Word sense disambiguation is defined as finding the corresponding sense for a target word in a given context, which comprises a major step in text applications. Recently, it has been addressed as an optimization problem. The idea behind is to find a sequence of senses that corresponds to the words in a given context with a maximum semantic similarity. Metaheuristics like simulated annealing and D-Bees provide approximate good-enough solutions, but are usually influenced by the starting parameters. In this paper, we study the parameter tuning for both algorithms within the word sense disambiguation problem. The experiments are conducted on different datasets to cover different disambiguation scenarios. We show that D-Bees is robust and less sensitive towards the initial parameters compared to simulated annealing, hence, it is sufficient to tune the parameters once and reuse them for different datasets, domains or languages.

In the current context of scientific information overload, text mining tools are of paramount importance for researchers who have to read scientific papers and assess their value. Current citation networks, which link papers by citation relationships (reference and citing paper), are useful to quantitatively understand the value of a piece of scientific work, however they are limited in that they do not provide information about what specific part of the reference paper the citing paper is referring to. This qualitative information is very important, for example, in the context of current community-based scientific summarization activities. In this paper, and relying on an annotated dataset of co-citation sentences, we carry out a number of experiments aimed at, given a citation sentence, automatically identify a part of a reference paper being cited. Additionally our algorithm predicts the specific reason why such reference sentence has been cited out of five possible reasons.

Automatic analysis of poetic rhythm is a challenging task that involves linguistics, literature, and computer science. When the language to be analyzed is known, rule-based systems or data-driven methods can be used. In this paper, we analyze poetic rhythm in English and Spanish. We show that the representations of data learned from character-based neural models are more informative than the ones from hand-crafted features, and that a Bi-LSTM+CRF-model produces state-of-the art accuracy on scansion of poetry in two languages. Results also show that the information about whole word structure, and not just independent syllables, is highly informative for performing scansion.

This paper is an attempt to exclusively focus on investigating the pivot language technique in which a bridging language is utilized to increase the quality of the Persian-Spanish low-resource Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In this case, English is used as the bridging language, and the Persian-English SMT is combined with the English-Spanish one, where the relatively large corpora of each may be used in support of the Persian-Spanish pairing. Our results indicate that the pivot language technique outperforms the direct SMT processes currently in use between Persian and Spanish. Furthermore, we investigate the sentence translation pivot strategy and the phrase translation in turn, and demonstrate that, in the context of the Persian-Spanish SMT system, the phrase-level pivoting outperforms the sentence-level pivoting. Finally we suggest a method called combination model in which the standard direct model and the best triangulation pivoting model are blended in order to reach a high-quality translation.

Stance classification determines the attitude, or stance, in a (typically short) text. The task has powerful applications, such as the detection of fake news or the automatic extraction of attitudes toward entities or events in the media. This paper describes a surprisingly simple and efficient classification approach to open stance classification in Twitter, for rumour and veracity classification. The approach profits from a novel set of automatically identifiable problem-specific features, which significantly boost classifier accuracy and achieve above state-of-the-art results on recent benchmark datasets. This calls into question the value of using complex sophisticated models for stance classification without first doing informed feature extraction.

We present GATE DictLemmatizer, a multilingual open source lemmatizer for the GATE NLP framework that currently supports English, German, Italian, French, Dutch, and Spanish, and is easily extensible to other languages. The software is freely available under the LGPL license. The lemmatization is based on the Helsinki Finite-State Transducer Technology (HFST) and lemma dictionaries automatically created from Wiktionary. We evaluate the performance of the lemmatizers against TreeTagger, which is only freely available for research purposes. Our evaluation shows that DictLemmatizer achieves similar or even better results than TreeTagger for languages where there is support from HFST. The performance drops when there is no support from HFST and the entire lemmatization process is based on lemma dictionaries. However, the results are still satisfactory given the fact that DictLemmatizer isopen-source and can be easily extended to other languages. The software for extending the lemmatizer by creating word lists from Wiktionary dictionaries is also freely available as open-source software.

To facilitate cross-lingual studies, there is an increasing interest in identifying linguistic universals. Recently, a new universal scheme was designed as a part of universal dependency project. In this paper, we map the Arabic tweets dependency treebank (ATDT) to the Universal Dependency (UD) scheme to compare it to other language resources and for the purpose of cross-lingual studies.

A number of machine translation methods have been proposed in recent years to deal with the increasingly important problem of automatic translation between texts of different languages or languages and their dialects. These methods have produced promising results when applied to some of the widely studied languages. Existing translation methods are mainly implemented using rule-based and static machine translation approaches. Rule based approaches utilize language translation rules that can either be constructed by an expert, which is quite difficult when dealing with dialects, or rely on rule construction algorithms, which require very large parallel datasets. Statistical approaches also require large parallel datasets to build the translation models. However, large parallel datasets do not exist for languages with low resources, such as the Arabic language and its dialects. In this paper we propose an algorithm that attempts to overcome this limitation, and apply it to translate the Egyptian dialect (EGY) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Monolingual corpus was collected for both MSA and EGY and a relatively small parallel language pair set was built to train the models. The proposed method utilizes Word embedding as it requires monolingual data rather than parallel corpus. Both Continuous Bag of Words and Skip-gram were used to build word vectors. The proposed method was validated on four different datasets using a four-fold cross validation approach.

This paper presents an approach to generating common sense knowledge written in raw English sentences. Instead of using public contributors to feed this source, this system chose to employ expert linguistics decisions by using definitions from English dictionaries. Because the definitions in English dictionaries are not prepared to be transformed into inference rules, some preprocessing steps were taken to turn each relation of word:definition in dictionaries into an inference rule in the form left-hand side ⇒ right-hand side. In this paper, we applied this mechanism using two dictionaries: The MacMillan Dictionary and WordNet definitions. A random set of 200 inference rules were extracted equally from the two dictionaries, and then we used human judgment as to whether these rules are ‘True’ or not. For the MacMillan Dictionary the precision reaches 0.74 with 0.508 recall, and the WordNet definitions resulted in 0.73 precision with 0.09 recall.

This paper presents the development of a natural language inference engine that benefits from two current standard approaches; i.e., shallow and deep approaches. This system combines two non-deterministic algorithms: the approximate matching from the shallow approach and a theorem prover from the deep approach for handling multi-step inference tasks. The theorem prover is customized to accept dependency trees and apply inference rules to these trees. The inference rules are automatically generated as syllogistic rules from our test data (FraCaS test suite). The theorem prover exploits a non-deterministic matching algorithm within a standard backward chaining inference engine. We employ continuation programming as a way of seamlessly handling the combination of these two non-deterministic algorithms. Testing the matching algorithm on “Generalized quantifiers” and “adjectives” topics in FraCaS (MacCartney and Manning 2007), we achieved an accuracy of 92.8% of the single-premise cases. For the multi-steps of inference, we checked the validity of our syllogistic rules and then extracted four generic instances that can be applied to more than one problem.

The last years witnessed an increasing interest in the automatic methods for spotting false translation units in translation memories. This problem presents a great interest to industry as there are many translation memories that contain errors. A closely related line of research deals with identifying sentences that do not align in the parallel corpora mined from the web. The task of spotting false translations is modeled as a binary classification problem. It is known that in certain conditions the ensembles of classifiers improve over the performance of the individual members. In this paper we benchmark the most popular ensemble of classifiers: Majority Voting, Bagging, Stacking and Ada Boost at the task of spotting false translation units for translation memories and parallel web corpora. We want to know if for this specific problem any ensemble technique improves the performance of the individual classifiers and if there is a difference between the data in translation memories and parallel web corpora with respect to this task.

