Literature is to some degree a snapshot of the time it was written in and the societal attitudes of the time. Not all depictions are pleasant or in-line with modern-day sensibilities; this becomes problematic when the prevalent depictions over a large body of work are negatively biased, leading to their normalisation. Many much-loved and much-read classics are set in periods of heightened social inequality: slavery, pre-womens’ rights movements, colonialism, etc. In this paper, we exploit known text co-occurrence metrics with respect to token-level level contexts to identify prevailing themes associated with known problematic descriptors. We see that prevalent, negative depictions are perpetuated by classic literature. We propose that such a methodology could form the basis of a system for making explicit such problematic associations, for interested parties: such as, sensitivity coordinators of publishing houses, library curators, or organisations concerned with social justice

Aporophobia, a negative social bias against poverty and the poor, has been highlighted asan overlooked phenomenon in toxicity detec-tion in texts. Aporophobia is potentially im-portant both as a standalone form of toxicity,but also given its potential as an aggravatingfactor in the wider stigmatization of groups. Asyet, there has been limited quantification of thisphenomenon. In this paper, we first quantifythe extent of aporophobia, as observable in Red-dit data: contrasting estimates of stigmatisingtopic propensity between low–wealth contextsand high–wealth contexts via Bayesian estima-tion. Next, we consider aporophobia as a causalfactor in the prejudicial association of groupswith stigmatising topics, by introducing peoplegroup as a variable, specifically Black people.This group is selected given its history of be-ing the subject of toxicity. We evaluate theaggravating effect on the observed n–grams in-dicative of stigmatised topics observed in com-ments which refer to Black people, due to thepresence of low–wealth contexts. We performthis evaluation via a Structural Causal Mod-elling approach, performing interventions onsimulations via Bayesian models, for three hy-pothesised causal mechanisms.

Named entity recognition (NER) on historical texts is beneficial for the field of digital humanities, as it allows to easily search for the names of people, places and other entities in digitised archives. While the task of historical NER in different languages has been gaining popularity in recent years, Dutch historical NER remains an underexplored topic. Using a recently released historical dataset from the Dutch Language Institute, we train three BERT-based models and analyse the errors to identify main challenges. All three models outperform a contemporary multilingual baseline by a large margin on historical test data.

We present a benchmark in six European languages containing manually annotated information about olfactory situations and events following a FrameNet-like approach. The documents selection covers ten domains of interest to cultural historians in the olfactory domain and includes texts published between 1620 to 1920, allowing a diachronic analysis of smell descriptions. With this work, we aim to foster the development of olfactory information extraction approaches as well as the analysis of changes in smell descriptions over time.

The growing interest in named entity recognition (NER) in various domains has led to the creation of different benchmark datasets, often with slightly different annotation guidelines. To better understand the different NER benchmark datasets for the domain of English literature and their impact on the evaluation of NER tools, we analyse two existing annotated datasets and create two additional gold standard datasets. Following on from this, we evaluate the performance of two NER tools, one domain-specific and one general-purpose NER tool, using the four gold standards, and analyse the sources for the differences in the measured performance. Our results show that the performance of the two tools varies significantly depending on the gold standard used for the individual evaluations.

This paper describes the first experiments towards tracking the complex and international network of text reuse within the Early Modern (XV-XVII centuries) community of Neo-Latin humanists. Our research, conducted within the framework of the TransLatin project, aims at gaining more evidence on the topic of textual similarities and semi-conscious reuse of literary models. It consists of two experiments conveyed through two main research fields (Information Retrieval and Stylometry), as a means to a better understanding of the complex and subtle literary mechanisms underlying the drama production of Modern Age authors and their transnational network of relations. The experiments led to the construction of networks of works and authors that fashion different patterns of similarity and models of evolution and interaction between texts.

Entities are a central element of knowledge bases and are important input to many knowledge-centric tasks including text analysis. For example, they allow us to find documents relevant to a specific entity irrespective of the underlying syntactic expression within a document. However, the entities that are commonly represented in knowledge bases are often a simplification of what is truly being referred to in text. For example, in a knowledge base, we may have an entity for Germany as a country but not for the more fuzzy concept of Germany that covers notions of German Population, German Drivers, and the German Government. Inspired by recent advances in contextual word embeddings, we introduce the concept of entity spaces - specific representations of a set of associated entities with near-identity. Thus, these entity spaces provide a handle to an amorphous grouping of entities. We developed a proof-of-concept for English showing how, through the introduction of entity spaces in the form of disambiguation pages, the recall of entity linking can be improved.

