Luigi Talamo


2024

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mini-CIEP+ : A Shareable Parallel Corpus of Prose
Annemarie Verkerk | Luigi Talamo
Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) @ LREC-COLING 2024

2022

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Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German
Marie-Pauline Krielke | Luigi Talamo | Mahmoud Fawzi | Jörg Knappen
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present two comparable diachronic corpora of scientific English and German from the Late Modern Period (17th c.–19th c.) annotated with Universal Dependencies. We describe several steps of data pre-processing and evaluate the resulting parsing accuracy showing how our pre-processing steps significantly improve output quality. As a sanity check for the representativity of our data, we conduct a case study comparing previously gained insights on grammatical change in the scientific genre with our data. Our results reflect the often reported trend of English scientific discourse towards heavy noun phrases and a simplification of the sentence structure (Halliday, 1988; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Biber and Gray, 2011; Biber and Gray, 2016). We also show that this trend applies to German scientific discourse as well. The presented corpora are valuable resources suitable for the contrastive analysis of syntactic diachronic change in the scientific genre between 1650 and 1900. The presented pre-processing procedures and their evaluations are applicable to other languages and can be useful for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks such as syntactic parsing.

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Tweaking UD Annotations to Investigate the Placement of Determiners, Quantifiers and Numerals in the Noun Phrase
Luigi Talamo
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

We describe a methodology to extract with finer accuracy word order patterns from texts automatically annotated with Universal Dependency (UD) trained parsers. We use the methodology to quantify the word order entropy of determiners, quantifiers and numerals in ten Indo-European languages, using UD-parsed texts from a parallel corpus of prosaic texts. Our results suggest that the combinations of different UD annotation layers, such as UD Relations, Universal Parts of Speech and lemma, and the introduction of language-specific lists of closed-category lemmata has the two-fold effect of improving the quality of analysis and unveiling hidden areas of variability in word order patterns.