Predicting which words are considered hard to understand for a given target population is a vital step in many NLP applications such as text simplification. This task is commonly referred to as Complex Word Identification (CWI). With a few exceptions, previous studies have approached the task as a binary classification task in which systems predict a complexity value (complex vs. non-complex) for a set of target words in a text. This choice is motivated by the fact that all CWI datasets compiled so far have been annotated using a binary annotation scheme. Our paper addresses this limitation by presenting the first English dataset for continuous lexical complexity prediction. We use a 5-point Likert scale scheme to annotate complex words in texts from three sources/domains: the Bible, Europarl, and biomedical texts. This resulted in a corpus of 9,476 sentences each annotated by around 7 annotators.
Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná（巴拉那联邦理工大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
This paper presents the results and main findings of SemEval-2021 Task 1 - Lexical Complexity Prediction. We provided participants with an augmented version of the CompLex Corpus (Shardlow et al 2020). CompLex is an English multi-domain corpus in which words and multi-word expressions (MWEs) were annotated with respect to their complexity using a five point Likert scale. SemEval-2021 Task 1 featured two Sub-tasks: Sub-task 1 focused on single words and Sub-task 2 focused on MWEs. The competition attracted 198 teams in total, of which 54 teams submitted official runs on the test data to Sub-tas…
This paper is aimed at reporting on the development and application of a computer model for discourse analysis through segmentation. Segmentation refers to the principled division of texts into contiguous constituents. Other studies have looked at the application of a number of models to the analysis of discourse by computer. The segmentation procedure developed for the present investigation is called LSM ('Link Set Median'). It was applied to three corpus of 300 texts from three different genres. The results obtained by application of the LSM procedure on the corpus were then compared to segm…
Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
Identifying words which may cause difficulty for a reader is an essential step in most lexical text simplification systems prior to lexical substitution and can also be used for assessing the readability of a text. This task is commonly referred to as Complex Word Identification (CWI) and is often modelled as a supervised classification problem. For training such systems, annotated datasets in which words and sometimes multi-word expressions are labelled regarding complexity are required. In this paper we analyze previous work carried out in this task and investigate the properties of CWI data…
Calculating the semantic similarity between sentences is a long dealt problem in the area of natural language processing. The semantic analysis field has a crucial role to play in the research related to the text analytics. The semantic similarity differs as the domain of operation differs. In this paper, we present a methodology which deals with this issue by incorporating semantic similarity and corpus statistics. To calculate the semantic similarity between words and sentences, the proposed method follows an edge-based approach using a lexical database. The methodology can be applied in a v…
We describe our experience with automatic alignment of sentences in parallel English-Chinese texts. Our report concerns three related topics: (1) progress on the HKUST English-Chinese Parallel Bilingual Corpus; (2) experiments addressing the applicability of Gale & Church's length-based statistical method to the task of alignment involving a non-Indo-European language; and (3) an improved statistical method that also incorporates domain-specific lexical cues.
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET)（库尔纳工程技术大学）；the University of Bolton（博尔顿大学）
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the lexical components of a Text to Knowledge Mapping (TKM) prototype. The prototype is domain-specific, the purpose of which is to map instructional text onto a knowledge domain. The context of the knowledge domain of the prototype is physics, specifically DC electrical circuits. During development, the prototype has been tested with a limited data set from the domain. The prototype now reached a stage where it needs to be evaluated with a representative linguistic data set called corpus. A corpus is a collection of text drawn from typical sources which ca…
University of Hyderabad（海得拉巴大学）；Inria Paris Center（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎中心）
The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit records around 650,000 sentences along with their morphological and lexical tagging. But inconsistencies in morphological analysis, and in providing crucial information like the segmented word, urges the need for standardization and validation of this corpus. Automating the validation process requires efficient analyzers which also provide the missing information. The Sanskrit Heritage Engine's Reader produces all possible segmentations with morphological and lexical analyses. Aligning these systems would help us in recording the linguistic differences, which can…
This paper presents a new approach for measuring semantic similarity/distance between words and concepts. It combines a lexical taxonomy structure with corpus statistical information so that the semantic distance between nodes in the semantic space constructed by the taxonomy can be better quantified with the computational evidence derived from a distributional analysis of corpus data. Specifically, the proposed measure is a combined approach that inherits the edge-based approach of the edge counting scheme, which is then enhanced by the node-based approach of the information content calculati…