For the analysis of historical wage development, no structured data is available. Job advertisements, as found in newspapers can provide insights into what different types of jobs paid, but require language technology to structure in a format conducive to quantitative analysis. In this paper, we report on our experiments to mine wages from 19th century newspaper advertisements and detail the challenges that need to be overcome to perform a socio-economic analysis of textual data sources.

Environmental factors determine the smells we perceive, but societal factors factors shape the importance, sentiment and biases we give to them. Descriptions of smells in text, or as we call them ‘smell experiences’, offer a window into these factors, but they must first be identified. To the best of our knowledge, no tool exists to extract references to smell experiences from text. In this paper, we present two variations on a semi-supervised approach to identify smell experiences in English literature. The combined set of patterns from both implementations offer significantly better performance than a keyword-based baseline.

This shared task focuses on identifying unusual, previously-unseen entities in the context of emerging discussions. Named entities form the basis of many modern approaches to other tasks (like event clustering and summarization), but recall on them is a real problem in noisy text - even among annotators. This drop tends to be due to novel entities and surface forms. Take for example the tweet “so.. kktny in 30 mins?!” – even human experts find the entity ‘kktny’ hard to detect and resolve. The goal of this task is to provide a definition of emerging and of rare entities, and based on that, also datasets for detecting these entities. The task as described in this paper evaluated the ability of participating entries to detect and classify novel and emerging named entities in noisy text.

More and more knowledge bases are publicly available as linked data. Since these knowledge bases contain structured descriptions of real-world entities, they can be exploited by entity linking systems that anchor entity mentions from text to the most relevant resources describing those entities. In this paper, we investigate adaptation of the entity linking task using contextual knowledge. The key intuition is that entity linking can be customized depending on the textual content, as well as on the application that would make use of the extracted information. We present an adaptive approach that relies on contextual knowledge from text to enhance the performance of ADEL, a hybrid linguistic and graph-based entity linking system. We evaluate our approach on a domain-specific corpus consisting of annotated WikiNews articles.

Entity linking has become a popular task in both natural language processing and semantic web communities. However, we find that the benchmark datasets for entity linking tasks do not accurately evaluate entity linking systems. In this paper, we aim to chart the strengths and weaknesses of current benchmark datasets and sketch a roadmap for the community to devise better benchmark datasets.

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.

Named entity recognition and disambiguation are of primary importance for extracting information and for populating knowledge bases. Detecting and classifying named entities has traditionally been taken on by the natural language processing community, whilst linking of entities to external resources, such as those in DBpedia, has been tackled by the Semantic Web community. As these tasks are treated in different communities, there is as yet no oversight on the performance of these tasks combined. We present an approach that combines the state-of-the art from named entity recognition in the natural language processing domain and named entity linking from the semantic web community. We report on experiments and results to gain more insights into the strengths and limitations of current approaches on these tasks. Our approach relies on the numerous web extractors supported by the NERD framework, which we combine with a machine learning algorithm to optimize recognition and linking of named entities. We test our approach on four standard data sets that are composed of two diverse text types, namely newswire and microposts.

Both sentiment and event factuality are fundamental information levels for our understanding of events mentioned in news texts. Most research so far has focused on either modeling opinions or factuality. In this paper, we propose a model that combines the two for the extraction and interpretation of perspectives on events. By doing so, we can explain the way people perceive changes in (their belief of) the world as a function of their fears of changes to the bad or their hopes of changes to the good. This study seeks to examine the effectiveness of this approach by applying factuality annotations, based on FactBank, on top of the MPQA Corpus, a corpus containing news texts annotated for sentiments and other private states. Our findings suggest that this approach can be valuable for the understanding of perspectives, but that there is still some work to do on the refinement of the integration.

Daily news streams often revolve around topics that span over a longer period of time such as the global financial crisis or the healthcare debate in the US. The length and depth of these stories can be such that they become difficult to track for information specialists who need to reconstruct exactly what happened for policy makers and companies. We present a framework to model stories from news: we describe the characteristics that make up interesting stories, how these translate to filters on our data and we present a first use case in which we detail the steps to visualising story lines extracted from news articles about the global automotive industry.

In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to bootstrap a named entity tagger for textual databases by exploiting the database structure to automatically generate domain and database-specific gazetteer lists. We compare three tagging strategies: (i) using the extracted gazetteers in a look-up tagger, (ii) using the gazetteers to automatically extract training data to train a database-specific tagger, and (iii) using a generic named entity tagger. Our results suggest that automatically built gazetteers in combination with a look-up tagger lead to a relatively good performance and that generic taggers do not perform particularly well on this type of data.