Modeling syntactic properties of MWEs in LFG

Il s'agit d'un réunion du réseau COST IC1207 PARSEMEThis paper describes preliminary investigationson how to model syntactic properties of differ-ent types of MWEs within the framework of LFG.While there are already several works which ad-dress this topic (Attia, 2006; Asudeh et al., 2013;Patejuk, 2014), we are particularly interested inanswering the question of which types of MWEscan be described at the level of the lexicon, andwhich (if any) require corresponding descriptionsat the level of phrase-structure rules

SEJF -a Grammatical Lexicon of Polish Multi-Word Expressions

International audienceWe present SEJF, a lexical resource of Polish nominal, adjectival and adverbial multi-word expressions. It consists of an intensional module with about 4,700 multi-word lemmas assigned to 160 inflection graphs, and an extensional module with 88,000 automatically generated inflected forms annotated with grammatical tags. We show the results of its coverage evaluation against an annotated corpus. The resource is freely available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license

Representation and Processing of Composition, Variation and Approximation in Language Resources and Tools

In my habilitation dissertation, meant to validate my capacity of and maturity for directingresearch activities, I present a panorama of several topics in computational linguistics, linguisticsand computer science.Over the past decade, I was notably concerned with the phenomena of compositionalityand variability of linguistic objects. I illustrate the advantages of a compositional approachto the language in the domain of emotion detection and I explain how some linguistic objects,most prominently multi-word expressions, defy the compositionality principles. I demonstratethat the complex properties of MWEs, notably variability, are partially regular and partiallyidiosyncratic. This fact places the MWEs on the frontiers between different levels of linguisticprocessing, such as lexicon and syntax.I show the highly heterogeneous nature of MWEs by citing their two existing taxonomies.After an extensive state-of-the art study of MWE description and processing, I summarizeMultiflex, a formalism and a tool for lexical high-quality morphosyntactic description of MWUs.It uses a graph-based approach in which the inflection of a MWU is expressed in function ofthe morphology of its components, and of morphosyntactic transformation patterns. Due tounification the inflection paradigms are represented compactly. Orthographic, inflectional andsyntactic variants are treated within the same framework. The proposal is multilingual: it hasbeen tested on six European languages of three different origins (Germanic, Romance and Slavic),I believe that many others can also be successfully covered. Multiflex proves interoperable. Itadapts to different morphological language models, token boundary definitions, and underlyingmodules for the morphology of single words. It has been applied to the creation and enrichmentof linguistic resources, as well as to morphosyntactic analysis and generation. It can be integratedinto other NLP applications requiring the conflation of different surface realizations of the sameconcept.Another chapter of my activity concerns named entities, most of which are particular types ofMWEs. Their rich semantic load turned them into a hot topic in the NLP community, which isdocumented in my state-of-the art survey. I present the main assumptions, processes and resultsissued from large annotation tasks at two levels (for named entities and for coreference), parts ofthe National Corpus of Polish construction. I have also contributed to the development of bothrule-based and probabilistic named entity recognition tools, and to an automated enrichment ofProlexbase, a large multilingual database of proper names, from open sources.With respect to multi-word expressions, named entities and coreference mentions, I pay aspecial attention to nested structures. This problem sheds new light on the treatment of complexlinguistic units in NLP. When these units start being modeled as trees (or, more generally, asacyclic graphs) rather than as flat sequences of tokens, long-distance dependencies, discontinu-ities, overlapping and other frequent linguistic properties become easier to represent. This callsfor more complex processing methods which control larger contexts than what usually happensin sequential processing. Thus, both named entity recognition and coreference resolution comesvery close to parsing, and named entities or mentions with their nested structures are analogous3to multi-word expressions with embedded complements.My parallel activity concerns finite-state methods for natural language and XML processing.My main contribution in this field, co-authored with 2 colleagues, is the first full-fledged methodfor tree-to-language correction, and more precisely for correcting XML documents with respectto a DTD. We have also produced interesting results in incremental finite-state algorithmics,particularly relevant to data evolution contexts such as dynamic vocabularies or user updates.Multilingualism is the leitmotif of my research. I have applied my methods to several naturallanguages, most importantly to Polish, Serbian, English and French. I have been among theinitiators of a highly multilingual European scientific network dedicated to parsing and multi-word expressions. I have used multilingual linguistic data in experimental studies. I believethat it is particularly worthwhile to design NLP solutions taking declension-rich (e.g. Slavic)languages into account, since this leads to more universal solutions, at least as far as nominalconstructions (MWUs, NEs, mentions) are concerned. For instance, when Multiflex had beendeveloped with Polish in mind it could be applied as such to French, English, Serbian and Greek.Also, a French-Serbian collaboration led to substantial modifications in morphological modelingin Prolexbase in its early development stages. This allowed for its later application to Polishwith very few adaptations of the existing model. Other researchers also stress the advantages ofNLP studies on highly inflected languages since their morphology encodes much more syntacticinformation than is the case e.g. in English.In this dissertation I am also supposed to demonstrate my ability of playing an active rolein shaping the scientific landscape, on a local, national and international scale. I describemy: (i) various scientific collaborations and supervision activities, (ii) roles in over 10 regional,national and international projects, (iii) responsibilities in collective bodies such as program andorganizing committees of conferences and workshops, PhD juries, and the National UniversityCouncil (CNU), (iv) activity as an evaluator and a reviewer of European collaborative projects.The issues addressed in this dissertation open interesting scientific perspectives, in whicha special impact is put on links among various domains and communities. These perspectivesinclude: (i) integrating fine-grained language data into the linked open data, (ii) deep parsingof multi-word expressions, (iii) modeling multi-word expression identification in a treebank as atree-to-language correction problem, and (iv) a taxonomy and an experimental benchmark fortree-to-language correction approaches