This paper evaluates different techniques for building a supervised, multilanguage keyphrase extraction pipeline for languages which lack a gold standard. Starting from an unsupervised English keyphrase extraction pipeline, we implement pipelines for Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, and we build test collections for languages which lack one. Then, we add a Machine Learning module trained on a well-known English language corpus and we evaluate the performance not only over English but on the other languages as well. Finally, we repeat the same evaluation after training the pipeline over an Arabic language corpus to check whether using a language-specific corpus brings a further improvement in performance. On the five languages we analyzed, results show an improvement in performance when using a machine learning algorithm, even if such algorithm is not trained and tested on the same language.

In this paper, we implement a multilingual Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system for Arabic-English Translation. Arabic Text can be categorized into standard and dialectal Arabic. These two forms of Arabic differ significantly. Different mono-lingual and multi-lingual hybrid SMT approaches are compared. Mono-lingual systems do always results in better translation accuracy in one Arabic form and poor accuracy in the other. Multi-lingual SMT models that are trained with pooled parallel MSA/dialectal data result in better accuracy. However, since the available parallel MSA data are much larger compared to dialectal data, multilingual models are biased to MSA. We propose in the work, a multi-lingual combination of different mono-lingual systems using an Arabic form classifier. The outcome of the classier directs the system to use the appropriate mono-lingual models (standard, dialectal, or mixture). Testing the different SMT systems shows that the proposed classifier-based SMT system outperforms mono-lingual and data pooled multi-lingual systems.

Paraphrases exist on different granularity levels, the most frequently used one being the sentential level. However, we argue that working on the sentential level is not optimal for both machines and humans, and that it would be easier and more efficient to work on sub-sentential levels. To prove this, we quantify and analyze the difference between paraphrases on both sentence and sub-sentence level in order to show the significance of the problem. First results on a preliminary dataset seem to confirm our hypotheses.

Manual text annotation is an essential part of Big Text analytics. Although annotators work with limited parts of data sets, their results are extrapolated by automated text classification and affect the final classification results. Reliability of annotations and adequacy of assigned labels are especially important in the case of sentiment annotations. In the current study we examine inter-annotator agreement in multi-class, multi-label sentiment annotation of messages. We used several annotation agreement measures, as well as statistical analysis and Machine Learning to assess the resulting annotations.

Decision trees have been previously employed in many machine-learning tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, morphological-attribute resolution, letter-to-sound conversion and statistical-parametric speech synthesis. In this paper we introduce an optimized tree-computation algorithm, which is based on the original ID3 algorithm. We also introduce a tree-pruning method that uses a development set to delete nodes from over-fitted models. The later mentioned algorithm also uses a results caching method for speed-up. Our algorithm is almost 200 times faster than a naive implementation and yields accurate results on our test datasets.

This paper proposes a novel method to select sentences for automatic summarization based on an evolutionary algorithm. The algorithm explores candidate summaries space following an objective function computed over ngrams probability distributions of the candidate summary and the source documents. This method does not consider a summary as a stack of independent sentences but as a whole text, and makes use of advances in unsupervised summarization evaluation. We compare this sentence extraction method to one of the best existing methods which is based on integer linear programming, and show its efficiency on three different acknowledged corpora.

We propose to use question answering (QA) data from Web forums to train chat-bots from scratch, i.e., without dialog data. First, we extract pairs of question and answer sentences from the typically much longer texts of questions and answers in a forum. We then use these shorter texts to train seq2seq models in a more efficient way. We further improve the parameter optimization using a new model selection strategy based on QA measures. Finally, we propose to use extrinsic evaluation with respect to a QA task as an automatic evaluation method for chatbot systems. The evaluation shows that the model achieves a MAP of 63.5% on the extrinsic task. Moreover, our manual evaluation demonstrates that the model can answer correctly 49.5% of the questions when they are similar in style to how questions are asked in the forum, and 47.3% of the questions, when they are more conversational in style.

Shallow text analysis (Text Mining) uses mainly Information Extraction techniques. The low resource languages do not allow application of such traditional techniques with sufficient accuracy and recall on big data. In contrast, Data Mining approaches provide an opportunity to make deep analysis and to discover new knowledge. Frequent pattern mining approaches are used mainly for structured information in databases and are a quite challenging task in text mining. Unfortunately, most frequent pattern mining approaches do not use contextual information for extracted patterns: general patterns are extracted regardless of the context. We propose a method that processes raw informal texts (from health discussion forums) and formal texts (outpatient records) in Bulgarian language. In addition we use some context information and small terminological lexicons to generalize extracted frequent patterns. This allows to map informal expression of medical terminology to the formal one and to generate automatically resources.

We propose a novel discriminative ranking model that learns embeddings from multilingual and multi-modal data, meaning that our model can take advantage of images and descriptions in multiple languages to improve embedding quality. To that end, we introduce an objective function that uses pairwise ranking adapted to the case of three or more input sources. We compare our model against different baselines, and evaluate the robustness of our embeddings on image–sentence ranking (ISR), semantic textual similarity (STS), and neural machine translation (NMT). We find that the additional multilingual signals lead to improvements on all three tasks, and we highlight that our model can be used to consistently improve the adequacy of translations generated with NMT models when re-ranking n-best lists.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) poses new challenges in real-world documents in which there are entities with different roles according to their purpose or meaning. Retrieving all the possible entities in scenarios in which only a subset of them based on their role is needed, produces noise on the overall precision. This work proposes a NER model that relies on role classification models that support recognizing entities with a specific role. The proposed model has been implemented in two use cases using Spanish drug Summary of Product Characteristics: identification of therapeutic indications and identification of adverse reactions. The results show how precision is increased using a NER model that is oriented towards a specific role and discards entities out of scope.

Emotion detection has a high potential positive impact on the benefit of business, society, politics or education. Given this, the main objective of our research is to contribute to the resolution of one of the most important challenges in textual emotion detection: emotional corpora annotation. This will be tackled by proposing a semi-automatic methodology. It consists in two main phases: (1) an automatic process to pre-annotate the unlabelled sentences with a reduced number of emotional categories; and (2) a manual process of refinement where human annotators will determine which is the dominant emotion between the pre-defined set. Our objective in this paper is to show the pre-annotation process, as well as to evaluate the usability of subjective and polarity information in this process. The evaluation performed confirms clearly the benefits of employing the polarity and subjective information on emotion detection and thus endorses the relevance of our approach.

With the increasing number of communication platforms that offer variety of ways of connecting two interlocutors, there is a resurgence of chat-based dialog systems. These systems, typically known as chatbots have been successfully applied in a range of consumer and enterprise applications. A key technology in such chat-bots is robust natural language understanding (NLU) which can significantly influence and impact the efficacy of the conversation and ultimately the user-experience. While NLU is far from perfect, this paper illustrates the role of underspecification and its impact on successful dialog completion.

In this paper, we present an application for the automatic identification of the important moments that might occur during students’ collaborative chats. The moments are detected based on the input received from the user, who may choose to perform an analysis on the topics that interest him/her. Moreover, the application offers various types of suggestive and intuitive graphics that aid the user in identification of such moments. There are two main aspects that are considered when identifying important moments: the concepts’ frequency and distribution throughout the conversation and the chat tempo, which is analyzed for identifying intensively debated concepts. By the tempo of the chat we understand the rate at which the ideas are input by the chat participants, expressed by the utterances’ timestamps.

Radiology reports express the results of a radiology study and contain information about anatomical entities, findings, measures and impressions of the medical doctor. The use of information extraction techniques can help physicians to access this information in order to understand data and to infer further knowledge. Supervised machine learning methods are very popular to address information extraction, but are usually domain and language dependent. To train new classification models, annotated data is required. Moreover, annotated data is also required as an evaluation resource of information extraction algorithms. However, one major drawback of processing clinical data is the low availability of annotated datasets. For this reason we performed a manual annotation of radiology reports written in Spanish. This paper presents the corpus, the annotation schema, the annotation guidelines and further insight of the data.

