The DISPRT 2019 workshop has organized a shared task aiming to identify cross-formalism and multilingual discourse segments. Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) are quite similar across different theories. Segmentation is the very first stage on the way of rhetorical annotation. Still, each annotation project adopted several decisions with consequences not only on the annotation of the relational discourse structure but also at the segmentation stage. In this shared task, we have employed pre-trained word embeddings, neural networks (BiLSTM+CRF) to perform the segmentation. We report F1 results for 6 languages: Basque (0.853), English (0.919), French (0.907), German (0.913), Portuguese (0.926) and Spanish (0.868 and 0.769). Finally, we also pursued an error analysis based on clause typology for Basque and Spanish, in order to understand the performance of the segmenter.

In this paper we present a Basque coreference resolution system enriched with semantic knowledge. An error analysis carried out revealed the deficiencies that the system had in resolving coreference cases in which semantic or world knowledge is needed. We attempt to improve the deficiencies using two semantic knowledge sources, specifically Wikipedia and WordNet.

This paper presents a method to improve the translation of Verb-Noun Combinations (VNCs) in a rule-based Machine Translation (MT) system for Spanish-Basque. Linguistic information about a set of VNCs is gathered from the public database Konbitzul, and it is integrated into the MT system, leading to an improvement in BLEU, NIST and TER scores, as well as the results being evidently better according to human evaluators.

We present a linguistic analysis of a set of English and Spanish verb+noun combinations (VNCs), and a method to use this information to improve VNC identification. Firstly, a sample of frequent VNCs are analysed in-depth and tagged along lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic dimensions, obtaining satisfactory inter-annotator agreement scores. Then, a VNC identification experiment is undertaken, where the analysed linguistic data is combined with chunking information and syntactic dependencies. A comparison between the results of the experiment and the results obtained by a basic detection method shows that VNC identification can be greatly improved by using linguistic information, as a large number of additional occurrences are detected with high precision.

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of statistically predictive syntactic features of complexity and the treatment of these features by humans when simplifying texts. To that end, we have used a list of the most five statistically predictive features obtained automatically and the Corpus of Basque Simplified Texts (CBST) to analyse how the syntactic phenomena in these features have been manually simplified. Our aim is to go beyond the descriptions of operations found in the corpus and relate the multidisciplinary findings to understand text complexity from different points of view. We also present some issues that can be important when analysing linguistic complexity.

The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of simple feature engineering mechanisms before applying more sophisticated techniques to the task of medical NER. Sometimes papers using scientifically sound techniques present raw baselines that could be improved adding simple and cheap features. This work focuses on entity recognition for the clinical domain for three languages: English, Swedish and Spanish. The task is tackled using simple features, starting from the window size, capitalization, prefixes, and moving to POS and semantic tags. This work demonstrates that a simple initial step of feature engineering can improve the baseline results significantly. Hence, the contributions of this paper are: first, a short list of guidelines well supported with experimental results on three languages and, second, a detailed description of the relevance of these features for medical NER.

This work compares the post-editing productivity of professional translators and lay users. We integrate an English to Basque MT system within Bologna Translation Service, an end-to-end translation management platform, and perform a producitivity experiment in a real working environment. Six translators and six lay users translate or post-edit two texts from English into Basque. Results suggest that overall, post-editing increases translation throughput for both translators and users, although the latter seem to benefit more from the MT output. We observe that translators and users perceive MT differently. Additionally, a preliminary analysis seems to suggest that familiarity with the domain, source text complexity and MT quality might affect potential productivity gain.

This paper presents the work that has been carried out to annotate semantic roles in the Basque Dependency Treebank (BDT). We will describe the resources we have used and the way the annotation of 100 verbs has been done. We decide to follow the model proposed in the PropBank project that has been deployed in other languages, such as Chinese, Spanish, Catalan and Russian. The resources used are: an in-house database with syntactic/semantic subcategorization frames for Basque verbs, an English-Basque verb mapping based on Levin’s classification and the BDT itself. Detailed guidelines for human taggers have been established as a result of this annotation process. In addition, we have characterized the information associated to the semantic tag. Besides, and based on this study, we will define semi-automatic procedures that will facilitate the task of manual annotation for the rest of the verbs of the Treebank. We have also adapted AbarHitz, a tool used in the construction of the BDT, for the task of annotating semantic roles according to the proposed characterization.

We present our initial strategy for Spanish-to-Basque MultiEngine Machine Translation, a language pair with very different structure and word order and with no huge parallel corpus available. This hybrid proposal is based on the combination of three different MT paradigms: Example-Based MT, Statistical MT and Rule- Based MT. We have evaluated the system, reporting automatic evaluation metrics for a corpus in a test domain. The first results obtained are encouraging.

The ZT corpus (Basque Corpus of Science and Technology) is a tagged collection of specialized texts in Basque, which wants to be a main resource in research and development about written technical Basque: terminology, syntax and style. It will be the first written corpus in Basque which will be distributed by ELDA (at the end of 2006) and it wants to be a methodological and functional reference for new projects in the future (i.e. a national corpus for Basque). We also present the technology and the tools to build this Corpus. These tools, Corpusgile and Eulia, provide a flexible and extensible infrastructure for creating, visualizing and managing corpora and for consulting, visualizing and modifying annotations generated by linguistic tools.

We present the current status of development of an open architecture for the translation from Spanish into Basque. The machine translation architecture uses an open source analyser for Spanish and new modules mainly based on finite-state transducers. The project is integrated in the OpenTrad initiative, a larger government funded project shared among different universities and small companies, which will also include MT engines for translation among the main languages in Spain. The main objective is the construction of an open, reusable and interoperable framework. This paper describes the design of the engine, the formats it uses for the communication among the modules, the modules reused from other project named Matxin and the new modules we are building.