A Multilingual Simplified Language News Corpus

Simplified language news articles are being offered by specialized web portals in several countries. The thousands of articles that have been published over the years are a valuable resource for natural language processing, especially for efforts towards automatic text simplification. In this paper, we present SNIML, a large multilingual corpus of news in simplified language. The corpus contains 13k simplified news articles written in one of six languages: Finnish, French, Italian, Swedish, English, and German. All articles are shared under open licenses that permit academic use. The level of text simplification varies depending on the news portal. We believe that even though SNIML is not a parallel corpus, it can be useful as a complement to the more homogeneous but often smaller corpora of news in the simplified variety of one language that are currently in use

Graph-Based Annotation Engineering: Towards a Gold Corpus for Role and Reference Grammar

This paper describes the application of annotation engineering techniques for the construction of a corpus for Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). RRG is a semantics-oriented formalism for natural language syntax popular in comparative linguistics and linguistic typology, and predominantly applied for the description of non-European languages which are less-resourced in terms of natural language processing. Because of its cross-linguistic applicability and its conjoint treatment of syntax and semantics, RRG also represents a promising framework for research challenges within natural language processing. At the moment, however, these have not been explored as no RRG corpus data is publicly available. While RRG annotations cannot be easily derived from any single treebank in existence, we suggest that they can be reliably inferred from the intersection of syntactic and semantic annotations as represented by, for example, the Universal Dependencies (UD) and PropBank (PB), and we demonstrate this for the English Web Treebank, a 250,000 token corpus of various genres of English internet text. The resulting corpus is a gold corpus for future experiments in natural language processing in the sense that it is built on existing annotations which have been created manually. A technical challenge in this context is to align UD and PB annotations, to integrate them in a coherent manner, and to distribute and to combine their information on RRG constituent and operator projections. For this purpose, we describe a framework for flexible and scalable annotation engineering based on flexible, unconstrained graph transformations of sentence graphs by means of SPARQL Update

Graph-based annotation engineering: towards a gold corpus for role and reference grammar

This paper describes the application of annotation engineering techniques for the construction of a corpus for Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). RRG is a semantics-oriented formalism for natural language syntax popular in comparative linguistics and linguistic typology, and predominantly applied for the description of non-European languages which are less-resourced in terms of natural language processing. Because of its cross-linguistic applicability and its conjoint treatment of syntax and semantics, RRG also represents a promising framework for research challenges within natural language processing. At the moment, however, these have not been explored as no RRG corpus data is publicly available. While RRG annotations cannot be easily derived from any single treebank in existence, we suggest that they can be reliably inferred from the intersection of syntactic and semantic annotations as represented by, for example, the Universal Dependencies (UD) and PropBank (PB), and we demonstrate this for the English Web Treebank, a 250,000 token corpus of various genres of English internet text. The resulting corpus is a gold corpus for future experiments in natural language processing in the sense that it is built on existing annotations which have been created manually. A technical challenge in this context is to align UD and PB annotations, to integrate them in a coherent manner, and to distribute and to combine their information on RRG constituent and operator projections. For this purpose, we describe a framework for flexible and scalable annotation engineering based on flexible, unconstrained graph transformations of sentence graphs by means of SPARQL Update

Investigating an open methodology for designing domain-specific language collections

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language Acquisition System (FLAX, http://flax.nzdl.org). FLAX uses the Greenstone digital library system, which is a widely used open-source software that enables end users to build collections of documents and metadata directly onto the Web (Witten, Bainbridge, & Nichols, 2010). FLAX offers a powerful suite of interactive text-mining tools, using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence designs, to enable novice collections builders to link selected language content to large pre-processed linguistic databases. An open methodology trialed at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the OER Research Hub at the UK Open University demonstrates how applying open corpus-based designs and technologies can enhance open educational practices among language teachers and subject academics for the preparation and delivery of courses in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

Deep Learning for Learning Representation and Its Application to Natural Language Processing

As the web evolves even faster than expected, the exponential growth of data becomes overwhelming. Textual data is being generated at an ever-increasing pace via emails, documents on the web, tweets, online user reviews, blogs, and so on. As the amount of unstructured text data grows, so does the need for intelligently processing and understanding it. The focus of this dissertation is on developing learning models that automatically induce representations of human language to solve higher level language tasks. In contrast to most conventional learning techniques, which employ certain shallow-structured learning architectures, deep learning is a newly developed machine learning technique which uses supervised and/or unsupervised strategies to automatically learn hierarchical representations in deep architectures and has been employed in varied tasks such as classification or regression. Deep learning was inspired by biological observations on human brain mechanisms for processing natural signals and has attracted the tremendous attention of both academia and industry in recent years due to its state-of-the-art performance in many research domains such as computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. This dissertation focuses on how to represent the unstructured text data and how to model it with deep learning models in different natural language processing viii applications such as sequence tagging, sentiment analysis, semantic similarity and etc. Specifically, my dissertation addresses the following research topics: In Chapter 3, we examine one of the fundamental problems in NLP, text classification, by leveraging contextual information [MLX18a]; In Chapter 4, we propose a unified framework for generating an informative map from review corpus [MLX18b]; Chapter 5 discusses the tagging address queries in map search [Mok18]. This research was performed in collaboration with Microsoft; and In Chapter 6, we discuss an ongoing research work in the neural language sentence matching problem. We are working on extending this work to a recommendation system

Improvements of the TextExplore web-based tool for text corpora analysis

The aim of this diploma thesis was to upgrade an existing web application with several interactive data visualizations that enable the user to analyze the imported data corpus. The web application has been build with an AngularJS framework: for data storage and retrieval it uses the ElasticSearch database. Prior to implementation, the areas of text visualization and processing of the natural language were examined. We have found that there are several types of text visualization. We implemented three different visualisations. Each visualisation shows data of imported corpus from a different angle