Antske Fokkens

Grammar Customization

This paper presents the LinGO Grammar Matrix grammar customization system, a web-based service which elicits typological descriptions of languages and outputs customized grammar fragments which are ready for sustained development into broad-coverage grammars. We describe the infrastructure we have developed to support grammar customization as well as the current set of linguistic phenomena addressed, reflect on what we have learned about a methodology for this style of multilingual grammar engineering, and evaluate the typological breadth of the system by using it to create grammars for seven languages from seven different language families.

SPINOZA_VU: An NLP Pipeline for Cross Document TimeLines

This paper describes the system SPINOZA VU developed for the SemEval 2015 Task 4: Cross Document TimeLines. The system integrates output from the NewsReader Natural Language Processing pipeline and is designed following an entity based model. The poor performance of the submitted runs are mainly a consequence of error propagation. Nevertheless, the error analysis has shown that the interpretation module behind the system performs correctly. An out of competition version of the system has fixed some errors and obtained competitive results. Therefore, we consider the system an important step towards a more complex task such as storyline extraction.

Collected Research Questions Concerning Ontology Design Patterns

This chapter lists and discusses open challenges for the ODP community in the coming years, both in terms of research questions that will need be answered, and in terms of tooling and infrastructur ...

GRaSP: Grounded Representation and Source Perspective

When people or organizations provide information, they make choices regarding what information they include and how they present it. The combination of these two aspects (the content and stance provided by the source) represents a perspective. Investigating differences in perspective can provide various useful insights in the reliability of information, the way perspectives change over time, shared beliefs among groups of a similar social or political background and contrasts between other groups, etc. This paper introduces GRaSP, a generic framework for modeling perspectives and their sources.

Finding Stories in 1,784,532 Events: Scaling up computational models of narrative.

Information professionals face the challenge of making sense of an ever increasing amount of information. Storylines can provide a useful way to present relevant information because they reveal explanatory relations between events. In this position paper, we present and discuss the four main challenges that make it difficult to get to these stories and our first ideas on how to start resolving them.

Unshared Task at the 3rd Workshop on Argument Mining: Perspective Based Local Agreement and Disagreement in Online Debate

This paper proposes a new task in argument mining in online debates. The task includes three annotations steps that result in fine-grained annotations of agreement and disagreement at a propositional level. We report on the results of a pilot annotation task on identifying sentences that are directly addressed in the comment.

Digital History: Towards New Methodologies

The field of Digital Humanities is changing the way historians do their research. Historians use tools to query larger data sets and they apply a different methodology to tackle certain research questions. In this paper we will discuss two propositions on the necessity of adapting to and taking advantage of the technological changes: (1) Digital Humanities tools are not the enemy of the historian, but they need to be used in a proper way. This requires historians to make ‘tool criticism’ part of their methodological toolkit; (2) Digital Humanities tools allow for a more data-driven and bottom-up approach to historical research. This eliminates some of the historian’s preconceptions that are inevitably part of more traditional historical research.

Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data should bring order and insight, reveal patterns and provide leads for new research questions. However, simple two-dimensional visualizations are often too static and too generic to meet these needs. Visualization tools for the humanities should be able to deal with the observer dependency, heterogeneity, uncertainty and provenance of data and the complexity of humanities research questions. They should furthermore offer scholars the opportunity to interactively manipulate their data sets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Storyteller, an open source visualization tool designed to interactively explore complex data sets for the humanities. We present the tool, and demonstrate its applicability in three very different humanities projects.

Mining Ministers (1572–1815). Using Semi-structured Data for Historical Research

There is a long tradition of categorizing and storing historical data in databases. However, these databases cannot always be used readily for computational approaches. In this paper, we use a twentieth century dataset on Dutch ministers (1572–1815) for modern quantitative analyses. We describe our methodology, provide results on the mobility of ministers and make further suggestions for the questions that can be answered now that could not before.