Yiddish is one of the national minority languages of Sweden, and one of the languages for which the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore is responsible for developing useful language resources. We here describe the web-based version of a Swedish-Yiddish/Yiddish-Swedish dictionary. The single search field of the web-based dictionary is used for incrementally searching all three components of the dictionary entries (the word in Swedish, the word in Yiddish with Hebrew characters and the transliteration in Latin script). When the user accesses the dictionary in an online mode, the dictionary is saved in the web browser, which makes it possible to also use the dictionary offline.

Rikstermbanken (Sweden’s National Term Bank), which was launched in 2009, uses the Nordic Terminological Record Format (NTRF) for organising its terminological data. Since then, new terminology formats have been established as standards, e.g., the Termbase eXchange format (TBX). We here describe work carried out by the Institute for Language and Folklore within the Federated eTranslation TermBank Network Action. This network develops a technical infrastructure for facilitating sharing of terminology resources throughout Europe. To be able to share some of the term collections of Rikstermbanken within this network and export them to Eurotermbank, we have implemented a conversion from the Nordic Terminological Record Format, as used in Rikstermbanken, to the TBX format.

We here describe line-a-line, a web-based tool for manual annotation of word-alignments in sentence-aligned parallel corpora. The graphical user interface, which builds on a design template from the Jigsaw system for investigative analysis, displays the words from each sentence pair that is to be annotated as elements in two vertical lists. An alignment between two words is annotated by drag-and-drop, i.e. by dragging an element from the left-hand list and dropping it on an element in the right-hand list. The tool indicates that two words are aligned by lines that connect them and by highlighting associated words when the mouse is hovered over them. Line-a-line uses the efmaral library for producing pre-annotated alignments, on which the user can base the manual annotation. The tool is mainly planned to be used on moderately under-resourced languages, for which resources in the form of parallel corpora are scarce. The automatic word-alignment functionality therefore also incorporates information derived from non-parallel resources, in the form of pre-trained multilingual word embeddings from the MUSE library.

Persuasion is rarely achieved through a loose set of arguments alone. Rather, an effective delivery of arguments follows a rhetorical strategy, combining logical reasoning with appeals to ethics and emotion. We argue that such a strategy means to select, arrange, and phrase a set of argumentative discourse units. In this paper, we model rhetorical strategies for the computational synthesis of effective argumentation. In a study, we let 26 experts synthesize argumentative texts with different strategies for 10 topics. We find that the experts agree in the selection significantly more when following the same strategy. While the texts notably vary for different strategies, especially their arrangement remains stable. The results suggest that our model enables a strategical synthesis.

We present an extension of an annotated corpus of short argumentative texts that had originally been built in a controlled text production experiment. Our extension more than doubles the size of the corpus by means of crowdsourcing. We report on the setup of this experiment and on the consequences that crowdsourcing had for assembling the data, and in particular for annotation. We labeled the argumentative structure by marking claims, premises, and relations between them, following the scheme used in the original corpus, but had to make a few modifications in response to interesting phenomena in the data. Finally, we report on an experiment with the automatic prediction of this argumentation structure: We first replicated the approach of an earlier study on the original corpus, and compare the performance to various settings involving the extension.

The occurrence of stance-taking towards vaccination was measured in documents extracted by topic modelling from two different corpora, one discussion forum corpus and one tweet corpus. For some of the topics extracted, their most closely associated documents contained a proportion of vaccine stance-taking texts that exceeded the corpus average by a large margin. These extracted document sets would, therefore, form a useful resource in a process for computer-assisted analysis of argumentation on the subject of vaccination.

A classifier for automatic detection of stance towards vaccination in online forums was trained and evaluated. Debate posts from six discussion threads on the British parental website Mumsnet were manually annotated for stance ‘against’ or ‘for’ vaccination, or as ‘undecided’. A support vector machine, trained to detect the three classes, achieved a macro F-score of 0.44, while a macro F-score of 0.62 was obtained by the same type of classifier on the binary classification task of distinguishing stance ‘against’ vaccination from stance ‘for’ vaccination. These results show that vaccine stance detection in online forums is a difficult task, at least for the type of model investigated and for the relatively small training corpus that was used. Future work will therefore include an expansion of the training data and an evaluation of other types of classifiers and features.

Automatic detection of five language components, which are all relevant for expressing opinions and for stance taking, was studied: positive sentiment, negative sentiment, speculation, contrast and condition. A resource-aware approach was taken, which included manual annotation of 500 training samples and the use of limited lexical resources. Active learning was compared to random selection of training data, as well as to a lexicon-based method. Active learning was successful for the categories speculation, contrast and condition, but not for the two sentiment categories, for which results achieved when using active learning were similar to those achieved when applying a random selection of training data. This difference is likely due to a larger variation in how sentiment is expressed than in how speakers express the other three categories. This larger variation was also shown by the lower recall results achieved by the lexicon-based approach for sentiment than for the categories speculation, contrast and condition.

Named entity recognition of the clinical entities disorders, findings and body structures is needed for information extraction from unstructured text in health records. Clinical notes from a Swedish emergency unit were annotated and used for evaluating a rule- and terminology-based entity recognition system. This system used different preprocessing techniques for matching terms to SNOMED CT, and, one by one, four other terminologies were added. For the class body structure, the results improved with preprocessing, whereas only small improvements were shown for the classes disorder and finding. The best average results were achieved when all terminologies were used together. The entity body structure was recognised with a precision of 0.74 and a recall of 0.80, whereas lower results were achieved for disorder (precision: 0.75, recall: 0.55) and for finding (precision: 0.57, recall: 0.30). The proportion of entities containing abbreviations were higher for false negatives than for correctly recognised entities, and no entities containing more than two tokens were recognised by the system. Low recall for disorders and findings shows both that additional methods are needed for entity recognition and that there are many expressions in clinical text that are not included in SNOMED CT.