Measuring readability of a text is the first sensible step to its simplification. In this paper we present an overview of the most common approaches to automatic measuring of readability. Of the described ones, we implemented and evaluated: Gunning FOG index, Flesch-based Pisarek method. We also present two other approaches. The first one is based on measuring distributional lexical similarity of a target text and comparing it to reference texts. In the second one, we propose a novel method for automation of Taylor test ― which, in its base form, requires performing a large amount of surveys. The automation of Taylor test is performed using a technique called statistical language modelling. We have developed a free on-line web-based system and constructed plugins for the most common text editors, namely Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org. Inner workings of the system are described in detail. Finally, extensive evaluations are performed for Polish ― a Slavic, highly inflected language. We show that Pisarek’s method is highly correlated to Gunning FOG Index, even if different in form, and that both the similarity-based approach and automated Taylor test achieve high accuracy. Merits of using either of them are discussed.

The aim of this paper is to present a system for semantic text annotation called Inforex. Inforex is a web-based system designed for managing and annotating text corpora on the semantic level including annotation of Named Entities (NE), anaphora, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and relations between named entities. The system also supports manual text clean-up and automatic text pre-processing including text segmentation, morphosyntactic analysis and word selection for word sense annotation. Inforex can be accessed from any standard-compliant web browser supporting JavaScript. The user interface has a form of dynamic HTML pages using the AJAX technology. The server part of the system is written in PHP and the data is stored in MySQL database. The system make use of some external tools that are installed on the server or can be accessed via web services. The documents are stored in the database in the original format ― either plain text, XML or HTML. Tokenization and sentence segmentation is optional and is stored in a separate table. Tokens are stored as pairs of values representing indexes of first and last character of the tokens and sets of features representing the morpho-syntactic information.

Building a wordnet is a serious undertaking. Fortunately, Language Technology (LT) can improve the process of wordnet construction both in terms of quality and cost. In this paper we present LT tools used during the construction of plWordNet and their influence on the lexicographer's work-flow. LT is employed in plWordNet development on every possible step: from data gathering through data analysis to data presentation. Nevertheless, every decision requires input from the lexicographer, but the quality of supporting tools is an important factor. Thus a limited evaluation of usefulness of employed tools is carried out on the basis of questionnaires.

This paper presents our efforts aimed at collecting and annotating a free Polish corpus. The corpus will serve for us as training and testing material for experiments with Machine Learning algorithms. As others may also benefit from the resource, we are going to release it under a Creative Commons licence, which is hoped to remove unnecessary usage restrictions, but also to facilitate reproduction of our experimental results. The corpus is being annotated with various types of linguistic entities: chunks and named entities, selected syntactic and semantic relations, word senses and anaphora. We report on the current state of the project as well as our ultimate goals.

We present an approach to the description of Polish Multi-word Expressions (MWEs) which is based on expressions in the WCCL language of morpho-syntactic constraints instead of grammar rules or transducers. For each MWE its basic morphological form and the base forms of its constituents are specified but also each MWE is assigned to a class on the basis of its syntactic structure. For each class a WCCL constraint is defined which is parametrised by string variables referring to MWE constituent base forms or inflected forms. The constraint specifies a minimal set of conditions that must be fulfilled in order to recognise an occurrence of the given MWE in text with high accuracy. Our formalism is focused on the efficient description of large MWE lexicons for the needs of utilisation in text processing. The formalism allows for the relatively easy representation of flexible word order and discontinuous constructions. Moreover, there is no necessity for the full specification of the MWE grammatical structure. Only some aspects of the particular MWE structure can be selected in way facilitating the target accuracy of recognition. On the basis of a set of simple heuristics, WCCL-based representation of MWEs can be automatically generated from a list of MWE base forms. The proposed representation was applied on a practical scale for the description of a large set of Polish MWEs included in plWordNet.

A limited prototype of the CLARIN Language Technology Infrastructure (LTI) node is presented. The node prototype provides several types of web services for Polish. The functionality encompasses morpho-syntactic processing, shallow semantic processing of corpus on the basis of the SuperMatrix system and plWordNet browsing. We take the prototype as the starting point for the discussion on requirements that must be fulfilled by the LTI. Some possible solutions are proposed for less frequently discussed problems, e.g. streaming processing of language data on the remote processing node. We experimentally investigate how to tackle with several requirements from many discussed. Such aspects as processing large volumes of data, asynchronous mode of processing and scalability of the architecture to large number of users got especial attention in the constructed prototype of the Web Service for morpho-syntactic processing of Polish called TaKIPI-WS (http://plwordnet.pwr.wroc.pl/clarin/ws/takipi/). TaKIPI-WS is a distributed system with a three-layer architecture, an asynchronous model of request handling and multi-agent-based processing. TaKIPI-WS consists of three layers: WS Interface, Database and Daemons. The role of the Database is to store and exchange data between the Interface and the Daemons. The Daemons (i.e. taggers) are responsible for executing the requests queued in the database. Results of the performance tests are presented in the paper, too.

The construction of a wordnet, a labour-intensive enterprise, can be significantly assisted by automatic grouping of lexical material and discovery of lexical semantic relations. The objective is to ensure high quality of automatically acquired results before they are presented for lexicographers’ approval. We discuss a software tool that suggests synset members using a measure of semantic relatedness with a given verb or adjective; this extends previous work on nominal synsets in Polish WordNet. Syntactically-motivated constraints are deployed on a large morphologically annotated corpus of Polish. Evaluation has been performed via the WordNet-Based Similarity Test and additionally supported by human raters. A lexicographer also manually assessed a suitable sample of suggestions. The results compare favourably with other known methods of acquiring semantic relations.