The Swedish bicameral parliament data presents a valuable textual resource that is of interest for many researches and scholars. The parliamentary texts offer many avenues for research including the study of how various affairs were run by governments over time. The Parliament proceedings are available in textual format, but in their original form, they are noisy and unstructured and thus hard to explore and investigate. In this paper, we report the transformation of the raw bicameral parliament data (1867-1970) into a structured lexical resource annotated with various word and document level attributes. The annotated data is then made searchable through two modern corpus infrastructure components which provide a wide array of corpus exploration, visualization, and comparison options. To demonstrate the practical utility of this resource, we present a case study examining the transformation of the concept of ‘market’ over time from a tangible physical entity to an abstract idea.

We present the DURel tool implementing the annotation of semantic proximity between word uses into an online, open source interface. The tool supports standardized human annotation as well as computational annotation, building on recent advances with Word-in-Context models. Annotator judgments are clustered with automatic graph clustering techniques and visualized for analysis. This allows to measure word senses with simple and intuitive micro-task judgments between use pairs, requiring minimal preparation efforts. The tool offers additional functionalities to compare the agreement between annotators to guarantee the inter-subjectivity of the obtained judgments and to calculate summary statistics over the annotated data giving insights into sense frequency distributions, semantic variation or changes of senses over time.

Post processing is the most conventional approach for correcting errors that are caused by Optical Character Recognition(OCR) systems. Two steps are usually taken to correct OCR errors: detection and corrections. For the first task, supervised machine learning methods have shown state-of-the-art performances. Previously proposed approaches have focused most prominently on combining lexical, contextual and statistical features for detecting errors. In this study, we report a novel system to error detection which is based merely on the n-gram counts of a candidate token. In addition to being simple and computationally less expensive, our proposed system beats previous systems reported in the ICDAR2019 competition on OCR-error detection with notable margins. We achieved state-of-the-art F1-scores for eight out of the ten involved European languages. The maximum improvement is for Spanish which improved from 0.69 to 0.90, and the minimum for Polish from 0.82 to 0.84.

FrameNet is a lexical semantic resource based on the linguistic theory of frame semantics. A number of framenet development strategies have been reported previously and all of them involve exploration of corpora and a fair amount of manual work. Despite previous efforts, there does not exist a well-thought-out automatic/semi-automatic methodology for frame construction. In this paper we propose a data-driven methodology for identification and semi-automatic construction of frames. As a proof of concept, we report on our initial attempts to build a wider-scale framenet for the legal domain (LawFN) using the proposed methodology. The constructed frames are stored in a lexical database and together with the annotated example sentences they have been made available through a web interface.

Linguistic typology is an area of linguistics concerned with analysis of and comparison between natural languages of the world based on their certain linguistic features. For that purpose, historically, the area has relied on manual extraction of linguistic feature values from textural descriptions of languages. This makes it a laborious and time expensive task and is also bound by human brain capacity. In this study, we present a deep learning system for the task of automatic extraction of linguistic features from textual descriptions of natural languages. First, textual descriptions are manually annotated with special structures called semantic frames. Those annotations are learned by a recurrent neural network, which is then used to annotate un-annotated text. Finally, the annotations are converted to linguistic feature values using a separate rule based module. Word embeddings, learned from general purpose text, are used as a major source of knowledge by the recurrent neural network. We compare the proposed deep learning system to a previously reported machine learning based system for the same task, and the deep learning system wins in terms of F1 scores with a fair margin. Such a system is expected to be a useful contribution for the automatic curation of typological databases, which otherwise are manually developed.

Language catalogues and typological databases are two important types of resources containing different types of knowledge about the world’s natural languages. The former provide metadata such as number of speakers, location (in prose descriptions and/or GPS coordinates), language code, literacy, etc., while the latter contain information about a set of structural and functional attributes of languages. Given that both types of resources are developed and later maintained manually, there are practical limits as to the number of languages and the number of features that can be surveyed. We introduce the concept of a language profile, which is intended to be a structured representation of various types of knowledge about a natural language extracted semi-automatically from descriptive documents and stored at a central location. It has three major parts: (1) an introductory; (2) an attributive; and (3) a reference part, each containing different types of knowledge about a given natural language. As a case study, we develop and present a language profile of an example language. At this stage, a language profile is an independent entity, but in the future it is envisioned to become part of a network of language profiles connected to each other via various types of relations. Such a representation is expected to be suitable both for humans and machines to read and process for further deeper linguistic analyses and/or comparisons.

There exist as many as 7000 natural languages in the world, and a huge number of documents describing those languages have been produced over the years. Most of those documents are in paper format. Any attempts to use modern computational techniques and tools to process those documents will require them to be digitized first. In this paper, we report a multilingual digitized version of thousands of such documents searchable through some well-established corpus infrastructures. The corpus is annotated with various meta, word, and text level attributes to make searching and analysis easier and more useful.

We describe a novel system for automatic extraction of typological linguistic information from descriptive grammars of natural languages, applying the theory of frame semantics in the form of frame-semantic parsing. The current proof-of-concept system covers a few selected linguistic features, but the methodology is general and can be extended not only to other typological features but also to descriptive grammars written in languages other than English. Such a system is expected to be a useful assistance for automatic curation of typological databases which otherwise are built manually, a very labor and time consuming as well as cognitively taxing enterprise.

Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meanings, and is considered to be a useful framework for shallow semantic analysis of natural language. FrameNet, which is based on frame semantics, is a popular lexical semantic resource. In addition to providing a set of core semantic frames and their frame elements, FrameNet also provides relations between those frames (hence providing a network of frames i.e. FrameNet). We address here the limited coverage of the network of conceptual relations between frames in FrameNet, which has previously been pointed out by others. We present a supervised model using rich features from three different sources: structural features from the existing FrameNet network, information from the WordNet relations between synsets projected into semantic frames, and corpus-collected lexical associations. We show large improvements over baselines consisting of each of the three groups of features in isolation. We then use this model to select frame pairs as candidate relations, and perform evaluation on a sample with good precision.

In this paper, we describe a multilingual open-source computational grammar of Persian, developed in Grammatical Framework (GF) ― A type-theoretical grammar formalism. We discuss in detail the structure of different syntactic (i.e. noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectival phrases, etc.) categories of Persian. First, we show how to structure and construct these categories individually. Then we describe how they are glued together to make well-formed sentences in Persian, while maintaining the grammatical features such as agreement, word order, etc. We also show how some of the distinctive features of Persian, such as the ezafe construction, are implemented in GF. In order to evaluate the grammar's correctness, and to demonstrate its usefulness, we have added support for Persian in a multilingual application grammar (the Tourist Phrasebook) using the reported resource grammar.