A Recurrent Neural Model with Attention for the Recognition of Chinese Implicit Discourse Relations

We introduce an attention-based Bi-LSTM for Chinese implicit discourse relations and demonstrate that modeling argument pairs as a joint sequence can outperform word order-agnostic approaches. Our model benefits from a partial sampling scheme and is conceptually simple, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Chinese Discourse Treebank. We also visualize its attention activity to illustrate the model's ability to selectively focus on the relevant parts of an input sequence.Comment: To appear at ACL2017, code available at https://github.com/sronnqvist/discourse-ablst

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

Get! Mimetypes! Right! (Crazy new idea)

This paper identifies three technical requirements - availability of data, sustainable hosting and resolvable URIs for hosted data - as minimal pre-conditions for Linguistic Linked Open Data technology to develop towards a mature technological ecosystem that third party applications can build upon. While a critical amount of data is available (and it continues to grow), there does not seem to exist a hosting solution that combines the prospects of long-term availability with an unrestricted capability to support resolvable URIs. In particular, data hosting services do currently not allow data to be declared as RDF content by means of their media type (mime type), so that the capability of clients to recognize formats and to resolve URIs on that basis is severely limited

Towards interoperable discourse annotation: discourse features in the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation

This paper describes the extension of the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) with respect to discourse features. The OLiA ontologies provide a a terminology repository that can be employed to facilitate the conceptual (semantic) interoperability of annotations of discourse phenomena as found in the most important corpora available to the community, including OntoNotes, the RST Discourse Treebank and the Penn Discourse Treebank. Along with selected schemes for information structure and coreference, discourse relations are discussed with special emphasis on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the RST Discourse Treebank. For an example contained in the intersection of both corpora, I show how ontologies can be employed to generalize over divergent annotation schemes

Corpora and linguistic linked open data: motivations, applications, limitations

Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) is a technology and a movement in several disciplines working with language resources, including Natural Language Processing, general linguistics, computational lexicography and the localization industry. This talk describes basic principles of Linguistic Linked Open Data and their application to linguistically annotated corpora, it summarizes the current status of the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud and gives an overview over selected LLOD vocabularies and their uses

Inducing discourse marker inventories from lexical knowledge graphs

Discourse marker inventories are important tools for the development of both discourse parsers and corpora with discourse annotations. In this paper we explore the potential of massively multilingual lexical knowledge graphs to induce multilingual discourse marker lexicons using concept propagation methods as previously developed in the context of translation inference across dictionaries. Given one or multiple source languages with discourse marker inventories that discourse relations as senses of potential discourse markers, as well as a large number of bilingual dictionaries that link them – directly or indirectly – with the target language, we specifically study to what extent discourse marker induction can benefit from the integration of information from different sources, the impact of sense granularity and what limiting factors may need to be considered. Our study uses discourse marker inventories from nine European languages normalized against the discourse relation inventory of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), as well as three collections of machine-readable dictionaries with different characteristics, so that the interplay of a large number of factors can be studied