We investigate parsing replicability across 7 languages (and 8 treebanks), showing that choices concerning the use of grammatical functions in parsing or evaluation, the influence of the rare word threshold, as well as choices in test sentences and evaluation script options have considerable and often unexpected effects on parsing accuracies. All of those choices need to be carefully documented if we want to ensure replicability.

The automatic identification of discourse relations is still a challenging task in natural language processing. Discourse connectives, such as since or but, are the most informative cues to identify explicit relations; however discourse parsers typically use a closed inventory of such connectives. As a result, discourse relations signalled by markers outside these inventories (i.e. AltLexes) are not detected as effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel method to leverage parallel corpora in text simplification and lexical resources to automatically identify alternative lexicalizations that signal discourse relation. When applied to the Simple Wikipedia and Newsela corpora along with WordNet and the PPDB, the method allowed the automatic discovery of 91 AltLexes.

In this article we propose a stylistic analysis of Solomon Marcus’ non-scientific published texts, gathered in six volumes, aiming to uncover some of his quantitative and qualitative fingerprints. Moreover, we compare and cluster two distinct periods of time in his writing style: 22 years of communist regime (1967-1989) and 27 years of democracy (1990-2016). The distributional analysis of Marcus’ text reveals that the passing from the communist regime period to democracy is sharply marked by two complementary changes in Marcus’ writing: in the pre-democracy period, the communist norms of writing style demanded on the one hand long phrases, long words and clichés, and on the other hand, a short list of preferred “official” topics; in democracy tendency was towards shorten phrases and words while approaching a broader area of topics.

This demo paper presents a system that builds a timeline with salient actions of a soccer game, based on the tweets posted by users. It combines information provided by external knowledge bases to enrich the content of tweets and applies graph theory to model relations between actions (e.g. goals, penalties) and participants of a game (e.g. players, teams). In the demo, a web application displays in nearly real-time the actions detected from tweets posted by users for a given match of Euro 2016. Our tools are freely available at https://bitbucket.org/eamosse/event_tracking.

In this paper, we propose an approach to build a timeline with actions in a sports game based on tweets. We combine information provided by external knowledge bases to enrich the content of the tweets, and apply graph theory to model relations between actions and participants in a game. We demonstrate the validity of our approach using tweets collected during the EURO 2016 Championship and evaluate the output against live summaries produced by sports channels.

Detecting which tweets describe a specific event and clustering them is one of the main challenging tasks related to Social Media currently addressed in the NLP community. Existing approaches have mainly focused on detecting spikes in clusters around specific keywords or Named Entities (NE). However, one of the main drawbacks of such approaches is the difficulty in understanding when the same keywords describe different events. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that exploits NE mentions in tweets and their entity context to create a temporal event graph. Then, using simple graph theory techniques and a PageRank-like algorithm, we process the event graphs to detect clusters of tweets describing the same events. Experiments on two gold standard datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results both in terms of evaluation performances and the quality of the detected events.

The recent failures of traditional poll models, like the predictions in United Kingdom with the Brexit, or in United States presidential elections with the victory of Donald Trump, have been noteworthy. With the decline of traditional poll models and the growth of the social networks, automatic tools are gaining popularity to make predictions in this context. In this paper we present our approximation and compare it with a real case: the 2017 French presidential election.

In this paper, we present the first attempts to develop a machine translation (MT) system between Spanish and Shipibo-konibo (es-shp). There are very few digital texts written in Shipibo-konibo and even less bilingual texts that can be aligned, hence we had to create a parallel corpus using both bilingual and monolingual texts. We will describe how this corpus was made, as well as the process we followed to improve the quality of the sentences used to build a statistical MT model or SMT. The results obtained surpassed the baseline proposed (dictionary based) and made a promising result for further development considering the size of corpus used. Finally, it is expected that this MT system can be reinforced with the use of additional linguistic rules and automatic language processing functions that are being implemented.

This paper discusses the general methodology and important practical aspects of implementing a new bilingual lexical resource – the Russian-Tatar Socio-Political Thesaurus that is being developed on the basis of the Russian RuThes thesaurus format as a hierarchy of concepts viewed as units of thought. Each concept is linked with a set of language expressions (words and collocations) referring to it in texts (text entries). Currently the Russian-Tatar Socio-Political Thesaurus includes 6,000 concepts, while new concepts and text entries are being constantly added to it. The paper outlines main challenges of translating concept names and their text entries into Tatar, and describes ways of reflecting the specificity of the Tatar lexical-semantic system.

We demo a chat bot with the focus on complex, multi-sentence questions that enforce what we call rhetoric agreement of answers with questions. Chat bot finds answers which are not only relevant by topic but also match the question by style, argumentation patterns, communication means, experience level and other attributes. The system achieves rhetoric agreement by learning pairs of discourse trees (DTs) for question (Q) and answer (A). We build a library of best answer DTs for most types of complex questions. To better recognize a valid rhetoric agreement between Q and A, DTs are extended with the labels for communicative actions. An algorithm for finding the best DT for an A, given a Q, is evaluated.

In the wake of a polarizing election, the cyber world is laden with hate speech. Context accompanying a hate speech text is useful for identifying hate speech, which however has been largely overlooked in existing datasets and hate speech detection models. In this paper, we provide an annotated corpus of hate speech with context information well kept. Then we propose two types of hate speech detection models that incorporate context information, a logistic regression model with context features and a neural network model with learning components for context. Our evaluation shows that both models outperform a strong baseline by around 3% to 4% in F1 score and combining these two models further improve the performance by another 7% in F1 score.

In the context of investigative journalism, we address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a given document are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. Despite its importance, this is a relatively understudied problem. Thus, we create a new corpus of political debates, containing statements that have been fact-checked by nine reputable sources, and we train machine learning models to predict which claims should be prioritized for fact-checking, i.e., we model the problem as a ranking task. Unlike previous work, which has looked primarily at sentences in isolation, in this paper we focus on a rich input representation modeling the context: relationship between the target statement and the larger context of the debate, interaction between the opponents, and reaction by the moderator and by the public. Our experiments show state-of-the-art results, outperforming a strong rivaling system by a margin, while also confirming the importance of the contextual information.

Rich data provided by tweets have beenanalyzed, clustered, and explored in a variety of studies. Typically those studies focus on named entity recognition, entity linking, and entity disambiguation or clustering. Tweets and hashtags are generally analyzed on sentential or word level but not on a compositional level of concatenated words. We propose an approach for a closer analysis of compounds in hashtags, and in the long run also of other types of text sequences in tweets, in order to enhance the clustering of such text documents. Hashtags have been used before as primary topic indicators to cluster tweets, however, their segmentation and its effect on clustering results have not been investigated to the best of our knowledge. Our results with a standard dataset from the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) show that segmented and harmonized hashtags positively impact effective clustering.

Nowadays, search for documents on the Internet is becoming increasingly difficult. The reason is the amount of content published by users (articles, comments, blogs, reviews). How to facilitate that the users can find their required documents? What would be necessary to provide useful document meta-data for supporting search engines? In this article, we present a study of some Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies that can be useful for facilitating the proper identification of documents according to the user needs. For this purpose, it is designed a document profile that will be able to represent semantic meta-data extracted from documents by using NLP technologies. The research is basically focused on the study of different NLP technologies in order to support the creation our novel document profile proposal from semantic perspectives.

