Extracting spatial information : grounding, classifying and linking spatial expressions

This paper is concerned with the tagging of spatial expressions in German newspaper articles, assigning a meaning to the expression and classifying the usages of the spatial expression and linking the derived referent to an event description. In our system, we implemented the activation of concepts in a very simple fashion, a concept is activated once (with a cost depending on the item that activated it) and is left activated thereafter. As an example, a city also activates the nodes for the region and the country it is part of, so that cities from one country are chosen over cities from different countries. A test corpus of 12 German newspaper articles was tested regarding several disambiguation strategies. Disambiguation was carried out via a beam search to find an approximately cost-optimal solution for the conflict set of potential grounding candidates for the tagged spatial expression. Test showed that the disambiguation strategies improved accuracy significantly

Temporal information extraction from legal documents

The aim of this paper is to analyze what kinds of temporal information can be found in different types of legal documents. In particular, it provides a comparison of different legal document types (case law, statute or transactional document) andit discusses how one can do further reasoning with the extracted temporal information

05151 Abstracts Collection -- Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events

From 10.04.05 to 15.04.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05151 ``Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

05151 Summary -- Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events

The main focus of the seminar was on TimeML-based temporal annotation and reasoning. We were concerned with three main points: determining how effectively one can use the TimeML language for consistent annotation, determining how useful such annotation is for further processing, and determining what modifications should be applied to the standard to improve its usefulness in applications such as question-answering and information retrieval

Legal Prompting: Teaching a Language Model to Think Like a Lawyer

Large language models that are capable of zero or few-shot prompting approaches have given rise to the new research area of prompt engineering. Recent advances showed that for example Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts can improve arithmetic or common sense tasks significantly. We explore how such approaches fare with legal reasoning tasks and take the COLIEE entailment task based on the Japanese Bar exam for testing zero-shot/few-shot and fine-tuning approaches. Our findings show that while CoT prompting and fine-tuning with explanations approaches show improvements, the best results are produced by prompts that are derived from specific legal reasoning techniques such as IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion). Based on our experiments we improve the 2021 best result from 0.7037 accuracy to 0.8148 accuracy and beat the 2022 best system of 0.6789 accuracy with an accuracy of 0.7431.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables. Accepted by NLLP 2022 (EMNLP workshop

Numerische Approximation quasiperiodischer invarianter Tori unter Anwendung erweiterter Systeme

Abstract This thesis presents an algorithm for the computation of quasi-periodic invariant tori. The algorithm is based on an invariance equation for tori which are densely filled by a quasi-periodic orbit. This equation is derived without introducing (local) torus coordinates, which greatly simplifies the construction of discretisation methods and distinguishes the approach discussed here from earlier ones. Similar to periodic solutions of autonomous systems, a solution of the invariance equation has a free phase for each unknown basic frequency. These free phases can be fixed by extending the equation by phase conditions. The phase conditions given here are generalisations of the well-known integral condition for periodic orbits. It is shown that an approximate solution of the extended invariance equation can be computed using Newton's method for functions. Concrete algorithms are constructed by discretising the extended invariance equation using finite-difference and, for comparison, Fourier-Galerkin methods. These methods are independent of the stability-type of the torus. Convergence of the finite-difference method is shown under the restrictions that the system is available in a partitioned form and that the torus is attractive or attractive after reversal of time, respectively. The proof of stability is still open for the extended system. A pseudo-arc-length continuation based on the methods discussed here (as correctors) is implemented in the software package {\tt torcont}. It was successfully tested on numerous examples, some of which are discussed in this thesis.In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein Algorithmus zur Approximation quasiperiodischer invarianter Tori entwickelt. Er basiert auf einer Invarianzgleichung für Tori die von einer quasiperiodischen Lösung dicht ausgefüllt werden. Für die Herleitung dieser Gleichung ist keine Transformation des Systems in (lokale) Toruskoordinaten nötig, was die Konstruktion von Diskretisierungsverfahren erheblich vereinfacht und den vorgestellten Zugang von Früheren unterscheidet. In Analogie zu periodischen Lösungen autonomer Systeme besitzt auch eine Lösung dieser Gleichung für jede unbekannte Basisfrequenz jeweils eine freie Phase, die durch Erweiterung der Gleichung um Phasenbedingungen fixiert werden können. Die hier konstruierten Phasenbedingungen sind dabei Verallgemeinerungen der für periodische Orbits bekannten Integralbedingung. Für die erweiterte Invarianzgleichung wird die Durchführbarkeit des Newton-Verfahrens für Funktionen gezeigt. Konkrete Algorithmen werden durch Diskretisierung der Invarianzgleichung mittels Finiten-Differenzen- und, für Vergleichsrechnungen, Fourier-Galerkin-Verfahren konstruiert. Diese sind unabhängig vom Stabilitätstyp des Torus. Die Konvergenz der Finiten-Differenzen-Methode wird unter den Einschränkungen nachgewiesen, daß das System partitioniert vorliegt und der Torus asymptotisch stabil bzw. nach Zeitumkehr asymptotisch stabil ist. Der Nachweis der Stabilität des um Phasenbedingungen erweiterten diskretisierten Systems ist noch offen. m Softwarepaket torcont, wurde eine Pseudo-Bogenlängen-Parameterfortsetzung auf der Grundlage der beschriebenen Verfahren (als Korrektor) implementiert und an zahlreichen Beispielen erfolgreich getestet, von denen eine Auswahl in der vorliegenden Arbeit diskutiert wird

