Computational approaches to semantic change (Volume 6)

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans

combining multimodal external resources for event-based news video retrieval and question answering

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Unsupervised Methods for Learning and Using Semantics of Natural Language

Teaching the computer to understand language is the major goal in the field of natural language processing. In this thesis we introduce computational methods that aim to extract language structure — e.g. grammar, semantics or syntax — from text, which provides the computer with information in order to understand language. During the last decades, scientific efforts and the increase of computational resources made it possible to come closer to the goal of understanding language. In order to extract language structure, many approaches train the computer on manually created resources. Most of these so-called supervised methods show high performance when applied to similar textual data. However, they perform inferior when operating on textual data, which are different to the one they are trained on. Whereas training the computer is essential to obtain reasonable structure from natural language, we want to avoid training the computer using manually created resources. In this thesis, we present so-called unsupervised methods, which are suited to learn patterns in order to extract structure from textual data directly. These patterns are learned with methods that extract the semantics (meanings) of words and phrases. In comparison to manually built knowledge bases, unsupervised methods are more flexible: they can extract structure from text of different languages or text domains (e.g. finance or medical texts), without requiring manually annotated structure. However, learning structure from text often faces sparsity issues. The reason for these phenomena is that in language many words occur only few times. If a word is seen only few times no precise information can be extracted from the text it occurs. Whereas sparsity issues cannot be solved completely, information about most words can be gained by using large amounts of data. In the first chapter, we briefly describe how computers can learn to understand language. Afterwards, we present the main contributions, list the publications this thesis is based on and give an overview of this thesis. Chapter 2 introduces the terminology used in this thesis and gives a background about natural language processing. Then, we characterize the linguistic theory on how humans understand language. Afterwards, we show how the underlying linguistic intuition can be operationalized for computers. Based on this operationalization, we introduce a formalism for representing words and their context. This formalism is used in the following chapters in order to compute similarities between words. In Chapter 3 we give a brief description of methods in the field of computational semantics, which are targeted to compute similarities between words. All these methods have in common that they extract a contextual representation for a word that is generated from text. Then, this representation is used to compute similarities between words. In addition, we also present examples of the word similarities that are computed with these methods. Segmenting text into its topically related units is intuitively performed by humans and helps to extract connections between words in text. We equip the computer with these abilities by introducing a text segmentation algorithm in Chapter 4. This algorithm is based on a statistical topic model, which learns to cluster words into topics solely on the basis of the text. Using the segmentation algorithm, we demonstrate the influence of the parameters provided by the topic model. In addition, our method yields state-of-the-art performances on two datasets. In order to represent the meaning of words, we use context information (e.g. neighboring words), which is utilized to compute similarities. Whereas we described methods for word similarity computations in Chapter 3, we introduce a generic symbolic framework in Chapter 5. As we follow a symbolic approach, we do not represent words using dense numeric vectors but we use symbols (e.g. neighboring words or syntactic dependency parses) directly. Such a representation is readable for humans and is preferred in sensitive applications like the medical domain, where the reason for decisions needs to be provided. This framework enables the processing of arbitrarily large data. Furthermore, it is able to compute the most similar words for all words within a text collection resulting in a distributional thesaurus. We show the influence of various parameters deployed in our framework and examine the impact of different corpora used for computing similarities. Performing computations based on various contextual representations, we obtain the best results when using syntactic dependencies between words within sentences. However, these syntactic dependencies are predicted using a supervised dependency parser, which is trained on