A Flexible Multitask Summarizer for Documents from Different Media, Domain and Language

Automatic Summarization is probably crucial with the increase of document generation. Particularly when retrieving, managing and processing information have become decisive tasks. However, one should not expect perfect systems able to substitute human sumaries. The automatic sumarization process strongly depends not only on the characteristics of the documents, but also on user different needs.Thus, several aspects have to be taken into account when designing an information system for summarizing, because, depending on the characteristics of the input documents and the desired results, several techniques can be aplied. In order to suport this process, the final goal of the thesis is to provide a flexible multitask summarizer architecture. This goal is decomposed in three main research purposes. First, to study the process of porting systems to different summarization tasks, processing documents in different lenguages, domains or media with the aim of designing a generic architecture to permit the easy addition of new tasks by reusing existents tools. Second, the developes prototypes for some tasks involving aspects related with the lenguage, the media and the domain of the document or documents to be summarized as well as aspects related with the summary content: generic, novelly summaries, or summaries that give answer to a specific user need. Third, to create an evaluation framework to analyze the performance of several approaches in written news and scientific oral presentation domains, focusing mainly in its intrinsic evaluation.El resumen automático probablemente sea crucial en un momento en que la gran cantidad de documentos generados diariamente hace que recuperar, tratar y asimilar la información que contienen se haya convertido en una ardua y a su vez decisiva tarea. A pesar de ello, no podemos esperar que los resúmenes producidos de forma automática vayan a ser capaces de sustituir a los humanos. El proceso de resumen automático no sólo depende de las características propias de los documentos a ser resumidos, sino que es fuertemente dependiente de las necesidades específicas de los usuarios. Por ello, el diseño de un sistema de información para resumen conlleva tener en cuenta varios aspectos. En función de las características de los documentos de entrada y de los resultados deseados es posible aplicar distintas técnicas. Por esta razón surge la necesidad de diseñar una arquitectura flexible que permita la implementación de múltiples tareas de resumen. Este es el objetivo final de la tesis que presento dividido en tres subtemas de investigación. En primer lugar, estudiar el proceso de adaptabilidad de sistemas a diferentes tareas de resumen, como son procesar documentos producidos en diferentes lenguas, dominios y medios (sonido y texto), con la voluntad de diseñar una arquitectura genérica que permita la fácil incorporación de nuevas tareas a través de reutilizar herramientas existentes. En segundo lugar, desarrollar prototipos para distintas tareas, teniendo en cuenta aspectos relacionados con la lengua, el dominio y el medio del documento o conjunto de documentos que requieren ser resumidos, así como aspectos relacionados con el contenido final del resumen: genérico, novedad o resumen que de respuesta a una necesidad especifica. En tercer lugar, crear un marco de evaluación que permita analizar la competencia intrínseca de distintos prototipos al resumir noticias escritas y presentaciones científicas orales

ALICE: Acquisition of Language through an Interactive Comprehension Environment

Integration of several state-of-the-art technologies related to spoken language and natural language processing used in Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) systems. We envision to show that the technology has a level of maturity that suggests that the time may be right to use it at high school. // Integración de tecnologías del estado del arte en procesamiento del habla y procesamiento del lenguaje natural aplicadas a los asistentes inteligentes para el aprendizaje de lenguas. El objetivo es mostrar que el nivel de madurez de la tecnología permite que sea aplicada al aprendizaje de segundas lenguas en secundaria.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

English language learning activity using spoken language and intelligent computer-assisted technologies

This paper presents work in progress on language technologies applied to secondary school education. The application presented integrates several state-of-the-art technologies related to spoken language and intelligent computer-assisted language learning. We envision to show that the technology has reached a level of maturity that suggests that the time may be right to use it to second language learning. To achieve this objective, an activity was designed to be tested at several Spanish high schools. The aim was to carry out a proof of concept in real conditions and to obtain feedback from the students through a questionnaire as well as from the teachers by means of an interview. The activity was designed with the collaboration of some of the teachers at the secondary schools.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Deliverable 6.1 Infrastructure for Extractive Summarization

