Nils Reiter

A Semantic Approach To Textual Entailment: System Evaluation and Task Analysis

This paper discusses our contribution to the third RTE Challenge -- the SALSA RTE system. It builds on an earlier system based on a relatively deep linguistic analysis, which we complement with a shallow component based on word overlap. We evaluate their (combined) performance on various data sets. However, earlier observations that the combination of features improves the overall accuracy could be replicated only partly.

A Resource-Poor Approach for Linking Ontology Classes to Wikipedia Articles

The applicability of ontologies for natural language processing depends on the ability to link ontological concepts and relations to their realisations in texts. We present a general, resource-poor account to create such a linking automatically by extracting Wikipedia articles corresponding to ontology classes. We evaluate our approach in an experiment with the Music Ontology. We consider linking as a promising starting point for subsequent steps of information extraction.

Adapting NLP Tools and Frame-Semantic Resources for the Semantic Analysis of Ritual Descriptions

In this paper we investigate the use of standard natural language processing (NLP) tools and annotation methods for processing linguistic data from ritual science, which is concerned with the study of structure and variance of rituals. The work is embedded in an interdisciplinary project that addresses this study by applying empirical and quantitative computational linguistic analysis techniques to ritual descriptions from Indian rituals.We present motivation and prospects of such a computational approach to ritual structure research and sketch the overall project research plan. In particular, we motivate the choice of frame semantics as a theoretical framework for the semantic analysis of rituals. We discuss the special characteristics of the textual data and examine several domain adaptation strategies in order to use standard NLP resources and tools on the ritual domain. We also report on our workflows and methods for semi-automatic semantic annotation, which is used as a basis for the extraction of event chains. We close with some preliminary investigations on how to uncover regularities and differences of rituals.-