In this paper we present a series of experiments towards POS tagging Corsican, a less-resourced language spoken in Corsica and linguistically related to Italian. The first contribution is Corsican-POS, the first gold standard POS-tagged corpus for Corsica, composed of 500 sentences manually annotated with the Universal POS tagset. Our second contribution is a set of experiments and evaluation of POS tagging models which starts with a baseline model for Italian and is aimed at finding the best training configuration, namely in terms of the size and combination strategy of the existing raw and annotated resources. These experiments result in (i) the first POS tagger for Corsican, reaching an accuracy of 93.38%, (ii) a quantification of the gain provided by the use of each available resource. We find that the optimal configuration uses Italian word embeddings further specialized with Corsican embeddings and trained on the largest gold corpus for Corsican available so far.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an applicative task for which annotation schemes vary. To compare the performance of systems which tagsets differ in precision and coverage, it is necessary to assess (i) the comparability of their annotation schemes and (ii) the individual adequacy of the latter to a common annotation scheme. What is more, and given the lack of robustness of some tools towards textual variation, we cannot expect an evaluation led on an homogeneous corpus with low-coverage to provide a reliable prediction of the actual tools performance. To tackle both these limitations in evaluation, we provide a gold corpus for French covering 6 textual genres and annotated with a rich tagset that enables comparison with multiple annotation schemes. We use the flexibility of this gold corpus to provide both: (i) an individual evaluation of four heterogeneous NER systems on their target tagsets, (ii) a comparison of their performance on a common scheme. This rich evaluation framework enables a fair comparison of NER systems across textual genres and annotation schemes.

Nous présentons ici FENEC (FrEnch Named-entity Evaluation Corpus), un corpus à échantillons équilibrés contenant six genres, annoté en entités nommées selon le schéma fin Quæro. Les caractéristiques de ce corpus nous permettent d’évaluer et de comparer trois outils d’annotation automatique — un à base de règles et deux à base de réseaux de neurones — en jouant sur trois dimensions : la finesse du jeu d’étiquettes, le genre des corpus, et les métriques d’évaluation.

Nous présentons dans cet article notre contribution aux 3 tâches de la campagne d’évaluation du défi Fouille de Texte 2021. Dans la tâche d’identification de de profil clinique (tâche 1) nous présentons une méthode de recherche d’information basé sur un index dérivé du MeSH. Pour la tâche de notation automatique à partir d’une correction (tâche 2), nous avons expérimenté une méthode de similarité de vecteurs de chaînes de caractères. Pour la tâche de notation à partir de copies déjà notées (tâche 3) nous avons entraîné un réseau de neurones LSTM.

We introduce in this paper a generic approach to combine implicit crowdsourcing and language learning in order to mass-produce language resources (LRs) for any language for which a crowd of language learners can be involved. We present the approach by explaining its core paradigm that consists in pairing specific types of LRs with specific exercises, by detailing both its strengths and challenges, and by discussing how much these challenges have been addressed at present. Accordingly, we also report on on-going proof-of-concept efforts aiming at developing the first prototypical implementation of the approach in order to correct and extend an LR called ConceptNet based on the input crowdsourced from language learners. We then present an international network called the European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques (enetCollect) that provides the context to accelerate the implementation of this generic approach. Finally, we exemplify how it can be used in several language learning scenarios to produce a multitude of NLP resources and how it can therefore alleviate the long-standing NLP issue of the lack of LRs.

Text corpora represent the foundation on which most natural language processing systems rely. However, for many languages, collecting or building a text corpus of a sufficient size still remains a complex issue, especially for corpora that are accessible and distributed under a clear license allowing modification (such as annotation) and further resharing. In this paper, we review the sources of text corpora usually called upon to fill the gap in low-resource contexts, and how crowdsourcing has been used to build linguistic resources. Then, we present our own experiments with crowdsourcing text corpora and an analysis of the obstacles we encountered. Although the results obtained in terms of participation are still unsatisfactory, we advocate that the effort towards a greater involvement of the speakers should be pursued, especially when the language of interest is newly written.

Nous présentons ici les résultats d’un travail de réplication et d’extension pour l’alsacien d’une expérience concernant l’étiquetage en parties du discours de langues peu dotées par spécialisation des plongements lexicaux (Magistry et al., 2018). Ce travail a été réalisé en étroite collaboration avec les auteurs de l’article d’origine. Cette interaction riche nous a permis de mettre au jour les éléments manquants dans la présentation de l’expérience, de les compléter, et d’étendre la recherche à la robustesse à la variation.

Building representative linguistic resources and NLP tools for non-standardized languages is challenging: when spelling is not determined by a norm, multiple written forms can be encountered for a given word, inducing a large proportion of out-of-vocabulary words. To embrace this diversity, we propose a methodology based on crowdsourced alternative spellings we use to extract rules applied to match OOV words with one of their spelling variants. This virtuous process enables the unsupervised augmentation of multi-variant lexicons without expert rule definition. We apply this multilingual methodology on Alsatian, a French regional language and provide an intrinsic evaluation of the correctness of the variants pairs, and an extrinsic evaluation on a downstream task. We show that in a low-resource scenario, 145 inital pairs can lead to the generation of 876 additional variant pairs, and a diminution of OOV words improving the part-of-speech tagging performance by 1 to 4%.

Nous présentons ici les résultats d’une expérience menée sur l’annotation en parties du discours d’un corpus d’une langue régionale encore peu dotée, l’alsacien, via une plateforme de myriadisation (crowdsourcing) bénévole développée spécifiquement à cette fin : Bisame1 . La plateforme, mise en ligne en mai 2016, nous a permis de recueillir 15 846 annotations grâce à 42 participants. L’évaluation des annotations, réalisée sur un corpus de référence, montre que la F-mesure des annotations volontaires est de 0, 93. Le tagger entraîné sur le corpus annoté atteint lui 82 % d’exactitude. Il s’agit du premier tagger spécifique à l’alsacien. Cette méthode de développement de ressources langagières est donc efficace et prometteuse pour certaines langues peu dotées, dont un nombre suffisant de locuteurs est connecté et actif sur le Web. Le code de la plateforme, le corpus annoté et le tagger sont librement disponibles.