This paper studies the potential of identifying lexical paraphrases within a single corpus, focusing on the extraction of verb paraphrases. Most previous approaches detect individual paraphrase instances within a pair (or set) of comparable corpora, each of them containing roughly the same information, and rely on the substantial level of correspondence of such corpora. We present a novel method that successfully detects isolated paraphrase instances within a single corpus without relying on any a-priori structure and information. A comparison suggests that an instance-based approach may be co…
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET)（库尔纳工程技术大学）；the University of Bolton（博尔顿大学）；University of Dhaka（达卡大学）
The aim of this paper is to evaluate a Text to Knowledge Mapping (TKM) Prototype. The prototype is domain-specific, the purpose of which is to map instructional text onto a knowledge domain. The context of the knowledge domain is DC electrical circuit. During development, the prototype has been tested with a limited data set from the domain. The prototype reached a stage where it needs to be evaluated with a representative linguistic data set called corpus. A corpus is a collection of text drawn from typical sources which can be used as a test data set to evaluate NLP systems. As there is no a…
University of Haifa（海法大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We q…
University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Phrase representations derived from BERT often do not exhibit complex phrasal compositionality, as the model relies instead on lexical similarity to determine semantic relatedness. In this paper, we propose a contrastive fine-tuning objective that enables BERT to produce more powerful phrase embeddings. Our approach (Phrase-BERT) relies on a dataset of diverse phrasal paraphrases, which is automatically generated using a paraphrase generation model, as well as a large-scale dataset of phrases in context mined from the Books3 corpus. Phrase-BERT outperforms baselines across a variety of phrase-…
Université Claude Bernard Lyon1（里昂第一大学）；CNRS UMR5015（法国国家科学研究中心 UMR5015）；Université de Haute Alsace（上阿尔萨斯大学）；CNRS UMR7044（法国国家科学研究中心 UMR7044）
"Semantic Atlas" is a mathematic and statistic model to visualise word senses according to relations between words. The model, that has been applied to proximity relations from a corpus, has shown its ability to distinguish word senses as the corpus' contributors comprehend them. We propose to use the model and a specialised corpus in order to create automatically a specialised dictionary relative to the corpus' domain. A morpho-syntactic analysis performed on the corpus makes it possible to create the dictionary from syntactic relations between lexical units. The semantic resource can be used…
In this paper we describe an algorithm for aligning sentences with their translations in a bilingual corpus using lexical information of the languages. Existing efficient algorithms ignore word identities and consider only the sentence lengths (Brown, 1991; Gale and Church, 1993). For a sentence in the source language text, the proposed algorithm picks the most likely translation from the target language text using lexical information and certain heuristics. It does not do statistical analysis using sentence lengths. The algorithm is language independent. It also aids in detecting addition and…
National Research University Higher School of Economics（俄罗斯高等经济研究大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
We present RuSemShift, a large-scale manually annotated test set for the task of semantic change modeling in Russian for two long-term time period pairs: from the pre-Soviet through the Soviet times and from the Soviet through the post-Soviet times. Target words were annotated by multiple crowd-source workers. The annotation process was organized following the DURel framework and was based on sentence contexts extracted from the Russian National Corpus. Additionally, we report the performance of several distributional approaches on RuSemShift, achieving promising results, which at the same tim…
The extraction of anglicisms (lexical borrowings from English) is relevant both for lexicographic purposes and for NLP downstream tasks. We introduce a corpus of European Spanish newspaper headlines annotated with anglicisms and a baseline model for anglicism extraction. In this paper we present: (1) a corpus of 21,570 newspaper headlines written in European Spanish annotated with emergent anglicisms and (2) a conditional random field baseline model with handcrafted features for anglicism extraction. We present the newspaper headlines corpus, describe the annotation tagset and guidelines and i…
This paper describes a new method, Combi-bootstrap, to exploit existing taggers and lexical resources for the annotation of corpora with new tagsets. Combi-bootstrap uses existing resources as features for a second level machine learning module, that is trained to make the mapping to the new tagset on a very small sample of annotated corpus material. Experiments show that Combi-bootstrap: i) can integrate a wide variety of existing resources, and ii) achieves much higher accuracy (up to 44.7 % error reduction) than both the best single tagger and an ensemble tagger constructed out of the same …
Russian-Armenian University（俄罗斯-亚美尼亚大学）；Ivannikov Laboratory for System Programming（伊万尼科夫系统编程实验室）
