Parliamentary debates offer a window on political stances as well as a repository of linguistic and semantic knowledge. They provide insights and reasons for laws and regulations that impact electors in their everyday life. One such resource is the transcribed debates available online from the Assemblée Nationale du Québec (ANQ). This paper describes the effort to convert the online ANQ debates from various HTML formats into a standardized ParlaMint TEI annotated corpus and to enrich it with annotations extracted from related unstructured members and political parties list. The resulting resource includes 88 years of debates over a span of 114 years with more than 33.3 billion words. The addition of linguistic annotations is detailed as well as a quantitative analysis of part-of-speech tags and distribution of utterances across the corpus.

We propose a multilingual method for the extraction of biased sentences from Wikipedia, and use it to create corpora in Bulgarian, French and English. Sifting through the revision history of the articles that at some point had been considered biased and later corrected, we retrieve the last tagged and the first untagged revisions as the before/after snapshots of what was deemed a violation of Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy. We extract the sentences that were removed or rewritten in that edit. The approach yields sufficient data even in the case of relatively small Wikipedias, such as the Bulgarian one, where 62k articles produced 5k biased sentences. We evaluate our method by manually annotating 520 sentences for Bulgarian and French, and 744 for English. We assess the level of noise and analyze its sources. Finally, we exploit the data with well-known classification methods to detect biased sentences. Code and datasets are hosted at https://github.com/crim-ca/wiki-bias.

While high quality gold standard annotated corpora are crucial for most tasks in natural language processing, many annotated corpora published in recent years, created by annotators or tools, contains noisy annotations. These corpora can be viewed as more silver than gold standards, even if they are used in evaluation campaigns or to compare systems’ performances. As upgrading a silver corpus to gold level is still a challenge, we explore the application of active learning techniques to detect errors using four datasets designed for document classification and part-of-speech tagging. Our results show that the proposed method for the seeding step improves the chance of finding incorrect annotations by a factor of 2.73 when compared to random selection, a 14.71% increase from the baseline methods. Our query method provides an increase in the error detection precision on average by a factor of 1.78 against random selection, an increase of 61.82% compared to other query approaches.

This article presents a domain-driven algorithm for the task of term sense disambiguation (TSD). TSD aims at automatically choosing which term record from a term bank best represents the meaning of a term occurring in a particular context. In a translation environment, finding the contextually appropriate term record is necessary to access the proper equivalent to be used in the target language text. The term bank TERMIUM Plus, recently published as an open access repository, is chosen as a domain-rich resource for testing our TSD algorithm, using English and French as source and target languages. We devise an experiment using over 1300 English terms found in scientific articles, and show that our domain-driven TSD algorithm is able to bring the best term record, and therefore the best French equivalent, at the average rank of 1.69 compared to a baseline random rank of 3.51.

This research provides a comparison of a linked open data resource (DBpedia) and web corpus data resources (Google Web Ngrams and Google Books Ngrams) for noun compound bracketing. Large corpus statistical analysis has often been used for noun compound bracketing, and our goal is to introduce a linked open data (LOD) resource for such task. We show its particularities and its performance on the task. Results obtained on resources tested individually are promising, showing a potential for DBpedia to be included in future hybrid systems.