This is the first Lexical Knowledge Base [...]]]> Machines need computing tools that are more powerful than conventional dictionaries for tasks like information extraction, disambiguation of word meanings, etc. This is in fact the function of the Euskal WordNet application —developed by the IXA Group (UPV/EHU)— which can already be consulted and downloaded free of charge.

This is the first Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) developed for the Basque language: a “semantic dictionary” or “store” that compiles and organises lexical and semantic information. “It’s like a database, but the difference is that it not only gathers the usual information of a dictionary —the meanings of words and their corresponding definitions and examples—, it also links the concepts with each other,” pointed out Eneko Agirre, an IXA Group computer programmer.

If we look up the entry hatz (“finger”, “digit” or “toe” in Basque), the result is as follows: “Each of the five appendages at the end of human hands and feet.” That is what the term means. But apart from this information, we can get much more: the finger/toe is an appendage of the body; the thumb is a finger; fingers are part of the hand; hands, in turn, are part of the arm and fingers are used to touch objects, etc. In short: all the concepts are interrelated hierarchically. Every concept is also related to its equivalents in other languages: digit, hatz, dedo, dixito and dit.

Consulting the word hatz in Basque WordNet.

This database is tremendously useful in various fields, like machine translation, information extraction, disambiguation of word meanings and for question-answer systems. In machine translation, for example, the system has to understand which word it is translating, a task for which it needs a “semantic dictionary” of this type. “For a quality translation, it is necessary to be able to distinguish the most appropriate meaning from among the various ones,” stressed Agirre.

“Our aim (within the framework of QTLeap European project) is to improve the quality of machine translations by using WordNet,” he pointed out.

Over the 2014-2015 academic year, the university Master’s degree in Language Analysis and Processing (LAP) that the IXA Group will be running at the UPV/EHU will be studying the Basque WordNet and other language technologies used to develop similar applications.

Master’s in Language Analysis and Processing (LAP)

The aim of the University Master’s in Language Analysis and Processing is to analyse language and to learn about the techniques and applications available for processing it with the help of the computer.

This Master’s has been organised by the UPV/EHU’s IXA Group and is geared towards anybody who combines linguistics and computing: philologists and linguistics experts, computing and telecommunications engineers, mathematicians, translators, etc. To apply for it, it is enough to be in possession of a University degree, have some experience and display some interest in the subject.

The Master’s will take one year and a half and the classes will be held at the Computing Faculty of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country. It will be possible to spread it over two or three academic years (to cater for professionals who are working).

The pre-registration period is already open, and applications will be accepted until June 30. For further information on the Master’s, please check out http://ixa.si.ehu.es/master/.

The Basque language academy, Euskaltzaindia, launched in 2008 the Lexikoaren Behatokia project (“The Lexicon Observatory”), led by Andoni Sagarna. The objective of the project was [...]]]> Topics : The Lexikoaren Behatokia project (X. Artola) + Enriching EDBL with Hiztegi Batua (Gorka Labaka – Xabier Artola)
Speakers: Xabier Artola and Gorka Labaka
Day: December 11th 2013, Wednesday

The Basque language academy, Euskaltzaindia, launched in 2008 the Lexikoaren Behatokia project (“The Lexicon Observatory”), led by Andoni Sagarna. The objective of the project was to create a labelled and linguistically annotated corpus for research. In order to carry out the corpus, it was expected to use a variety of sources, mostly media, especially general interest ones. In late 2012, the corpus consisted of 26,565,924 words, and has been expanded year after year. Euskaltzaindia, the IXA research group, the Elhuyar foundation and UZEI collaborate on the project.

The Lexikoaren Behatokia corpus is available here.

On the other hand, the latest version of the prescriptive dictionary Hiztegi Batua has provided new entries for the Basque lexical database EDBL. This enriching process was explained in the seminar.

Three members of the IXA Group (Manex Agirrezabal, Bertol Arrieta and Iñaki Alegria), in collaboration with the Association of Friends of Bertsolaritza (AFB, Bertsozale Elkartea) have developed a new product named Arbel digitala to train verse-makers, including language technology tools and verse-making. This new product was presented last January in the Koldo Mitxelena Library [...]]]>

Three members of the IXA Group (Manex Agirrezabal, Bertol Arrieta and Iñaki Alegria), in collaboration with the Association of Friends of Bertsolaritza (AFB, Bertsozale Elkartea) have developed a new product named Arbel digitala to train verse-makers, including language technology tools and verse-making. This new product was presented last January in the Koldo Mitxelena Library by Manex, Bertol, and the members of the AFB Aritz Zerain and Ixiar Eizagirre.

The tool has different capabilities:

• different stanzas and melodies accessible from a database,
• rhyme and synonym search engine,
• syllable counter…

This application is more powerful than Bertsolarixa, a previous system created some years ago.  These capabilities were also used some months ago when they created a robot verse-maker.

If you want to know more about the Arbel digitala tool, you can go directly with this link. Try it, and maybe, you’ll write an incredible verse with this artificial inspiration!

This new in several media: Berria, bertso-eskolak.com, Diario Vasco, Hamaika TV…

Speakers: Hugo Quispe and Richard Castro (Universidad UNSAAC of Cusco, Peru), ………………Olatz Arregi, Xabier Artola eta Kepa Sarasola (Ixa Group) Title: Primera aproximación al procesamiento automático del Quechua ………(First steps towards Quechua’s processing.) Date: November 15, 2012, Thursday Time: 16:00–17:00 Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Our colleague Maite Oronoz won last Monday the II. Koldo MItxelena Award for PhD Theses organized by Euskaltzaindia (the Academy of Basque Language) and the University of the Basque Country.