Promoting multiword expressions in A* TAG parsing

International audienceMultiword expressions (MWEs) are pervasive in natural languages and often have both idiomatic and compositional readings, which leads to high syntactic ambiguity. We show that for some MWE types idiomatic readings are usually the correct ones. We propose a heuristic for an A* parser for Tree Adjoining Grammars which benefits from this knowledge by promoting MWE-oriented analyses. This strategy leads to a substantial reduction in the parsing search space in case of true positive MWE occurrences, while avoiding parsing failures in case of false positives

Enhancing practical TAG parsing efficiency by capturing redundancy

International audienceParsing efficiency within the context of tree adjoining grammars (TAGs) depends not only on the size of the input sentence but also, linearly, on the size of the input TAG, which can attain several thousands of elementary trees. We propose a factorized, finite-state TAG representation which copes with this combinatorial explosion. The associated parsing algorithm substantially increases the parsing performance on a real-size French TAG grammar

Author name extraction in blog web pages: a machine learning approach

International audienceThis paper presents research results concerning the automatic extraction of author names that are explicitly mentioned in blog web pages. It shows that some NLP pre-preprocessing stages (NE recognition, coreference resolution) prior to a SVM classification have a positive impact on accuracy.Cet article présente les résultats de travaux ayant pour but l'extraction automatique de noms d'auteurs explicites dans des articles de blogs. Il montre que l'ajout de pré-traitements relevant du TAL (détection d'entités nommées, résolution des coréférences) avant une classification de type SVM améliore les performances

Détection des émotions à partir du contenu linguistique d'énoncés oraux : application à un robot compagnon pour enfants fragilisés

International audienceProject ANR Emotirob aims at detecting emotions from an original point of view: realizing an emotional companion robot for weakened children. In our approach, linguistic detection and prosodie are combined. Our experiments show that human beings can estimate the emotional value of an utterance from its propositional content in a reliable way. So we have implemented a first model of linguistic detection, based on the principle that emotions can be compound: lexical words have an emotional value while predicates can modify emotional values of their arguments. This paper presents a short description of the logical understanding system, the outputs of which are used for the final emotional value calculus. Then, the creation of a lexical emotional reference standard is presented with an ontology of emotional predicate classes for children, aged between 5 and 7

Annotation de la temporalité en corpus : contribution à l'amélioration de la norme TimeML

National audienceThis paper reports a critical analysis of the TimeML standard, in the light of a temporal annotation that was conducted on spoken French. It shows that the norm suffers from weaknesses that must be corrected to fit the needs of NLP and corpus linguistics. These limitations concern mainly 1) the separation of different levels of linguistic annotation, 2) the delimitation in the text of the events, and 3) the absence of a bridging temporal relation in the norm.Cet article propose une analyse critique de la norme TimeML à la lumière de l'expérience d'annotation temporelle d'un corpus de français parlé. Il montre que certaines adaptations de la norme seraient conseillées pour répondre aux besoins du TAL et des sciences du langage. Sont étudiées ici les questions de séparation des niveaux d'annotation, de délimitation des éventualités dans le texte et de l'ajout d'une relation temporelle de type associative