IXA Group is the local organizer of IWPT 2015 and Koldo Gojenola is its Organizing Chair. The ACL Special Interest [...]]]> 14th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2015)
Wednesday, July 22, to Friday, July 24, 2015
University of the Basque Country (Bilbao)
FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
(May 8, 2015: Deadline for paper submission)

IXA Group is the local organizer of IWPT 2015 and Koldo Gojenola is its Organizing Chair. The ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Parsing (SIGPARSE) invites submissions to its biennual conference on parsing technologies. IWPT 2015 will be the 14th conference in a series that started in 1989. The conference will be held between July 22 and July 24, 2015, in the city center of beautiful Bilbao (Spain), hosted by the University of the Basque Country. There will be two invited keynotes:

• Large-scale Semantic Parsing as Graph Matching. Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Towards Universal Syntactic Processing of Natural Language. Slav Petrov, Google, USA

Interleaved with the main conference, there will be the 6th Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL).

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

Linda Wiechetek, a researcher from the University of Tromsø (Norway) is visiting the Ixa Group in Donostia in the period April to July in 2010. Her visit is founded by the NILS mobility project.

Why Sami and Basque? Why do we [...]]]> Researchers working on Basque and Sami (Laponian) are collaborating on Automatic Language Processing.

Linda Wiechetek, a researcher from the University of Tromsø (Norway) is visiting the Ixa Group in Donostia in the period April to July in 2010. Her visit is founded by the NILS mobility project.

Why Sami and Basque? Why do we work with this unusual language pair?

Some of the reasons for that are:
1) Both are small languages,
2) With limited resources to face the use of language technology. (Sami is even lesser resourced than Basque now adays).
3) Sami and Basque morphologies are very rich and demand adequate tools such as our morphological transducers and syntactic disambiguation and analysis modules. Many of the better resourced languages with highly developed language Technology such as English, Spanish and French do not need such complex modules to create their basic tools.
4) There are clear syntactic parallels betwen Basque and Sami including the grammatical cases/postpositions causing morpho-syntactic ambiguity.

In this context we are collaborating on the following ways:
a) Use of semantic prototype features in Constraint Grammar for syntactic disambiguation.
b) Use of semantic features in Constraint Grammar for lexical/syntactic transfer in Machine Translation.
c) Use of information on verb-subcategorization for syntactic disambiguation.
d) Use of verb-subcategorization information in for lexical and syntactic transfer in Machine Translation.

The parser for Basque is not very accurate yet, not as accurate as English parsers. The Sami parser on the other hand gets good results in accuracy, but the use of valency is necessary for other tasks such as MT and QA.
With this collaboration between Basque and Sami researchers we aim to improve our NLP tools.

Besides of that, now Linda is able to speak some Basque, and we are learning some words in Sami.
That’s another way of collaboration

giellatekno.uit.no/background/giellatekno3.pdf