Krzysztof Jassem

PSI-Toolkit: A Natural Language Processing Pipeline

The paper presents the main ideas and the architecture of the open source PSI-Toolkit, a set of linguistic tools being developed within a project financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The toolkit is intended for experienced language engineers as well as casual users not having any technological background. The former group of users is delivered a set of libraries that may be included in their Perl, Python or Java applications. The needs of the latter group should be satisfied by a user friendly web interface. The main feature of the toolkit is its data structure, the so-called PSI-lattice that assembles annotations delivered by all PSI tools. This cohesive architecture allows the user to invoke a series of processes with one command. The command has the form of a pipeline of instructions resembling shell command pipelines known from Linux-based systems.

Semantic Classification of Adjectives on the Basis of theirSyntactic Features in Polish and English

This paper proposes a semantic classification of Polish adjectives on the basisof their syntactic features in Polish and English. The aim of the classification is to assure thecompleteness and the homogeneity of descriptions of the entries inbilingual dictionaries designed for Machine Translation. Theclassification should prove helpful in assigning descriptions toadjectives in larger dictionaries than that discussed in the paper.

Automatic summarization of Polish news articles by sentence selection

This paper describes the automatic summarization system developed for the Polish language. The system implements sentence-based extractive summarization technique, which consists in determining most important sentences in document due to their computed salience. A structure of the system is presented, as well as the evaluation method and achieved results. The presented attempt is intended to serve as the baseline for future solutions, as it is the first summarization project evaluated against the Polish Summaries Corpus, the standardized corpus of summaries for the Polish language.

Teaching internationalization: internationally

This paper describes a foray into teaching internationalization by attempting to do a collaborative project between students in the United States and Poland. The project required Polish students to work with software developed by American students and to provide feedback to the Americans on how easy it was to understand and modify their code. Students communicated via email and online chats as well as in a live session facilitated by Google Hangout. The goals were to get students in both countries to appreciate the clarity needed to communicate and work with international colleagues and to have them experience the myriad issues involved in such collaborations. We report the details of the project we assigned, the processes we went through to set up the collaboration, and our successes and failures as we worked toward our goals.

Acquiring bilingual lexica from keyword listings

In this paper, we present a new method for acquiring bilingual dictionaries from on-line text corpora. The method merges rulebased techniques for obtaining dictionaries from structuralised data, such as paper dictionaries (in electronic form) or on-line glossaries, with methods used by aligning tools, such as GIZA. The basic idea is to search for anchor words such as abstract or keywords followed by their equivalents in another language. Text fragments that follow anchor words are likely to supply new entries for bilingual lexica.

Binary Classification Algorithms for the Detection of Sparse Word Forms in New Indo-Aryan Languages

This paper describes experiments in applying statistical classification algorithms for the detection of converbs – rare word forms found in historical texts in New Indo-Aryan languages. The digitized texts were first manually tagged with the help of a custom made tool called IA Tagger enabling semi-automatic tagging of the texts. One of the features of the system is the generation of statistical data on occurrences of words and phrases in various contexts, which helps perform historical linguistic analysis at the levels of morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. The experiments carried out on data annotated with the use of IA Tagger involved the training of multi-class and binary POS-classifiers.

An Example of a Compatible NLP Toolkit

The paper describes an open-source set of linguistic tools, whose distinctive features are its customisability and compatibility with other NLP toolkits: texts in various natural languages and character encodings may be read from a number of popular data formats; all annotation tools may be run with several options to differentiate the format of input and output; rule lists used by individual tools may be supplemented or replaced by the user; external tools (including NLP tools designed in independent research centres) may be incorporated into the toolkit’s environment.

An Algorithm for Inconsistency Management in Spatial Knowledge Integration

In the process of knowledge acquisition it is often necessary to solve the problem of ambiguous entities. The problem occurs when the same names refer to different entities in the knowledge database. We propose a method for resolving some of the ambiguities by means of the constraint calculus, namely RCC-5. We discuss the properties of our algorithm. Then we show that the algorithm can be extended to handle other types of relations. By applying a disambiguation algorithm in the process of knowledge acquisition we are able to increase the quality of the knowledge database acquired from the variety of data resources. The database is used in the prototype of our QA system, Hipisek [11].

Applying Transition Networks in Translating Polish E-Mails

The paper presents an adoption of transition networks to recognizing and translating fragments of texts characteristic of e-mails written in Polish. An extension of XTND (XML Transition Networks Definition) — abbreviated as PTND — is introduced in order to provide a convenient way to describe these networks. A new tool for graphical representation, modification and validation of network descriptions is proposed.