Manuela Speranza

Also published as: M. Speranza


2018

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KRAUTS: A German Temporally Annotated News Corpus
Jannik Strötgen | Anne-Lyse Minard | Lukas Lange | Manuela Speranza | Bernardo Magnini
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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The Scope and Focus of Negation: A Complete Annotation Framework for Italian
Begoña Altuna | Anne-Lyse Minard | Manuela Speranza
Proceedings of the Workshop Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles

In this paper we present a complete framework for the annotation of negation in Italian, which accounts for both negation scope and negation focus, and also for language-specific phenomena such as negative concord. In our view, the annotation of negation complements more comprehensive Natural Language Processing tasks, such as temporal information processing and sentiment analysis. We applied the proposed framework and the guidelines built on top of it to the annotation of written texts, namely news articles and tweets, thus producing annotated data for a total of over 36,000 tokens.

2016

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TextPro-AL: An Active Learning Platform for Flexible and Efficient Production of Training Data for NLP Tasks
Bernardo Magnini | Anne-Lyse Minard | Mohammed R. H. Qwaider | Manuela Speranza
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents TextPro-AL (Active Learning for Text Processing), a platform where human annotators can efficiently work to produce high quality training data for new domains and new languages exploiting Active Learning methodologies. TextPro-AL is a web-based application integrating four components: a machine learning based NLP pipeline, an annotation editor for task definition and text annotations, an incremental re-training procedure based on active learning selection from a large pool of unannotated data, and a graphical visualization of the learning status of the system.

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MEANTIME, the NewsReader Multilingual Event and Time Corpus
Anne-Lyse Minard | Manuela Speranza | Ruben Urizar | Begoña Altuna | Marieke van Erp | Anneleen Schoen | Chantal van Son
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

In this paper, we present the NewsReader MEANTIME corpus, a semantically annotated corpus of Wikinews articles. The corpus consists of 480 news articles, i.e. 120 English news articles and their translations in Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. MEANTIME contains annotations at different levels. The document-level annotation includes markables (e.g. entity mentions, event mentions, time expressions, and numerical expressions), relations between markables (modeling, for example, temporal information and semantic role labeling), and entity and event intra-document coreference. The corpus-level annotation includes entity and event cross-document coreference. Semantic annotation on the English section was performed manually; for the annotation in Italian, Spanish, and (partially) Dutch, a procedure was devised to automatically project the annotations on the English texts onto the translated texts, based on the manual alignment of the annotated elements; this enabled us not only to speed up the annotation process but also provided cross-lingual coreference. The English section of the corpus was extended with timeline annotations for the SemEval 2015 TimeLine shared task. The “First CLIN Dutch Shared Task” at CLIN26 was based on the Dutch section, while the EVALITA 2016 FactA (Event Factuality Annotation) shared task, based on the Italian section, is currently being organized.

2015

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SemEval-2015 Task 4: TimeLine: Cross-Document Event Ordering
Anne-Lyse Minard | Manuela Speranza | Eneko Agirre | Itziar Aldabe | Marieke van Erp | Bernardo Magnini | German Rigau | Rubén Urizar
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2014

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Annotating Causality in the TempEval-3 Corpus
Paramita Mirza | Rachele Sprugnoli | Sara Tonelli | Manuela Speranza
Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Causality in Language (CAtoCL)

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CROMER: a Tool for Cross-Document Event and Entity Coreference
Christian Girardi | Manuela Speranza | Rachele Sprugnoli | Sara Tonelli
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this paper we present CROMER (CROss-document Main Events and entities Recognition), a novel tool to manually annotate event and entity coreference across clusters of documents. The tool has been developed so as to handle large collections of documents, perform collaborative annotation (several annotators can work on the same clusters), and enable the linking of the annotated data to external knowledge sources. Given the availability of semantic information encoded in Semantic Web resources, this tool is designed to support annotators in linking entities and events to DBPedia and Wikipedia, so as to facilitate the automatic retrieval of additional semantic information. In this way, event modelling and chaining is made easy, while guaranteeing the highest interconnection with external resources. For example, the tool can be easily linked to event models such as the Simple Event Model [Van Hage et al , 2011] and the Grounded Annotation Framework [Fokkens et al. 2013].

2010

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Entity Mention Detection using a Combination of Redundancy-Driven Classifiers
Silvana Marianela Bernaola Biggio | Manuela Speranza | Roberto Zanoli
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

We present an experimental framework for Entity Mention Detection in which two different classifiers are combined to exploit Data Redundancy attained through the annotation of a large text corpus, as well as a number of Patterns extracted automatically from the same corpus. In order to recognize proper name, nominal, and pronominal mentions we not only exploit the information given by mentions recognized within the corpus being annotated, but also given by mentions occurring in an external and unannotated corpus. The system was first evaluated in the Evalita 2009 evaluation campaign obtaining good results. The current version is being used in a number of applications: on the one hand, it is used in the LiveMemories project, which aims at scaling up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources. On the other hand, it is used to annotate corpora, such as Italian Wikipedia, thus providing easy access to syntactic and semantic annotation for both the Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval communities. Moreover a web service version of the system is available and the system is going to be integrated into the TextPro suite of NLP tools.

2008

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Evaluation of Natural Language Tools for Italian: EVALITA 2007
Bernardo Magnini | Amedeo Cappelli | Fabio Tamburini | Cristina Bosco | Alessandro Mazzei | Vincenzo Lombardo | Francesca Bertagna | Nicoletta Calzolari | Antonio Toral | Valentina Bartalesi Lenzi | Rachele Sprugnoli | Manuela Speranza
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants’ systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages.

2006

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Ontology Population from Textual Mentions: Task Definition and Benchmark
Bernardo Magnini | Emanuele Pianta | Octavian Popescu | Manuela Speranza
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge

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Multilingual Extension of a Temporal Expression Normalizer using Annotated Corpora
E. Saquete | P. Martínez-Barco | R. Muñoz | M. Negri | M. Speranza | R. Sprugnoli
Proceedings of the Cross-Language Knowledge Induction Workshop

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I-CAB: the Italian Content Annotation Bank
B. Magnini | E. Pianta | C. Girardi | M. Negri | L. Romano | M. Speranza | V. Bartalesi Lenzi | R. Sprugnoli
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

In this paper we present work in progress for the creation of the Italian Content Annotation Bank (I-CAB), a corpus of Italian news annotated with semantic information at different levels. The first level is represented by temporal expressions, the second level is represented by different types of entities (i.e. person, organizations, locations and geo-political entities), and the third level is represented by relations between entities (e.g. the affiliation relation connecting a person to an organization). So far I-CAB has been manually annotated with temporal expressions, person entities and organization entities. As we intend I-CAB to become a benchmark for various automatic Information Extraction tasks, we followed a policy of reusing already available markup languages. In particular, we adopted the annotation schemes developed for the ACE Entity Detection and Time Expressions Recognition and Normalization tasks. As the ACE guidelines have originally been developed for English, part of the effort consisted in adapting them to the specific morpho-syntactic features of Italian. Finally, we have extended them to include a wider range of entities, such as conjunctions.

2004

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A Semantic-based Approach to Interoperabiltity of Classification Hierarchies: Evaluation of Linguistic Techniques
Bernardo Magnini | Manuela Speranza | Christian Girardi
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics