Ben Verhoeven

Evaluating Content-Independent Features for Personality Recognition

This paper describes our submission for the WCPR14 shared task on computational personality recognition. We have investigated whether the features proposed by Soler and Wanner (2014) for gender prediction might also be useful in personality recognition. We have compared these features with simple approaches using token unigrams, character trigrams and liwc features. Although the newly investigated features seem to work quite well on certain personality traits, they do not outperform the simple approaches.

Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying in Social Media Text

While social media offer great communication opportunities, they also increase the vulnerability of young people to threatening situations online. Recent studies report that cyberbullying constitutes a growing problem among youngsters. Successful prevention depends on the adequate detection of potentially harmful messages and the information overload on the Web requires intelligent systems to identify potential risks automatically. The focus of this paper is on automatic cyberbullying detection in social media text by modelling posts written by bullies, victims, and bystanders of online bullying. We describe the collection and fine-grained annotation of a cyberbullying corpus for English and Dutch and perform a series of binary classification experiments to determine the feasibility of automatic cyberbullying detection. We make use of linear support vector machines exploiting a rich feature set and investigate which information sources contribute the most for the task. Experiments on a hold-out test set reveal promising results for the detection of cyberbullying-related posts. After optimisation of the hyperparameters, the classifier yields an F1 score of 64% and 61% for English and Dutch respectively, and considerably outperforms baseline systems.

A Taxonomy for Afrikaans and Dutch Compounds

The linguistic categorisation of compounds dates back to some of the earliest work in linguistics. The cross-linguistic compound taxonomy of Bisetto and Scalise (2005), later refined in Scalise and Bisetto (2009), is well-known in linguistics for understanding the grammatical relations in compounds. Although this taxonomy has not been used extensively in the field of computational linguistics, it has the potential to influence choices with regard to compound annotation and understanding in natural language processing. For example, their 2005 taxonomy formed the basis for the large-scale, multilingual database of compounds, called CompoNet. The aim of this paper is to examine their latest taxonomy critically, especially with a view on rigorous implementation in computational environments (e.g. for the morphological annotation of compounds). We propose a number of general improvements of their taxonomy, as well as some language-specific refinements.

Automatic Compound Processing: Compound Splitting and Semantic Analysis for Afrikaans and Dutch

Compounding, the process of combining several simplex words into a complex whole, is a productive process in a wide range of languages. In particular, concatenative compounding, in which the components are “glued” together, leads to problems, for instance, in computational tools that rely on a predefined lexicon. Here we present the AuCoPro project, which focuses on compounding in the closely related languages Afrikaans and Dutch. The project consists of subprojects focusing on compound splitting (identifying the boundaries of the components) and compound semantics (identifying semantic relations between the components). We describe the developed datasets as well as results showing the effectiveness of the developed datasets.

Periphrastic progressive constructions in Dutch and Afrikaans: a contrastive analysis

Given the common ancestry of Dutch and Afrikaans, it is not surprising that they use similar periphrastic constructions to express progressive meaning: aan het (Dutch) and aan die/’t (Afrikaans) lit. ‘at the’; bezig met/(om) te (Dutch) lit. ‘busy with/to’ and besig om te lit. ‘busy to’ (Afrikaans); and so-called cardinal posture verb constructions (zitten/sit ‘sit’, staan ‘stand’, liggen/lê ‘lie’ and lopen/loop ‘walk’), CPV te (‘to’ Dutch) and CPV en (‘and’ Afrikaans). However, these cognate constructions have grammaticalized to different extents. To assess the exact nature of these differences, we analyzed the constructions with respect to overall frequency, collocational range, and transitivity (compatibility with transitive predicates and passivizability). We used two corpora that are equal in size (both about 57 million words) and contain roughly the same types of written text. It turns out that the use of periphrastic progressives is generally more widespread in Afrikaans than in Dutch. As far as grammaticalization is concerned, we found that the Afrikaans aan dieand CPV-constructions, as well as the Dutch bezigand CPV-constructions, are semantically restricted. In addition, only the Afrikaans besigand CPV en-constructions allow passivization, which is remarkable for such periphrastic expressions.*