Since the advent of word embedding methods, the representation of longer pieces of texts such as sentences and paragraphs is gaining more and more interest, especially for textual similarity tasks. Mikolov et al. (2013) have demonstrated that words and phrases exhibit linear structures that allow to meaningfully combine words by an element-wise addition of their vector representations. Recently, Arora et al. (2017) have shown that removing the projections of the weighted average sum of word embedding vectors on their first principal components, outperforms sophisticated supervised methods including RNN’s and LSTM’s. Inspired by Mikolov et al. (2013) and Arora et al. (2017) findings and by a bilingual word mapping technique presented in Artetxe et al. (2016), we introduce MappSent, a novel approach for textual similarity. Based on a linear sentence embedding representation, its principle is to build a matrix that maps sentences in a joint-subspace where similar sets of sentences are pushed closer. We evaluate our approach on the SemEval 2016/2017 question-to-question similarity task and show that overall MappSent achieves competitive results and outperforms in most cases state-of-art methods.

Figurative language such as irony, sarcasm, and metaphor is considered a significant challenge in sentiment analysis. These figurative devices can sculpt the affect of an utterance and test the limits of sentiment analysis of supposedly literal texts. We explore the effect of figurative language on sentiment analysis. We incorporate the figurative language indicators into the sentiment analysis process and compare the results with and without the additional information about them. We evaluate on the SemEval-2015 Task 11 data and outperform the first team with our convolutional neural network model and additional training data in terms of mean squared error and we follow closely behind the first place in terms of cosine similarity.

Argument labeling of explicit discourse relations is a challenging task. The state of the art systems achieve slightly above 55% F-measure but require hand-crafted features. In this paper, we propose a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based model for argument labeling. We experimented with multiple configurations of our model. Using the PDTB dataset, our best model achieved an F1 measure of 23.05% without any feature engineering. This is significantly higher than the 20.52% achieved by the state of the art RNN approach, but significantly lower than the feature based state of the art systems. On the other hand, because our approach learns only from the raw dataset, it is more widely applicable to multiple textual genres and languages.

Parsing Chinese critically depends on correct word segmentation for the parser since incorrect segmentation inevitably causes incorrect parses. We investigate a pipeline approach to segmentation and parsing using word lattices as parser input. We compare CRF-based and lexicon-based approaches to word segmentation. Our results show that the lattice parser is capable of selecting the correction segmentation from thousands of options, thus drastically reducing the number of unparsed sentence. Lexicon-based parsing models have a better coverage than the CRF-based approach, but the many options are more difficult to handle. We reach our best result by using a lexicon from the n-best CRF analyses, combined with highly probable words.

Today’s massive news streams demand the automate analysis which is provided by various online news explorers. However, most of them do not provide sentiment analysis. The main problem of sentiment analysis of news is the differences between the writers and readers attitudes to the news text. News can be good or bad but have to be delivered in neutral words as pure facts. Although there are applications for sentiment analysis of news, the task of news analysis is still a very actual problem because the latest news impacts people’s lives daily. In this paper, we explored the problem of sentiment analysis for Ukrainian and Russian news, developed a corpus of Ukrainian and Russian news and annotated each text using one of three categories: positive, negative and neutral. Each text was marked by at least three independent annotators via the web interface, the inter-annotator agreement was analyzed and the final label for each text was computed. These texts were used in the machine learning experiments. Further, we investigated what kinds of named entities such as Locations, Organizations, Persons are perceived as good or bad by the readers and which of them were the cause for text annotation ambiguity.

It is completely amazing! Fake news and “click baits” have totally invaded the cyberspace. Let us face it: everybody hates them for three simple reasons. Reason #2 will absolutely amaze you. What these can achieve at the time of election will completely blow your mind! Now, we all agree, this cannot go on, you know, somebody has to stop it. So, we did this research, and trust us, it is totally great research, it really is! Make no mistake. This is the best research ever! Seriously, come have a look, we have it all: neural networks, attention mechanism, sentiment lexicons, author profiling, you name it. Lexical features, semantic features, we absolutely have it all. And we have totally tested it, trust us! We have results, and numbers, really big numbers. The best numbers ever! Oh, and analysis, absolutely top notch analysis. Interested? Come read the shocking truth about fake news and clickbait in the Bulgarian cyberspace. You won’t believe what we have found!

Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically distinguishing false rumors from factually true claims. Here, we propose a general-purpose framework for fully-automatic fact checking using external sources, tapping the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to confirm or reject a claim. Our framework uses a deep neural network with LSTM text encoding to combine semantic kernels with task-specific embeddings that encode a claim together with pieces of potentially relevant text fragments from the Web, taking the source reliability into account. The evaluation results show good performance on two different tasks and datasets: (i) rumor detection and (ii) fact checking of the answers to a question in community question answering forums.

The purpose of this research is to address the problem of extracting information from travel itineraries and discuss the challenges faced in the process. Business-to-customer emails like booking confirmations and e-tickets are usually machine generated by filling slots in pre-defined templates which improve the presentation of such emails but also make the emails more complex in structure. Extracting the relevant information from these emails would let users track their journeys and important updates on applications installed on their devices to give them a consolidated over view of their itineraries and also save valuable time. We investigate the use of an HMM-based named entity recognizer on such emails which we will use to label and extract relevant entities. NER in such emails is challenging as these itineraries offer less useful contextual information. We also propose a rich set of features which are integrated into the model and are specific to our domain. The result from our model is a list of lists containing the relevant information extracted from ones itinerary.

This paper presents an supervised approach to the recognition of Cross-document Structure Theory (CST) relations in Polish texts. In the proposed, graph-based representation is constructed for sentences. Graphs are built on the basis of lexicalised syntactic-semantic relation extracted from text. Similarity between sentences is calculated from graph, and the similarity values are input to classifiers trained by Logistic Model Tree. Several different configurations of graph, as well as graph similarity methods were analysed for this tasks. The approach was evaluated on a large open corpus annotated manually with 17 types of selected CST relations. The configuration of experiments was similar to those known from SEMEVAL and we obtained very promising results.

Machine translation systems are very sensitive to the domains they were trained on. Several domain adaptation techniques have already been deeply studied. We propose a new technique for neural machine translation (NMT) that we call domain control which is performed at runtime using a unique neural network covering multiple domains. The presented approach shows quality improvements when compared to dedicated domains translating on any of the covered domains and even on out-of-domain data. In addition, model parameters do not need to be re-estimated for each domain, making this effective to real use cases. Evaluation is carried out on English-to-French translation for two different testing scenarios. We first consider the case where an end-user performs translations on a known domain. Secondly, we consider the scenario where the domain is not known and predicted at the sentence level before translating. Results show consistent accuracy improvements for both conditions.

We examine the effects of particular orderings of sentence pairs on the on-line training of neural machine translation (NMT). We focus on two types of such orderings: (1) ensuring that each minibatch contains sentences similar in some aspect and (2) gradual inclusion of some sentence types as the training progresses (so called “curriculum learning”). In our English-to-Czech experiments, the internal homogeneity of minibatches has no effect on the training but some of our “curricula” achieve a small improvement over the baseline.

In this article we present the result of the recent research in the recognition and normalisation of Polish temporal expressions. The temporal information extracted from the text plays major role in many information extraction systems, like question answering, event recognition or discourse analysis. We proposed a new method for the temporal expressions normalisation, called Cascade of Partial Rules. Here we describe results achieved by updated version of Liner2 machine learning system.

In this paper, we introduce WoRel, a model that jointly learns word embeddings and a semantic representation of word relations. The model learns from plain text sentences and their dependency parse trees. The word embeddings produced by WoRel outperform Skip-Gram and GloVe in word similarity and syntactical word analogy tasks and have comparable results on word relatedness and semantic word analogy tasks. We show that the semantic representation of relations enables us to express the meaning of phrases and is a promising research direction for semantics at the sentence level.

This paper introduces a Czech dataset for semantic similarity and semantic relatedness. The dataset contains word pairs with hand annotated scores that indicate the semantic similarity and semantic relatedness of the words. The dataset contains 953 word pairs compiled from 9 different sources. It contains words and their contexts taken from real text corpora including extra examples when the words are ambiguous. The dataset is annotated by 5 independent annotators. The average Spearman correlation coefficient of the annotation agreement is r = 0.81. We provide reference evaluation experiments with several methods for computing semantic similarity and relatedness.

The naive approach to annotation projection is not effective to project discourse annotations from one language to another because implicit relations are often changed to explicit ones and vice-versa in the translation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the intersection between statistical word-alignment models to identify unsupported discourse annotations. This approach identified 65% of the unsupported annotations in the English-French parallel sentences from Europarl. By filtering out these unsupported annotations, we induced the first PDTB-style discourse annotated corpus for French from Europarl. We then used this corpus to train a classifier to identify the discourse-usage of French discourse connectives and show a 15% improvement of F1-score compared to the classifier trained on the non-filtered annotations.

Extracting semantic relations from texts is a good way to build and supply a knowledge base, an indispensable resource for text analysis. We propose and evaluate the combination of three ways of producing lexical-semantic relations.

Correcting errors in a data set is a critical issue. This task can be either hand-made by experts, or by crowdsourcing methods, or automatically done using algorithms. Although the rate of errors present in the JeuxDeMots network is rather low, it is important to reduce it. We present here automatic methods for detecting potential secondary errors that would result from automatic inference mechanisms when they rely on an initial error manually detected. Encouraging results also invite us to consider strategies that would automatically detect “erroneous” initial relations, which could lead to the automatic detection of the majority of errors in the network.

In this paper, we analyze and evaluate word embeddings for representation of longer texts in the multi-label classification scenario. The embeddings are used in three convolutional neural network topologies. The experiments are realized on the Czech ČTK and English Reuters-21578 standard corpora. We compare the results of word2vec static and trainable embeddings with randomly initialized word vectors. We conclude that initialization does not play an important role for classification. However, learning of word vectors is crucial to obtain good results.

Social media provides users a platform to publish messages and socialize with others, and microblogs have gained more users than ever in recent years. With such usage, user profiling is a popular task in computational linguistics and text mining. Different approaches have been used to predict users’ gender, age, and other information, but most of this work has been done on English and other Western languages. The goal of this project is to predict the gender of users based on their posts on Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging platform. Given issues in Chinese word segmentation, we explore character and word n-grams as features for this task, as well as using character and word embeddings for classification. Given how the data is extracted, we approach the task on a per-post basis, and we show the difficulties of the task for both humans and computers. Nonetheless, we present encouraging results and point to future improvements.

In this paper, we propose a novel supervised model for parsing natural language sentences into their formal semantic representations. This model treats sentence-to-lambda-logical expression conversion within the framework of the statistical machine translation with forest-to-tree algorithm. To make this work, we transform the lambda-logical expression structure into a form suitable for the mechanics of statistical machine translation and useful for modeling. We show that our model is able to yield new state-of-the-art results on both standard datasets with simple features.

Social media platforms play a crucial role in piecing together global news stories via their corresponding online discussions. Thus, in this work, we introduce the problem of automatically summarizing massively multilingual microblog text streams. We discuss the challenges involved in both generating summaries as well as evaluating them. We introduce a simple word graph based approach that utilizes node neighborhoods to identify keyphrases and thus in turn, pick summary candidates. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating precise summaries as compared to other popular techniques.

In this paper we show that if we want to obtain human evidence about conventionalization of some phrases, we should ask native speakers about associations they have to a given phrase and its component words. We have shown that if component words of a phrase have each other as frequent associations, then this phrase can be considered as conventionalized. Another type of conventionalized phrases can be revealed using two factors: low entropy of phrase associations and low intersection of component word and phrase associations. The association experiments were performed for the Russian language.

In this paper we examine methods to detect hate speech in social media, while distinguishing this from general profanity. We aim to establish lexical baselines for this task by applying supervised classification methods using a recently released dataset annotated for this purpose. As features, our system uses character n-grams, word n-grams and word skip-grams. We obtain results of 78% accuracy in identifying posts across three classes. Results demonstrate that the main challenge lies in discriminating profanity and hate speech from each other. A number of directions for future work are discussed.

We report a first major upgrade of Inforex — a web-based system for qualitative and collaborative text corpora annotation and analysis. Inforex is a part of Polish CLARIN infrastructure. It is integrated with a digital repository for storing and publishing language resources and allows to visualize, browse and annotate text corpora stored in the repository. As a result of a series of workshops for researches from humanities and social sciences fields we improved the graphical interface to make the system more friendly and readable for non-experienced users. We also implemented a new functionality for gold standard annotation which includes private annotations and annotation agreement by a super-annotator.

In the paper we present a tool for lemmatization of multi-word common noun phrases and named entities for Polish called LemmaPL. The tool is based on a set of manually crafted rules and heuristics utilizing a set of dictionaries (including morphological, named entities and inflection patterns). The accuracy of lemmatization obtained by the tool reached 97.99% on a dataset with multi-word common noun phrases and 86.17% for case-sensitive evaluation on a dataset with named entities.

To alleviate data sparsity in spoken Uyghur machine translation, we proposed a log-linear based morphological segmentation approach. Instead of learning model only from monolingual annotated corpus, this approach optimizes Uyghur segmentation for spoken translation based on both bilingual and monolingual corpus. Our approach relies on several features such as traditional conditional random field (CRF) feature, bilingual word alignment feature and monolingual suffixword co-occurrence feature. Experimental results shown that our proposed segmentation model for Uyghur spoken translation achieved 1.6 BLEU score improvements compared with the state-of-the-art baseline.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important component of natural language processing (NLP), with applicability in biomedical domain, enabling knowledge-discovery from medical texts. Due to the fact that for the Romanian language there are only a few linguistic resources specific to the biomedical domain, it was created a sub-corpus specific to this domain. In this paper we present a newly developed Romanian sub-corpus for medical-domain NER, which is a valuable asset for the field of biomedical text processing. We provide a description of the sub-corpus, informative statistics about data-composition and we evaluate an automatic NER tool on the newly created resource.

This paper presents a Named Entity Classification system, which employs machine learning. Our methodology employs local entity information and profiles as feature set. All features are generated in an unsupervised manner. It is tested on two different data sets: (i) DrugSemantics Spanish corpus (Overall F1 = 74.92), whose results are in-line with the state of the art without employing external domain-specific resources. And, (ii) English CONLL2003 dataset (Overall F1 = 81.40), although our results are lower than previous work, these are reached without external knowledge or complex linguistic analysis. Last, using the same configuration for the two corpora, the difference of overall F1 is only 6.48 points (DrugSemantics = 74.92 versus CoNLL2003 = 81.40). Thus, this result supports our hypothesis that our approach is language and domain independent and does not require any external knowledge or complex linguistic analysis.

POS tagging and dependency parsing achieve good results for homogeneous datasets. However, these tasks are much more difficult on heterogeneous datasets. In (Mukherjee et al. 2016, 2017), we address this issue by creating genre experts for both POS tagging and parsing. We use topic modeling to automatically separate training and test data into genres and to create annotation experts per genre by training separate models for each topic. However, this approach assumes that topic modeling is performed jointly on training and test sentences each time a new test sentence is encountered. We extend this work by assigning new test sentences to their genre expert by using similarity metrics. We investigate three different types of methods: 1) based on words highly associated with a genre by the topic modeler, 2) using a k-nearest neighbor classification approach, and 3) using perplexity to determine the closest topic. The results show that the choice of similarity metric has an effect on results and that we can reach comparable accuracies to the joint topic modeling in POS tagging and dependency parsing, thus providing a viable and efficient approach to POS tagging and parsing a sentence by its genre expert.

