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

Speaker: Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd., Brighton) Title: Getting to Know Your Corpus. Date: November 7, 2012, Wednesday Time: 16:00 Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Abstract

Corpora are not easy to get a handle on. The usual way of getting to grips with text is to read it, but corpora are mostly too [...]]]>

Speaker: Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd., Brighton)
Title: Getting to Know Your Corpus.
Date: November 7, 2012, Wednesday
Time: 16:00
Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Abstract

Corpora are not easy to get a handle on. The usual way of getting to grips with text is to read it, but corpora are mostly too big to read (and not designed to be read). We show, with examples, how keyword lists (of one corpus vs: another) are a direct, practical and fascinating way to explore the characteristics of corpora, and of text types. Our method is to classify the top one hundred keywords of corpus1 vs: corpus2, and corpus2 vs: corpus1. This promptly reveals a range of contrasts between all the pairs of corpora we apply it to. We also present improved maths for keywords, and quantitative comparisons between corpora. All the methods discussed (and almost all of the corpora) are available in the Sketch Engine, a leading corpus query tool.

Title: Beyond Shallow Semantics. Date: October 8, 2012 Time: 16:00-19:00 Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Abstract

Shallow semantic analyzers, such as semantic role labelers and sense taggers, are increasing in accuracy and becoming commonplace. However, they only provide limited and local representations of [...]]]> Speaker:  Martha Palmer.  Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado (AEB)

Title: Beyond Shallow Semantics.
Date: October 8, 2012
Time: 16:00-19:00
Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Abstract

Shallow semantic analyzers, such as semantic role labelers and sense taggers, are increasing in accuracy and becoming commonplace. However, they only provide limited and local representations of words and individual predicate-argument structures. This talk will address some of the current opportunities and challenges in producing deeper, richer representations of coherent eventualities. Available resources, such as VerbNet, that can assist in this process will also be discussed, as well as some of their limitations.

Speaker’s bio

She is a Full Professor at the University of Colorado with joint appointments in Linguistics and Computer Science and is an Institute of Cognitive Science Faculty Fellow. She recently won a Boulder Faculty Assembly 2010 Research Award. Her research has been focused on trying to capture elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents. Supervised machine learning techniques rely on vast amounts of annotated training data so she and her students are engaged in providing data with word sense tags and semantic role labels for English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, funded by DARPA and NSF. They also train automatic sense taggers and semantic role labelers, and extract bilingual lexicons from parallel corpora.

A more recent focus is the application of these methods to biomedical journal articles and clinical notes, funded by NIH. She is a co-editor for the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and for LiLT, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and on the CLJ Editorial Board. She is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, past Chair of SIGLEX and SIGHAN, and was the Director of the 2011 Linguistics Institute held in Boulder, Colorado.

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.

ABSTRACT These two sessions cover some of the most important aspects of Computational Semantics and Pragmatics including: * Lexical Representations and Argument Structure * Parsing with constituency or dependency structure * Co-reference resolution [...]]]> Speaker: Rodolfo Delmonte, (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy).
Date: January 17 and 18, 2011
Time: 16:00 – 19:30
Where: Computer Science Faculty

ABSTRACT
These two sessions cover some of the most important aspects of Computational Semantics and Pragmatics including:
* Lexical Representations and Argument Structure
* Parsing with constituency or dependency structure
* Co-reference resolution
* Underspecified arguments
* Argumentative structure, subjectivity, factuality and sentiment analysis
* Textual Entailment
The talks follow a linguistically motivated approach with the use of ontologies and similar resources to deal with co-reference or textual entailment tasks. The talks are accompanied by several applications and demonstrations.

SHORT BIO
Rodolfo Delmonte is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Venice where he is in charge of the corresponding course at BA, MA and Ph.D. level. Specialist in experimental phonetics and computational linguistics he presents his research work at major international conferences and publishes articles in international journals. He is referee for and publishes in Speech Communication, International Journal of Speech Technologies, Journal of Natural Language Engineering and international conferences every year. He has been invited speaker in a number of conferences, teacher at international schools, and invited professor in the last five years in Boulder, Colorado at the CLSR, in Besançon at the Centre Tesnière, in Dallas at UTD. Hot topics of his latest research include the following: Implicit entities and antecedents of omitted and underspecified arguments; Argumentative Analysis, Subjectivity, Factuality and Sentiment Analysis.

project.cgm.unive.it/delmonte.html

Wauter Bosma is currently working as a postdoc on the European KYOTO project (where Ixa group is another partner) at the Vrieje Universiteit Amsterdam . His main research interests are in the area of Natural Language [...]]]> Speaker: Wauter Bosma (Vrieje Universiteit Amsterdam)
Date: Oct 22, 2010
Time: 15:00
Where: Computer Science Faculty, room 2.2 .

Wauter Bosma is currently working as a postdoc on the European KYOTO project (where Ixa group is another partner) at the Vrieje Universiteit Amsterdam . His main research interests are in the area of Natural Language Processing, and in particular text mining, terminology extraction and automatic summarization. In 2008 he received his PhD from the University of Twente on ‘Discourse-oriented summarization’.

Discourse theories claim that text gets meaning in context. Most summarization systems do not take advantage of this. They assess the relevance of each passage individually rather than modeling the way context affects the relevance of passages. In order to model relations in text, I developed a framework for graph-based summarization, so that the passages can be viewed in a broader context. The result is a summarization system which is more in line with discourse theory but still fully automatic. I evaluated the content selection performance of an implementation of the framework in different configurations. The system significantly outperforms a competitive baseline (and participant systems) on the DUC 2005 evaluation set.