In this work, we employ a semi-automatic method based on back translation to generate a sentential paraphrase corpus for the Armenian language. The initial collection of sentences is translated from Armenian to English and back twice, resulting in pairs of lexically distant but semantically similar sentences. The generated paraphrases are then manually reviewed and annotated. Using the method train and test datasets are created, containing 2360 paraphrases in total. In addition, the datasets are used to train and evaluate BERTbased models for detecting paraphrase in Armenian, achieving results…
Echoes Across Vietnam's Highlands, Delta, and Coast: A Multilingual Corpus for Cham, Khmer, and Tay-Nung
Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM（胡志明市理工大学计算机科学与工程学院（胡志明市国立大学所属））；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
In speech communication, how something is said (paralinguistic information) is as crucial as what is said (linguistic information). As a type of paralinguistic information, English speech uses sentence stress, the heaviest prominence within a sentence, to convey emphasis. While different placements of sentence stress communicate different emphatic implications, current speech translation systems return the same translations if the utterances are linguistically identical, losing paralinguistic information. Concentrating on focus, a type of emphasis, we propose mapping paralinguistic information…
This work presents a new resource for borrowing identification and analyzes the performance and errors of several models on this task. We introduce a new annotated corpus of Spanish newswire rich in unassimilated lexical borrowings -- words from one language that are introduced into another without orthographic adaptation -- and use it to evaluate how several sequence labeling models (CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and Transformer-based models) perform. The corpus contains 370,000 tokens and is larger, more borrowing-dense, OOV-rich, and topic-varied than previous corpora available for this task. Our result…
Understanding language requires grasping not only the overtly stated content, but also making inferences about things that were left unsaid. These inferences include presuppositions, a phenomenon by which a listener learns about new information through reasoning about what a speaker takes as given. Presuppositions require complex understanding of the lexical and syntactic properties that trigger them as well as the broader conversational context. In this work, we introduce the Naturally-Occurring Presuppositions in English (NOPE) Corpus to investigate the context-sensitivity of 10 different ty…
In this article we present the Frankfurt Latin Lexicon (FLL), a lexical resource for Medieval Latin that is used both for the lemmatization of Latin texts and for the post-editing of lemmatizations. We describe recent advances in the development of lemmatizers and test them against the Capitularies corpus (comprising Frankish royal edicts, mid-6th to mid-9th century), a corpus created as a reference for processing Medieval Latin. We also consider the post-correction of lemmatizations using a limited crowdsourcing process aimed at continuous review and updating of the FLL. Starting from the tex…
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立信息通信技术研究所）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
Morphological analysis (MA) and lexical normalization (LN) are both important tasks for Japanese user-generated text (UGT). To evaluate and compare different MA/LN systems, we have constructed a publicly available Japanese UGT corpus. Our corpus comprises 929 sentences annotated with morphological and normalization information, along with category information we classified for frequent UGT-specific phenomena. Experiments on the corpus demonstrated the low performance of existing MA/LN methods for non-general words and non-standard forms, indicating that the corpus would be a challenging benchm…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Given a small set of seed entities (e.g., ``USA'', ``Russia''), corpus-based set expansion is to induce an extensive set of entities which share the same semantic class (Country in this example) from a given corpus. Set expansion benefits a wide range of downstream applications in knowledge discovery, such as web search, taxonomy construction, and query suggestion. Existing corpus-based set expansion algorithms typically bootstrap the given seeds by incorporating lexical patterns and distributional similarity. However, due to no negative sets provided explicitly, these methods suffer from sema…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Apple（苹果公司）
Word embedding techniques heavily rely on the abundance of training data for individual words. Given the Zipfian distribution of words in natural language texts, a large number of words do not usually appear frequently or at all in the training data. In this paper we put forward a technique that exploits the knowledge encoded in lexical resources, such as WordNet, to induce embeddings for unseen words. Our approach adapts graph embedding and cross-lingual vector space transformation techniques in order to merge lexical knowledge encoded in ontologies with that derived from corpus statistics. W…
This paper describes team LCP-RIT's submission to the SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP). The task organizers provided participants with an augmented version of CompLex (Shardlow et al., 2020), an English multi-domain dataset in which words in context were annotated with respect to their complexity using a five point Likert scale. Our system uses logistic regression and a wide range of linguistic features (e.g. psycholinguistic features, n-grams, word frequency, POS tags) to predict the complexity of single words in this dataset. We analyze the impact of different linguis…
In this study we analyzed a corpus of 8 million words academic literature from Computational lingustics' academic literature. the lexical bundles from this corpus are categorized based on structures and functions.