SKATER Internal Report: software of infrastructure for extractive Summarization (work carried out until December 2013)Preprin

Summarizing a multimodal set of documents in a Smart Room

This article reports an intrinsic automatic summarization evaluation in the scientific lecture domain. The lecture takes place in a Smart Room that has access to different types of documents produced from different media. An evaluation framework is presented to analyze the performance of systems producing summaries answering a user need. Several ROUGE metrics are used and a manual content responsiveness evaluation was carried out in order to analyze the performance of the evaluated approaches. Various multilingual summarization approaches are analyzed showing that the use of different types of documents outperforms the use of transcripts. In fact, not using any part of the spontaneous speech transcription in the summary improves the performance of automatic summaries. Moreover, the use of semantic information represented in the different textual documents coming from different media helps to improve summary quality.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

FEMsum at DUC 2007

This paper describes and analyzes how the FEMsum system deals with DUC 2007 tasks of providing summary-length answers to complex questions, both background and just-the-news summaries. We participated in producing background summaries for the main task with the FEMsum approach that obtained better results in our last year participation. The FEMsum semantic based approach was adapted to deal with the update pilot task with the aim of producing just-the-news summaries.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Spell-checking in Spanish: the case of diacritic accents

This article presents the problem of diacritic restoration (or diacritization) in the context of spell-checking, with the focus on an orthographically rich language such as Spanish. We argue that despite the large volume of work published on the topic of diacritization, currently available spell-checking tools have still not found a proper solution to the problem in those cases where both forms of a word are listed in the checker’s dictionary. This is the case, for instance, when a word form exists with and without diacritics, such as continuo ‘continuous’ and continuó ‘he/she/it continued’, or when different diacritics make other word distinctions, as in continúo ‘I continue’. We propose a very simple solution based on a word bigram model derived from correctly typed Spanish texts and evaluate the ability of this model to restore diacritics in artificial as well as real errors. The case of diacritics is only meant to be an example of the possible applications for this idea, yet we believe that the same method could be applied to other kinds of orthographic or even grammatical errors. Moreover, given that no explicit linguistic knowledge is required, the proposed model can be used with other languages provided that a large normative corpus is available.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Hacia la interacción en lenguaje natural

En éste documento se presenta la investigación que está siendo llevada a cabo en el Grupo de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural (GPLN) de la Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC). En concreto, hemos articulado la presentación de las diferentes líneas de trabajo tomando como referencia su aplicación en un asistente virtual. Creemos que su uso y implantación irá en aumento en los próximos diez años, de ahí la importancia del estado de las tecnologías del lenguaje natural y, aún mas, de los nuevos retos que este tipo de aplicaciones nos plantean.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

FEMsum at DUC 2006: Semantic-based approach integrated in a Flexible Eclectic Multitask Summarizer Architecture

In order to face different requirements at TALP Research Center we have built a highly parameterized environment allowing to instantiate specific summarizers for different summarization tasks in different languages. This paper describes and analyzes how our system deals with the DUC 2006 task of providing summary-length answers to complex questions. The given query is used to detect relevant passages. After that, semantic similarities between these relevant sentences are detected and then used as input of an iterative graph-based algorithm to avoid redundancy and obtain a cohesioned text. NIST human evaluations are used to analyze several aspects of our system and a specific analysis for each of the three different kinds of submitted summaries is reported.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Recomendador t-incluye para un uso inclusivo del lenguaje

Sistema que procesa un texto escrito en castellano detectando usos del lenguaje no inclusivos. Para cada sintagma nominal sospechoso el sistema propone una serie de alternativas. El sistema permite también la adquisición automática de ejemplos positivos a partir de documentos que hagan un uso inclusivo del lenguaje. Éstos ejemplos seran usados, junto a su contexto, en la presentación de sugerencias.System to detect exclusive language in spanish documents. For each noun phrase detected as exclusive, several alternative are suggested by the system. Moreover, the system allows the automatic adquisition of positive examples from inclusive documents to be presented within their context as alternatives.Postprint (published version