language-dependent and human-annotated resources. To avoid such language-specific preprocessing for computing distributional thesauri, we investigate the replacement of language-dependent dependency parsers by language-independent unsupervised parsers in Chapter 6. Evaluating the syntactic dependencies from unsupervised and supervised parses against human-annotated resources reveals that the unsupervised methods are not capable to compete with the supervised ones. In this chapter we use the predicted structure of both types of parses as context representation in order to compute word similarities. Then, we evaluate the quality of the similarities, which provides an extrinsic evaluation setup for both unsupervised and supervised dependency parsers. In an evaluation on English text, similarities computed based on contextual representations generated with unsupervised parsers do not outperform the similarities computed with the context representation extracted from supervised parsers. However, we observe the best results when applying context retrieved by the unsupervised parser for computing distributional thesauri on German language. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our framework is capable to combine different context representations, as we obtain the best performance with a combination of both flavors of syntactic dependencies for both languages. Most languages are not composed of single-worded terms only, but also contain many multi-worded terms that form a unit, called multiword expressions. The identification of multiword expressions is particularly important for semantics, as e.g. the term New York has a different meaning than its single terms New or York. Whereas most research on semantics avoids handling these expressions, we target on the extraction of multiword expressions in Chapter 7. Most previously introduced methods rely on part-of-speech tags and apply a ranking function to rank term sequences according to their multiwordness. Here, we introduce a language-independent and knowledge-free ranking method that uses information from distributional thesauri. Performing evaluations on English and French textual data, our method achieves the best results in comparison to methods from the literature. In Chapter 8 we apply information from distributional thesauri as features for various applications. First, we introduce a general setting for tackling the out-of-vocabulary problem. This problem describes the inferior performance of supervised methods according to words that are not contained in the training data. We alleviate this issue by replacing these unseen words with the most similar ones that are known, extracted from a distributional thesaurus. Using a supervised part-of-speech tagging method, we show substantial improvements in the classification performance for out-of-vocabulary words based on German and English textual data. The second application introduces a system for replacing words within a sentence with a word of the same meaning. For this application, the information from a distributional thesaurus provides the highest-scoring features. In the last application, we introduce an algorithm that is capable to detect the different meanings of a word and groups them into coarse-grained categories, called supersenses. Generating features by means of supersenses and distributional thesauri yields an performance increase when plugged into a supervised system that recognized named entities (e.g. names, organizations or locations). Further directions for using distributional thesauri are presented in Chapter 9. First, we lay out a method, which is capable of incorporating background information (e.g. source of the text collection or sense information) into a distributional thesaurus. Furthermore, we describe an approach on building thesauri for different text domains (e.g. medical or finance domain) and how they can be combined to have a high coverage of domain-specific knowledge as well as a broad background for the open domain. In the last section we characterize yet another method, suited to enrich existing knowledge bases. All three directions might be further extensions, which induce further structure based on textual data. The last chapter gives a summary of this work: we demonstrate that without language-dependent knowledge, a computer can learn to extract useful structure from text by using computational semantics. Due to the unsupervised nature of the introduced methods, we are able to extract new structure from raw textual data. This is important especially for languages, for which less manually created resources are available as well as for special domains e.g. medical or finance. We have demonstrated that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we have proven their impact by applying the extracted structure in three natural language processing tasks. We have also applied the methods to different languages and large amounts of data. Thus, we have not proposed methods, which are suited for extracting structure for a single language, but methods that are capable to explore structure for “language” in general