This paper presents the InScript corpus (Narrative Texts Instantiating Script structure). InScript is a corpus of 1,000 stories centered around 10 different scenarios. Verbs and noun phrases are annotated with event and participant types, respectively. Additionally, the text is annotated with coreference information. The corpus shows rich lexical variation and will serve as a unique resource for the study of the role of script knowledge in natural language processing.
In this paper we describe some ways to utilize various lexical resources to improve the quality of statistical machine translation system. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as IndoWordnet semantic relation set, function words, kridanta pairs and verb phrases etc. Our research on the usage of lexical resources mainly focused on two ways such as augmenting parallel corpus with more vocabulary and augmenting with various word forms. We have described case studies, evaluations and detailed error analysis for both Marathi to Hindi and Hindi to Marathi machine…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Responding to the need for semantic lexical resources in natural language processing applications, we examine methods to acquire noun compounds (NCs), e.g., "orange juice", together with suitable fine-grained semantic interpretations, e.g., "squeezed from", which are directly usable as paraphrases. We employ bootstrapping and web statistics, and utilize the relationship between NCs and paraphrasing patterns to jointly extract NCs and such patterns in multiple alternating iterations. In evaluation, we found that having one compound noun fixed yields both a higher number of semantically interpre…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Categorical compositional distributional model of Coecke et al. (2010) suggests a way to combine grammatical composition of the formal, type logical models with the corpus based, empirical word representations of distributional semantics. This paper contributes to the project by expanding the model to also capture entailment relations. This is achieved by extending the representations of words from points in meaning space to density operators, which are probability distributions on the subspaces of the space. A symmetric measure of similarity and an asymmetric measure of entailment is defined,…
Stylometry, the science of inferring characteristics of the author from the characteristics of documents written by that author, is a problem with a long history and belongs to the core task of Text categorization that involves authorship identification, plagiarism detection, forensic investigation, computer security, copyright and estate disputes etc. In this work, we present a strategy for stylometry detection of documents written in Bengali. We adopt a set of fine-grained attribute features with a set of lexical markers for the analysis of the text and use three semi-supervised measures for…
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Humans have remarkable capacity to reason abductively and hypothesize about what lies beyond the literal content of an image. By identifying concrete visual clues scattered throughout a scene, we almost can't help but draw probable inferences beyond the literal scene based on our everyday experience and knowledge about the world. For example, if we see a "20 mph" sign alongside a road, we might assume the street sits in a residential area (rather than on a highway), even if no houses are pictured. Can machines perform similar visual reasoning? We present Sherlock, an annotated corpus of 103K i…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；IBM Research Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究院）；eBay Inc（eBay公司）
Recent advances in text representation have shown that training on large amounts of text is crucial for natural language understanding. However, models trained without predefined notions of topical interest typically require careful fine-tuning when transferred to specialized domains. When a sufficient amount of within-domain text may not be available, expanding a seed corpus of relevant documents from large-scale web data poses several challenges. First, corpus expansion requires scoring and ranking each document in the collection, an operation that can quickly become computationally expensiv…
A word having multiple senses in a text introduces the lexical semantic task to find out which particular sense is appropriate for the given context. One such task is Word sense disambiguation which refers to the identification of the most appropriate meaning of the polysemous word in a given context using computational algorithms. The language processing research in Hindi, the official language of India, and other Indian languages is restricted by unavailability of the standard corpus. For Hindi word sense disambiguation also, the large corpus is not available. In this work, we prepared the t…
University of West Bohemia（西波希米亚大学）；NTIS – New Technologies for the Information Society（NTIS——信息社会新技术研究中心）
In this paper, we describe our method for the detection of lexical semantic change, i.e., word sense changes over time. We examine semantic differences between specific words in two corpora, chosen from different time periods, for English, German, Latin, and Swedish. Our method was created for the SemEval 2020 Task 1: \textit{Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection.} We ranked $1^{st}$ in Sub-task 1: binary change detection, and $4^{th}$ in Sub-task 2: ranked change detection. Our method is fully unsupervised and language independent. It consists of preparing a semantic vector space for…
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Lack of proper linguistic resources is the major challenges faced by the Machine Translation system developments when dealing with the resource poor languages. In this paper, we describe effective ways to utilize the lexical resources to improve the quality of statistical machine translation. Our research on the usage of lexical resources mainly focused on two ways, such as; augmenting the parallel corpus with more vocabulary and to provide various word forms. We have augmented the training corpus with various lexical resources such as lexical words, function words, kridanta pairs and verb phr…
