Núria Bel

Cross-lingual text categorization

This article deals with the problem of Cross-Lingual Text Categorization (CLTC), which arises when documents in different languages must be classified according to the same classification tree. We describe practical and cost-effective solutions for automatic Cross-Lingual Text Categorization, both in case a sufficient number of training examples is available for each new language and in the case that for some language no training examples are available.

SemEval-2016 task 5 : aspect based sentiment analysis

This paper describes the SemEval 2016 shared task on Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), a continuation of the respective tasks of 2014 and 2015. In its third year, the task provided 19 training and 20 testing datasets for 8 languages and 7 domains, as well as a common evaluation procedure. From these datasets, 25 were for sentence-level and 14 for text-level ABSA; the latter was introduced for the first time as a subtask in SemEval. The task attracted 245 submissions from 29 teams.

Multilingual resources for NLP in the lexical markup framework (LMF)

Optimizing the production, maintenance and extension of lexical resources is one the crucial aspects impacting natural language processing (NLP). A second aspect involves optimizing the process leading to their integration in applications. With this respect, we believe that a consensual specification on monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexicons can be a useful aid for the various NLP actors. Within ISO, one purpose of Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO-24613) is to define a standard for lexicons that covers multilingual lexical data.

Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) for NLP Multilingual Resources

Optimizing the production, maintenance and extension of lexical resources is one the crucial aspects impacting Natural Language Processing (NLP). A second aspect involves optimizing the process leading to their integration in applications. With this respect, we believe that the production of a consensual specification on multilingual lexicons can be a useful aid for the various NLP actors. Within ISO, one purpose of LMF (ISO-24613) is to define a standard for lexicons that covers multilingual data.

Reading Between the Lines: Overcoming Data Sparsity for Accurate Classification of Lexical Relationships

The lexical semantic relationships between word pairs are key features for many NLP tasks. Most approaches for automatically classifying related word pairs are hindered by data sparsity because of their need to observe two words co-occurring in order to detect the lexical relation holding between them. Even when mining very large corpora, not every related word pair co-occurs. Using novel representations based on graphs and word embeddings, we present two systems that are able to predict relations between words, even when these are never found in the same sentence in a given corpus. In two experiments, we demonstrate superior performance of both approaches over the state of the art, achieving significant gains in recall.

The Spanish Resource Grammar: Pre-processing Strategy and Lexical Acquisition

This paper describes work on the development of an open-source HPSG grammar for Spanish implemented within the LKB system. Following a brief description of the main features of the grammar, we present our approach for pre-processing and ongoing research on automatic lexical acquisition.

Automatic Acquisition of Grammatical Types for Nouns

The work we present here is concerned with the acquisition of deep grammatical information for nouns in Spanish. The aim is to build a learner that can handle noise, but, more interestingly, that is able to overcome the problem of sparse data, especially important in the case of nouns. We have based our work on two main points. Firstly, we have used distributional evidences as features. Secondly, we made the learner deal with all occurrences of a word as a single complex unit. The obtained results show that grammatical features of nouns is a level of generalization that can be successfully approached with a Decision Tree learner.

Automatic selection of hpsg-parsed sentences for treebank construction

This article presents an ensemble parse approach to detecting and selecting high-quality linguistic analyses output by a hand-crafted HPSG grammar of Spanish implemented in the LKB system. The approach uses full agreement (i.e., exact syntactic match) along with a MaxEnt parse selection model and a statistical dependency parser trained on the same data. The ultimate goal is to develop a hybrid corpus annotation methodology that combines fully automatic annotation and manual parse selection, in order to make the annotation task more efficient while maintaining high accuracy and the high degree of consistency necessary for any foreseen uses of a treebank.

The apertium bilingual dictionaries on the web of data

Bilingual electronic dictionaries contain collections of lexical entries in two languages, with explicitly declared translation relations between such entries. Nevertheless, they are typically developed in isolation, in their own formats and accessible through proprietary APIs. In this paper we propose the use of Semantic Web techniques to make translations available on the Web to be consumed by other semantic enabled resources in a direct manner, based on standard languages and query means. In particular, we describe the conversion of the Apertium family of bilingual dictionaries and lexicons into RDF (Resource Description Framework) and how their data have been made accessible on the Web as linked data. As a result, all the converted dictionaries (many of them covering under-resourced languages) are connected among them and can be easily traversed from one to another to obtain, for instance, translations between language pairs not originally connected in any of the original dictionaries.

The language resource Strategic Agenda: the FLaReNet synthesis of community recommendations

Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to serve as a landmark for future research and in particular for future strategic, infrastructural and coordination initiatives. It presents a preliminary plan for actions and infrastructures that could become the basis for future initiatives in the sector of Language Resources and Technologies (LRTs). The FLaReNet Language Resource Strategic Agenda presents a set of recommendations for the development and progress of LRT in Europe, as issued from a three-year consultation of the FLaReNet European project. Recommendations cover a broad range of topics and activities, spanning over production and use of language resources, licensing, maintenance and preservation issues, infrastructures for language resources, resource identification and sharing, evaluation and validation, interoperability and policy issues. The intended recipients belong to a large set of players and stakeholders in LRT, ranging from individuals to research and education institutions, to policy-makers, funding agencies, SMEs and large companies, service and media providers. The main goal of these recommendations is to serve as an instrument to support stakeholders in planning for and addressing the urgencies of the LRT of the future.