CONGRATULATIONS Maite!

Besides, our colleague Larraitz Uria’s PhD thesis was also nominated for this award.

Both theses face language error detection. Maite’s thesis deals [...]]]>  

Our colleague Maite Oronoz won last Monday the II. Koldo MItxelena Award for PhD Theses organized by Euskaltzaindia (the Academy of Basque Language) and  the University of the Basque Country.

CONGRATULATIONS Maite!

Besides, our colleague Larraitz Uria’s PhD thesis was also nominated for this award.

Both theses face language error detection. Maite’s thesis deals with it from a computational point of view, while Larraitz’ work does it from a linguistic perspective.

Title of Maite’s thesis: Euskarazko errore sintaktikoak detektatzeko eta zuzentzeko baliabideen garapena: datak, postposizio-lokuzioak eta komunztadura.
(Saroi, a system to detect and correct syntactic mistakes: dates, complex postpositions, and agreement.)
Maite’s supervisors: Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza and Koldo Gojenola
Title of Larraitz’ thesis: Euskarazko erroreen eta desbideratzeen analisirako lan-ingurunea. Determinatzaile-erroreen azterketa eta prozesamendua.
(A framework for the analysis of errors and deviations in Basque texts. Analysis and processing of errors on the use of determiners.
Larraitz’ supervisors: Igone Zabala and Montse Maritxalar
Publications:

• Oronoz_PhD_Thesis (in Basque)
• Uria_PhD_Thesis (in Basque)

• Maite Oronoz, Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza, Koldo Gojenola 2010
  Design and evaluation of an agreement error detection system: testing the effect of ambiguity, parser and corpus type
  7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, IceTAL 2010, H. Loftsson, E. R ̈gnvaldsson, S. Helgad ́ttir (Eds.): IceTAL 2010, LNAI 6233, pp. 281–292, 2010. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010, August 16-18, 2010 Reykjavik, Iceland
• Díaz de Ilarraza A., Gojenola K., Oronoz M. 2009
  Evaluating the Impact of Morphosyntactic Ambiguity in Grammatical Error Detection
  Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing ISSN 1313-8502. Páginas: 155-160

• Uria L. Arrieta B., Díaz de Ilarraza A., Maritxalar M., Oronoz M. 2009
  Determiner errors in Basque: Analysis and Automatic Detection.
  Proceedings de XXV Conferencia de la Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN), Revista nº 43, pp. 41-48 Septiembre 2009. ISSN: 1135-5948.

The title of his course was:

“Computational Morphology: trends, finite-states and open-source” (Evolución de la morfología computacional: nuevas posibilidades)

Foma, the application developed by Mans Hulden (University of Helsinki), was the [...]]]> In January Iñaki Alegria  participated in the XII Simposium de Comunicación Social organized by Centro de Lingüística Aplicada (CLA) in Santiago de Cuba.

The title of his course was:

“Computational Morphology: trends, finite-states and open-source”
(Evolución de la morfología computacional: nuevas posibilidades)

Foma, the application developed by Mans Hulden (University of Helsinki), was the main tool used in this tutorial.

As the CLA Centre is celebrating its 40th  anniversary this year , they have sent the Ixa Group a sculpture (see the picture) to commemorate our co-operation.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

And  CONGRATULATIONS  to Eloina, Julio Vitelio, Leonel, and all those compañeros that created this research centre and have been promoting it!

IXA group has been collaborating with CLA for 10 years. One of the fruits of this collaboration is the third edition of the Diccionario Básico Escolar (DBE). This dictionary is coded in XML and has been implemented using leXkit, an application developed by Ixa Group for dictionary managing.

Version in Basque of this new / Berri hau euskaraz

current trends and future directions Summary: Research on modality and negation focuses on [...]]]> Speaker: Roser Morante Senior researcher on the BIOGRAPH project led by Walter Daelemans.  CLiPS-Computational Linguistics research group University of Antwerp, Date: February 23, 2010 Time: 16:00 Where: Computer Science Faculty, Meeting room (batzar aretoa) .

Modality and negation in natural language processing: 

current trends and future directions

Summary:
Research on modality and negation focuses on finding subjective,
uncertain and counterfactual information in texts, be it in scientific
papers, product reviews, or opinions in blogs. This type of +research is
concerned with processing texts at the information level and aims at
deep text understanding.  Modality and negation are phenomena relevant
for all applications that are concerned with +some form of text
understanding, including text mining, sentiment analysis, recognizing
textual entailment, information extraction, text summarization, and
question answering. Hence, the adequate +modeling of these phenomena is
of crucial importance to the natural language processing (NLP) community
as a whole.

Whereas from a theoretical perspective, the study of modality has a long
tradition, only in the recent years have these topics attracted the
attention of NLP researchers. Mainly, the development of +sentiment
analysis techniques and the growing need of mining biomedical texts have
been the causes for the interest in these semantic aspects of language.
In this talk I will define modality and +negation from an NLP
perspective, I will motivate the need for processing these phenomena,
and I will summarize existing research on processing modality and
negation, touching on diverse aspects +ranging from task modelling to
feature visualization. Finally, I will speculate about future
developments in this research area.