We propose a new task of automatically detecting reputation defence strategies in the field of computational argumentation. We cast the problem as relation classification, where given a pair of reputation threat and reputation defence, we determine the reputation defence strategy. We annotate a dataset of parliamentary questions and answers with reputation defence strategies. We then propose a model based on supervised learning to address the detection of these strategies, and report promising experimental results.

Previous approaches to generic frame classification analyze frames at the document level. Here, we propose a supervised based approach based on deep neural networks and distributional representations for classifying frames at the sentence level in news articles. We conduct our experiments on the publicly available Media Frames Corpus compiled from the U.S. Newspapers. Using (B)LSTMs and GRU networks to represent the meaning of frames, we demonstrate that our approach yields at least 14-point improvement over several baseline methods.

We explore the idea of automatically crafting a tuning dataset for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) that makes the hyper-parameters of the SMT system more robust with respect to some specific deficiencies of the parameter tuning algorithms. This is an under-explored research direction, which can allow better parameter tuning. In this paper, we achieve this goal by selecting a subset of the available sentence pairs, which are more suitable for specific combinations of optimizers, objective functions, and evaluation measures. We demonstrate the potential of the idea with the pairwise ranking optimization (PRO) optimizer, which is known to yield too short translations. We show that the learning problem can be alleviated by tuning on a subset of the development set, selected based on sentence length. In particular, using the longest 50% of the tuning sentences, we achieve two-fold tuning speedup, and improvements in BLEU score that rival those of alternatives, which fix BLEU+1’s smoothing instead.

We address information credibility in community forums, in a setting in which the credibility of an answer posted in a question thread by a particular user has to be predicted. First, we motivate the problem and we create a publicly available annotated English corpus by crowdsourcing. Second, we propose a large set of features to predict the credibility of the answers. The features model the user, the answer, the question, the thread as a whole, and the interaction between them. Our experiments with ranking SVMs show that the credibility labels can be predicted with high performance according to several standard IR ranking metrics, thus supporting the potential usage of this layer of credibility information in practical applications. The features modeling the profile of the user (in particular trollness) turn out to be most important, but embedding features modeling the answer and the similarity between the question and the answer are also very relevant. Overall, half of the gap between the baseline performance and the perfect classifier can be covered using the proposed features.

The paper presents a deep factored machine translation (MT) system between English and Bulgarian languages in both directions. The MT system is hybrid. It consists of three main steps: (1) the source-language text is linguistically annotated, (2) it is translated to the target language with the Moses system, and (3) translation is post-processed with the help of the transferred linguistic annotation from the source text. Besides automatic evaluation we performed manual evaluation over a domain test suite of sentences demonstrating certain phenomena like imperatives, questions, etc.

The present paper describes the identification of prominent characters and their adjectives from Indian mythological epic, Mahabharata, written in English texts. However, in contrast to the tra-ditional approaches of named entity identifica-tion, the present system extracts hidden attributes associated with each of the characters (e.g., character adjectives). We observed distinct phrase level linguistic patterns that hint the pres-ence of characters in different text spans. Such six patterns were used in order to extract the cha-racters. On the other hand, a distinguishing set of novel features (e.g., multi-word expression, nodes and paths of parse tree, immediate ancestors etc.) was employed. Further, the correlation of the features is also measured in order to identify the important features. Finally, we applied various machine learning algorithms (e.g., Naive Bayes, KNN, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest etc.) along with deep learning to classify the patterns as characters or non-characters in order to achieve decent accuracy. Evaluation shows that phrase level linguistic patterns as well as the adopted features are highly active in capturing characters and their adjectives.

Gender identification in social networks is one of the most popular aspects of user profile learning. Traditionally it has been linked to author profiling, a difficult problem to solve because of the little difference in the use of language between genders. This situation has led to the need of taking into account other information apart from textual data, favoring the emergence of multimodal data. The aim of this paper is to apply neural networks to perform data fusion, using an existing multimodal corpus, the NUS-MSS data set, that (not only) contains text data, but also image and location information. We improved previous results in terms of macro accuracy (87.8%) obtaining the state-of-the-art performance of 91.3%.

In this article we present the result of the recent research in the recognition of genuine Polish suicide notes (SNs). We provide useful method to distinguish between SNs and other types of discourse, including counterfeited SNs. The method uses a wide range of word-based and semantic features and it was evaluated using Polish Corpus of Suicide Notes, which contains 1244 genuine SNs, expanded with manually prepared set of 334 counterfeited SNs and 2200 letter-like texts from the Internet. We utilized the algorithm to create the class-related sense dictionaries to improve the result of SNs classification. The obtained results show that there are fundamental differences between genuine SNs and counterfeited SNs. The applied method of the sense dictionary construction appeared to be the best way of improving the model.

In this paper, we introduce a cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) system with language independent features based upon Universal Dependencies. We propose two methods to convert SRL annotations from monolingual dependency trees into universal dependency trees. Our SRL system is based upon cross-lingual features derived from universal dependency trees and a supervised learning that utilizes a maximum entropy classifier. We design experiments to verify whether the Universal Dependencies are suitable for the cross-lingual SRL. The results are very promising and they open new interesting research paths for the future.

In recent years gaze data has been increasingly used to improve and evaluate NLP models due to the fact that it carries information about the cognitive processing of linguistic phenomena. In this paper we conduct a preliminary study towards the automatic identification of multiword expressions based on gaze features from native and non-native speakers of English. We report comparisons between a part-of-speech (POS) and frequency baseline to: i) a prediction model based solely on gaze data and ii) a combined model of gaze data, POS and frequency. In spite of the challenging nature of the task, best performance was achieved by the latter. Furthermore, we explore how the type of gaze data (from native versus non-native speakers) affects the prediction, showing that data from the two groups is discriminative to an equal degree for the task. Finally, we show that late processing measures are more predictive than early ones, which is in line with previous research on idioms and other formulaic structures.

Real-time summarization of news events (RTS) allows persons to stay up-to-date on important topics that develop over time. With the occurrence of major sub-events, media attention increases and a large number of news articles are published. We propose a summarization approach that detects such changes and selects a suitable summarization configuration at run-time. In particular, at times with high media attention, our approach exploits the redundancy in content to produce a more precise summary and avoid emitting redundant information. We find that our approach significantly outperforms a strong non-adaptive RTS baseline in terms of the emitted summary updates and achieves the best results on a recent web-scale dataset. It can successfully be applied to a different real-world dataset without requiring additional modifications.

In human language, an expression could be conveyed in many ways by different people. Even that the same person may express same sentence quite differently when addressing different audiences, using different modalities, or using different syntactic variations or may use different set of vocabulary. The possibility of such endless surface form of text while the meaning of the text remains almost same, poses many challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems like question-answering system, machine translation system and text summarization. This research paper is an endeavor to understand the characteristic of such endless semantic divergence. In this research work we develop a corpus of 1525 semantic divergent sentences for 200 English tweets.

Unknown words are a challenge for any NLP task, including sentiment analysis. Here, we evaluate the extent to which sentiment polarity of complex words can be predicted based on their morphological make-up. We do this on German as it has very productive processes of derivation and compounding and many German hapax words, which are likely to bear sentiment, are morphologically complex. We present results of supervised classification experiments on new datasets with morphological parses and polarity annotations.

