbal Lexicon Acquisition: The Case for a Young Children-versus-Adults Classification in French and Mandarin

International audienceIn this paper we define a lexical metrology in graphs of verbal synonymy to com-pute the flexsemic score of speakers from their verbal productions in action denominationtasks. This flexsemic score is used to automatically categorize young children versus youngadults. We show that this score is effective in French and in Mandarin

Query Expansion of Zero-Hit Subject Searches: Using a Thesaurus in Conjunction with NLP Techniques

The focus of our study is zero-hit queries in keyword subject searches and the effort of increasing recall in these cases by reformulating and, then, expanding the initial queries using an external source of knowledge, namely a thesaurus. To this end, the objectives of this study are twofold. First, we perform the mapping of query terms to the thesaurus terms. Second, we use the matched terms to expand the user’s initial query by taking advantage of the thesaurus relations and implementing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We report on the overall procedure and elaborate on key points and considerations of each step of the process