Temporal Relations in English and German Narrative Discourse

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsUnderstanding the temporal relations which hold between situations described in a narrative is a highly complex process. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the factors we have to take into account in order to determine the temporal coherence of a narrative discourse. In particular, aspectual information, tense, and world and context knowledge have to be considered and the interplay of all these factors must be specified. German is aspectually speaking an interesting language, because it does not possess a grammaticalised distinction between a perfective and imperfective aspect. In this thesis I examine the German aspectual system and the interaction of the factors which have an influence on the derived temporal relation for short discourse sequences. The analysis is carried out in two steps: First, the aspectual and temporal properties of German are investigated, following the cross-linguistic framework developed by Carlota S. Smith. An account for German is given which emphasises the properties which are peculiar to this language and explains why it has to be treated differently to, for example, English. The main result for the tense used in a narrative text—the Preterite—is that information regarding the end point of a described situation is based on our world knowledge and may be overridden provided context knowledge forces us to do this. Next, the more complex level of discourse is taken into account in order to derive the temporal relations which hold between the described situations. This investigation provides us with insights into the interaction of different knowledge sources like aspectual information as well as world and context knowledge. This investigation of German discourse sequences gives rise to the need for a time logic which is capable of expressing fine as well as coarse (or underspecified) temporal relations between situations. An account is presented to describe exhaustively all conceivable temporal relations within a computationally tractable reasoning system, based on the interval calculus by James Allen. However, in order to establish a coherent discourse for larger sequences, the hierarchical structure of a narrative has to be considered as well. I propose a Tree Description Grammar — a further development of Tree Adjoining Grammars — for parsing the given discourse structure, and stipulate discourse principles which give an explanation for the way a discourse should be processed. I furthermore discuss how a discourse grammar needs to distinguish between discourse structure and discourse processing. The latter term can be understood as navigating through a discourse tree, and reflects the process of how a discourse is comprehended. Finally, a small fragment of German is given which shows how the discourse grammar can be applied to short discourse sequences of four to seven sentences. The conclusion discusses the outcome of the analysis conducted in this thesis and proposes likely areas of future research

Use Your Strategic Entrepreneurs to Build Your Strategic Partnerships

Internationalisation through strategic partnerships is a goal for many higher education institutions and their upper-level management teams. Yet for institutional objectives to truly flourish, they should get the most out of the various skills that different actors bring to be table. This piece explores the interesting role that can be played by resourceful academic staff in materialising institutional, and individual, aims