In the paper, we introduce two software applications for automatic evaluation of coherence in Czech texts called EVALD – Evaluator of Discourse. The first one – EVALD 1.0 – evaluates texts written by native speakers of Czech on a five-step scale commonly used at Czech schools (grade 1 is the best, grade 5 is the worst). The second application is EVALD 1.0 for Foreigners assessing texts by non-native speakers of Czech using six-step scale (A1–C2) according to CEFR. Both appli-cations are available online at https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/evald-foreign/.

In our work we address limitations in the state-of-the-art in idiom type identification. We investigate different approaches for a lexical fixedness metric, a component of the state-of the-art model. We also show that our Machine Learning based approach to the idiom type identification task achieves an F1-score of 0.85, an improvement of 11 points over the state-of the-art.

Sentiment analysis is the computational task of extracting sentiment from a text document – for example whether it expresses a positive, negative or neutral opinion. Various approaches have been introduced in recent years, using a range of different techniques to extract sentiment information from a document. Measuring these methods against a gold standard dataset is a useful way to evaluate such systems. However, different sentiment analysis techniques represent sentiment values in different ways, such as discrete categorical classes or continuous numerical sentiment scores. This creates a challenge for evaluating and comparing such systems; in particular assessing numerical scores against datasets that use fixed classes is difficult, because the numerical outputs have to be mapped onto the ordered classes. This paper proposes a novel calibration technique that uses precision vs. recall curves to set class thresholds to optimize a continuous sentiment analyser’s performance against a discrete gold standard dataset. In experiments mapping a continuous score onto a three-class classification of movie reviews, we show that calibration results in a substantial increase in f-score when compared to a non-calibrated mapping.

We describe in this paper a hybrid ap-proach to build automatically bilingual lexicons of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) from parallel corpora. We more specifically investigate the impact of using a domain-specific bilingual lexicon of MWEs on domain adaptation of an Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) system. We conducted experiments on the English-French language pair and two kinds of texts: in-domain texts from Europarl (European Parliament proceedings) and out-of-domain texts from Emea (European Medicines Agency documents) and Ecb (European Central Bank corpus). The obtained results indicate that integrating domain-specific bilingual lexicons of MWEs improves translation quality of the EBMT system when texts to translate are related to the specific domain and induces a relatively slight deterioration of translation quality when translating general-purpose texts.

In this paper, we present a study for the identification of authors’ national variety of English in texts from social media. In data from Facebook and Twitter, information about the author’s social profile is annotated, and the national English variety (US, UK, AUS, CAN, NNS) that each author uses is attributed. We tested four feature types: formal linguistic features, POS features, lexicon-based features related to the different varieties, and data-based features from each English variety. We used various machine learning algorithms for the classification experiments, and we implemented a feature selection process. The classification accuracy achieved, when the 31 highest ranked features were used, was up to 77.32%. The experimental results are evaluated, and the efficacy of the ranked features discussed.

Word vectors with varying dimensionalities and produced by different algorithms have been extensively used in NLP. The corpora that the algorithms are trained on can contain either natural language text (e.g. Wikipedia or newswire articles) or artificially-generated pseudo corpora due to natural data sparseness. We exploit Lexical Chain based templates over Knowledge Graph for generating pseudo-corpora with controlled linguistic value. These corpora are then used for learning word embeddings. A number of experiments have been conducted over the following test sets: WordSim353 Similarity, WordSim353 Relatedness and SimLex-999. The results show that, on the one hand, the incorporation of many-relation lexical chains improves results, but on the other hand, unrestricted-length chains remain difficult to handle with respect to their huge quantity.

A common reason for errors in coreference resolution is the lack of semantic information to help determine the compatibility between mentions referring to the same entity. Distributed representations, which have been shown successful in encoding relatedness between words, could potentially be a good source of such knowledge. Moreover, being obtained in an unsupervised manner, they could help address data sparsity issues in labeled training data at a small cost. In this work we investigate whether and to what extend features derived from word embeddings can be successfully used for supervised coreference resolution. We experiment with several word embedding models, and several different types of embeddingbased features, including embedding cluster and cosine similarity-based features. Our evaluations show improvements in the performance of a supervised state-of-theart coreference system.

We introduce Flames Detector, an online system for measuring flames, i.e. strong negative feelings or emotions, insults or other verbal offences, in news commentaries across five languages. It is designed to assist journalists, public institutions or discussion moderators to detect news topics which evoke wrangles. We propose a machine learning approach to flames detection and calculate an aggregated score for a set of comment threads. The demo application shows the most flaming topics of the current period in several language variants. The search functionality gives a possibility to measure flames in any topic specified by a query. The evaluation shows that the flame detection in discussions is a difficult task, however, the application can already reveal interesting information about the actual news discussions.

We propose a novel metric for evaluating summary content coverage. The evaluation framework follows the Pyramid approach to measure how many summarization content units, considered important by human annotators, are contained in an automatic summary. Our approach automatizes the evaluation process, which does not need any manual intervention on the evaluated summary side. Our approach compares abstract meaning representations of each content unit mention and each summary sentence. We found that the proposed metric complements well the widely-used ROUGE metrics.

We work on detecting positive or negative sentiment towards named entities in very large volumes of news articles. The aim is to monitor changes over time, as well as to work towards media bias detection by com-paring differences across news sources and countries. With view to applying the same method to dozens of languages, we use lin-guistically light-weight methods: searching for positive and negative terms in bags of words around entity mentions (also consid-ering negation). Evaluation results are good and better than a third-party baseline sys-tem, but precision is not sufficiently high to display the results publicly in our multilin-gual news analysis system Europe Media Monitor (EMM). In this paper, we focus on describing our effort to improve the English language results by avoiding the biggest sources of errors. We also present new work on using a syntactic parser to identify safe opinion recognition rules, such as predica-tive structures in which sentiment words di-rectly refer to an entity. The precision of this method is good, but recall is very low.

In this paper, we investigate the application of text classification methods to predict the law area and the decision of cases judged by the French Supreme Court. We also investigate the influence of the time period in which a ruling was made over the textual form of the case description and the extent to which it is necessary to mask the judge’s motivation for a ruling to emulate a real-world test scenario. We report results of 96% f1 score in predicting a case ruling, 90% f1 score in predicting the law area of a case, and 75.9% f1 score in estimating the time span when a ruling has been issued using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained on lexical features.

We introduce a language-independent, graph-based probabilistic model of morphology, which uses transformation rules operating on whole words instead of the traditional morphological segmentation. The morphological analysis of a set of words is expressed through a graph having words as vertices and structural relationships between words as edges. We define a probability distribution over such graphs and develop a sampler based on the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The sampling is applied in order to determine the strength of morphological relationships between words, filter out accidental similarities and reduce the set of rules necessary to explain the data. The model is evaluated on the task of finding pairs of morphologically similar words, as well as generating new words. The results are compared to a state-of-the-art segmentation-based approach.

The sentiment analysis task has been traditionally divided into lexicon or machine learning approaches, but recently the use of word embeddings methods have emerged, that provide powerful algorithms to allow semantic understanding without the task of creating large amounts of annotated test data. One problem with this type of binary classification, is that the sentiment output will be in the form of ‘1’ (positive) or ‘0’ (negative) for the string of text in the tweet, regardless if there are one or more entities referred to in the text. This paper plans to enhance the word embeddings approach with the deployment of a sentiment lexicon-based technique to appoint a total score that indicates the polarity of opinion in relation to a particular entity or entities. This type of sentiment classification is a way of associating a given entity with the adjectives, adverbs, and verbs describing it, and extracting the associated sentiment to try and infer if the text is positive or negative in relation to the entity or entities.