Script acquisition : a crowdsourcing and text mining approach

According to Grice’s (1975) theory of pragmatics, people tend to omit basic information when participating in a conversation (or writing a narrative) under the assumption that left out details are already known or can be inferred from commonsense knowledge by the hearer (or reader). Writing and understanding of texts makes particular use of a specific kind of common-sense knowledge, referred to as script knowledge. Schank and Abelson (1977) proposed Scripts as a model of human knowledge represented in memory that stores the frequent habitual activities, called scenarios, (e.g. eating in a fast food restaurant, etc.), and the different courses of action in those routines. This thesis addresses measures to provide a sound empirical basis for high-quality script models. We work on three key areas related to script modeling: script knowledge acquisition, script induction and script identification in text. We extend the existing repository of script knowledge bases in two different ways. First, we crowdsource a corpus of 40 scenarios with 100 event sequence descriptions (ESDs) each, thus going beyond the size of previous script collections. Second, the corpus is enriched with partial alignments of ESDs, done by human annotators. The crowdsourced partial alignments are used as prior knowledge to guide the semi-supervised script-induction algorithm proposed in this dissertation. We further present a semi-supervised clustering approach to induce script structure from crowdsourced descriptions of event sequences by grouping event descriptions into paraphrase sets and inducing their temporal order. The proposed semi-supervised clustering model better handles order variation in scripts and extends script representation formalism, Temporal Script graphs, by incorporating "arbitrary order" equivalence classes in order to allow for the flexible event order inherent in scripts. In the third part of this dissertation, we introduce the task of scenario detection, in which we identify references to scripts in narrative texts. We curate a benchmark dataset of annotated narrative texts, with segments labeled according to the scripts they instantiate. The dataset is the first of its kind. The analysis of the annotation shows that one can identify scenario references in text with reasonable reliability. Subsequently, we proposes a benchmark model that automatically segments and identifies text fragments referring to given scenarios. The proposed model achieved promising results, and therefore opens up research on script parsing and wide coverage script acquisition.Gemäß der Grice’schen (1975) Pragmatiktheorie neigen Menschen dazu, grundlegende Informationen auszulassen, wenn sie an einem Gespräch teilnehmen (oder eine Geschichte schreiben). Dies geschieht unter der Annahme, dass die ausgelassenen Details bereits bekannt sind, oder vom Hörer (oder Leser) aus Weltwissen erschlossen werden können. Besonders beim Schreiben und Verstehen von Text wird Verwendung einer spezifischen Art von solchem Weltwissen gemacht, welches auch Skriptwissen genannt wird. Schank und Abelson (1977) erdachten Skripte als ein Modell menschlichen Wissens, welches im menschlichen Gedächtnis gespeichert ist und häufige Alltags-Aktivitäten sowie deren typischen Ablauf beinhaltet. Solche Skript-Aktivitäten werden auch als Szenarios bezeichnet und umfassen zum Beispiel Im Restaurant Essen etc. Diese Dissertation widmet sich der Bereitstellung einer soliden empirischen Grundlage zur Akquisition qualitativ hochwertigen Skriptwissens. Wir betrachten drei zentrale Aspekte im Bereich der Skriptmodellierung: Akquisition ition von Skriptwissen, Skript-Induktion und Skriptidentifizierung in Text. Wir erweitern das bereits bestehende Repertoire und Skript-Datensätzen in 2 Bereichen. Erstens benutzen wir Crowdsourcing zur Erstellung eines Korpus, das 40 Szenarien mit jeweils 100 Ereignissequenzbeschreibungen (Event Sequence Descriptions, ESDs) beinhaltet, und welches somit größer als bestehende Skript- Datensätze ist. Zweitens erweitern wir das Korpus mit partiellen ESD-Alignierungen, die von Hand annotiert werden. Die partiellen Alignierungen werden dann als Vorwissen für einen halbüberwachten Algorithmus zur Skriptinduktion benutzt, der im Rahmen dieser Dissertation vorgestellt wird. Wir präsentieren außerdem einen halbüberwachten Clusteringansatz zur Induktion von Skripten, basierend auf Ereignissequenzen, die via Crowdsourcing gesammelt wurden. Hierbei werden einzelne Ereignisbeschreibungen gruppiert, um Paraphrasenmengen und der deren temporale Ordnung abzuleiten. Der vorgestellte Clusteringalgorithmus ist im Stande, Variationen in der typischen Reihenfolge in Skripte besser abzubilden und erweitert damit einen Formalismus zur Skriptrepräsentation, temporale Skriptgraphen. Dies wird dadurch bewerkstelligt, dass Equivalenzklassen von Beschreibungen mit "arbiträrer Reihenfolge" genutzt werden, die es erlauben, eine flexible Ereignisordnung abzubilden, die inhärent bei Skripten vorhanden ist. Im dritten Teil der vorliegenden Arbeit führen wir den Task der SzenarioIdentifikation ein, also der automatischen Identifikation von Skriptreferenzen in narrativen Texten. Wir erstellen einen Benchmark-Datensatz mit annotierten narrativen Texten, in denen einzelne Segmente im Bezug auf das Skript, welches sie instantiieren, markiert wurden. Dieser Datensatz ist der erste seiner Art. Eine Analyse der Annotation zeigt, dass Referenzen zu Szenarien im Text mit annehmbarer Akkuratheit vorhergesagt werden können. Zusätzlich stellen wir ein Benchmark-Modell vor, welches Textfragmente automatisch erstellt und deren Szenario identifiziert. Das vorgestellte Modell erreicht erfolgversprechende Resultate und öffnet damit einen Forschungszweig im Bereich des Skript-Parsens und der Skript-Akquisition im großen Stil