We present a method for detecting word sense changes by utilizing automatically induced word senses. Our method works on the level of individual senses and allows a word to have e.g. one stable sense and then add a novel sense that later experiences change. Senses are grouped based on polysemy to find linguistic concepts and we can find broadening and narrowing as well as novel (polysemous and homonymic) senses. We evaluate on a testset, present recall and estimates of the time between expected and found change.

A huge body of continuously growing written knowledge is available on the web in the form of social media posts, RSS feeds, and news articles. Real-time information extraction from such high velocity, high volume text streams requires scalable, distributed natural language processing pipelines. We introduce such a system for fine-grained event recognition within the big data framework Flink, and demonstrate its capabilities for extracting and geo-locating mobility- and industry-related events from heterogeneous text sources. Performance analyses conducted on several large datasets show that our system achieves high throughput and maintains low latency, which is crucial when events need to be detected and acted upon in real-time. We also present promising experimental results for the event extraction component of our system, which recognizes a novel set of event types. The demo system is available at http://dfki.de/sd4m-sta-demo/.

Utilising effective features in machine learning-based natural language processing (NLP) is crucial in achieving good performance for a given NLP task. The paper describes a pilot study on the analysis of eye-tracking data during named entity (NE) annotation, aiming at obtaining insights into effective features for the NE recognition task. The eye gaze data were collected from 10 annotators and analysed regarding working time and fixation distribution. The results of the preliminary qualitative analysis showed that human annotators tend to look at broader contexts around the target NE than recent state-of-the-art automatic NE recognition systems and to use predicate argument relations to identify the NE categories.

Text comparison is an interesting though hard task, with many applications in Natural Language Processing. This work introduces a new text-similarity measure, which employs named-entities’ information extracted from the texts and the n-gram graphs’ model for representing documents. Using OpenCalais as a named-entity recognition service and the JINSECT toolkit for constructing and managing n-gram graphs, the text similarity measure is embedded in a text clustering algorithm (k-Means). The evaluation of the produced clusters with various clustering validity metrics shows that the extraction of named entities at a first step can be profitable for the time-performance of similarity measures that are based on the n-gram graph representation without affecting the overall performance of the NLP task.

In this paper we describe experiments with automated detection of metaphors in the Polish language. We focus our analysis on noun phrases composed of an adjective and a noun, and distinguish three types of expressions: with literal sense, with metaphorical sense, and expressions both literal and methaphorical (context-dependent). We propose a method of automatically recognizing expression type using word embeddings and neural networks. We evaluate multiple neural network architectures and demonstrate that the method significantly outperforms strong baselines.

In this article we present a system that extracts information from pathology reports. The reports are written in Norwegian and contain free text describing prostate biopsies. Currently, these reports are manually coded for research and statistical purposes by trained experts at the Cancer Registry of Norway where the coders extract values for a set of predefined fields that are specific for prostate cancer. The presented system is rule based and achieves an average F-score of 0.91 for the fields Gleason grade, Gleason score, the number of biopsies that contain tumor tissue, and the orientation of the biopsies. The system also identifies reports that contain ambiguity or other content that should be reviewed by an expert. The system shows potential to encode the reports considerably faster, with less resources, and similar high quality to the manual encoding.

We propose a neural reranking system for named entity recognition (NER), leverages recurrent neural network models to learn sentence-level patterns that involve named entity mentions. In particular, given an output sentence produced by a baseline NER model, we replace all entity mentions, such as Barack Obama, into their entity types, such as PER. The resulting sentence patterns contain direct output information, yet is less sparse without specific named entities. For example, “PER was born in LOC” can be such a pattern. LSTM and CNN structures are utilised for learning deep representations of such sentences for reranking. Results show that our system can significantly improve the NER accuracies over two different baselines, giving the best reported results on a standard benchmark.

The lack of large realistic datasets presents a bottleneck in online deception detection studies. In this paper, we apply a data collection method based on social network analysis to quickly identify high quality deceptive and truthful online reviews1 from Amazon. The dataset contains more than 10,000 deceptive reviews and is diverse in product domains and reviewers. Using this dataset, we explore effective general features for online deception detection that perform well across domains. We demonstrate that with generalized features – advertising speak and writing complexity scores – deception detection performance can be further improved by adding additional deceptive reviews from assorted domains in training. Finally, reviewer level evaluation gives an interesting insight into different deceptive reviewers’ writing styles.

Capabilities of detecting temporal and causal relations between two events can benefit many applications. Most of existing temporal relation classifiers were trained in a supervised manner. Instead, we explore the observation that regular event pairs show a consistent temporal relation despite of their various contexts and these rich contexts can be used to train a contextual temporal relation classifier, which can further recognize new temporal relation contexts and identify new regular event pairs. We focus on detecting after and before temporal relations and design a weakly supervised learning approach that extracts thousands of regular event pairs and learns a contextual temporal relation classifier simultaneously. Evaluation shows that the acquired regular event pairs are of high quality and contain rich commonsense knowledge and domain specific knowledge. In addition, the weakly supervised trained temporal relation classifier achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised systems.

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an important task in lexical simplification and text accessibility. Due to the lack of CWI datasets, previous works largely depend on Simple English Wikipedia and edit histories for obtaining ‘gold standard’ annotations, which are of doubtable quality, and limited only to English. We collect complex words/phrases (CP) for English, German and Spanish, annotated by both native and non-native speakers, and propose language independent features that can be used to train multilingual and cross-lingual CWI models. We show that the performance of cross-lingual CWI systems (using a model trained on one language and applying it on the other languages) is comparable to the performance of monolingual CWI systems.

Recent attempts at behaviour understanding through language grounding have shown that it is possible to automatically generate models for planning problems from textual instructions. One drawback of these approaches is that they either do not make use of the semantic structure behind the model elements identified in the text, or they manually incorporate a collection of concepts with semantic relationships between them. We call this collection of knowledge situation model. The situation model introduces additional context information to the model. It could also potentially reduce the complexity of the planning problem compared to models that do not use situation models. To address this problem, we propose an approach that automatically generates the situation model from textual instructions. The approach is able to identify various hierarchical, spatial, directional, and causal relations. We use the situation model to automatically generate planning problems in a PDDL notation and we show that the situation model reduces the complexity of the PDDL model in terms of number of operators and branching factor compared to planning models that do not make use of situation models.

Different approaches for behaviour understanding rely on textual instructions to generate models of human behaviour. These approaches usually use state of the art parsers to obtain the part of speech (POS) meaning and dependencies of the words in the instructions. For them it is essential that the parser is able to correctly annotate the instructions and especially the verbs as they describe the actions of the person. State of the art parsers usually make errors when annotating textual instructions, as they have short sentence structure often in imperative form. The inability of the parser to identify the verbs results in the inability of behaviour understanding systems to identify the relevant actions. To address this problem, we propose a simple rule-based model that attempts to correct any incorrectly annotated verbs. We argue that the model is able to significantly improve the parser’s performance without the need of additional training data. We evaluate our approach by extracting the actions from 61 textual instructions annotated only with the Stanford parser and once again after applying our model. The results show a significant improvement in the recognition rate when applying the rules (75% accuracy compared to 68% without the rules, p-value < 0.001).

This study presents SMILLE, a system that draws on the Noticing Hypothesis and on input enhancements, addressing the lack of salience of grammatical infor mation in online documents chosen by a given user. By means of input enhancements, the system can draw the user’s attention to grammar, which could possibly lead to a higher intake per input ratio for metalinguistic information. The system receives as input an online document and submits it to a combined processing of parser and hand-written rules for detecting its grammatical structures. The input text can be freely chosen by the user, providing a more engaging experience and reflecting the user’s interests. The system can enhance a total of 107 fine-grained types of grammatical structures that are based on the CEFR. An evaluation of some of those structures resulted in an overall precision of 87%.