Focus of this work is the prediction of reading times as the task is customarily dealt with in literature: that is, by collecting eye-tracking data that are averaged and employed to train learning models. We start by observing that systems trained on average values are ill-suited for the prediction of the reading times for specific subjects, as they fail to account for individual variability and accurately analyze the reading gestures of specific reader groups, or to target specific user needs. To overcome such limitation, that is to predict the reading times for a specific subject, we propose a novel approach based on creating an embedding to compactly describe her/his fixations. Embeddings are used to individuate readers that share same or similar reading behavior from a reference corpus. Models are then trained on values averaged over this subset of similar readers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms its corresponding variants, in which predictions of reading times for specific readers are based on data from all subjects rather than from the most similar ones.

Reading movements and times are a precious cue to follow reader’s strategy, and to track the underlying effort in text processing. To date, many approaches are being devised to simplify texts to overcome difficulties stemming from sentences obscure, ambiguous or deserving clarification. In the legal domain, ensuring the clarity of norms and regulations is of the utmost importance, as the full understanding of such documents lies at the foundation of core social obligations and rights. This task requires determining which utterances and text excerpts are difficult for which (sort of) reader. This investigation is the aim of the present work. We propose a preliminary study based on eye-tracking data of 61 readers, with focus on individuating different reader profiles, and on predicting reading times of our readers.

Biographical event detection is a relevant task that allows for the exploration and comparison of the ways in which people’s lives are told and represented. This may support several real-life applications in digital humanities and in works aimed at exploring bias about minoritized groups. Despite that, there are no corpora and models specifically designed for this task. In this paper we fill this gap by presenting a new corpus annotated for biographical event detection. The corpus, which includes 20 Wikipedia biographies, was aligned with 5 existing corpora in order to train a model for the biographical event detection task. The model was able to detect all mentions of the target-entity in a biography with an F-score of 0.808 and the entity-related events with an F-score of 0.859. Finally, the model was used for performing an analysis of biases about women and non-Western people in Wikipedia biographies.

Despite biographies are widely spread within the Semantic Web, resources and approaches to automatically extract biographical events are limited. Such limitation reduces the amount of structured, machine-readable biographical information, especially about people belonging to underrepresented groups. Our work challenges this limitation by providing a set of guidelines for the semantic annotation of life events. The guidelines are designed to be interoperable with existing ISO-standards for semantic annotation: ISO-TimeML (SO-24617-1), and SemAF (ISO-24617-4). Guidelines were tested through an annotation task of Wikipedia biographies of underrepresented writers, namely authors born in non-Western countries, migrants, or belonging to ethnic minorities. 1,000 sentences were annotated by 4 annotators with an average Inter-Annotator Agreement of 0.825. The resulting corpus was mapped on OntoNotes. Such mapping allowed to to expand our corpus, showing that already existing resources may be exploited for the biographical event extraction task.

We present LESSLEX, a novel multilingual lexical resource. Different from the vast majority of existing approaches, we ground our embeddings on a sense inventory made available from the BabelNet semantic network. In this setting, multilingual access is governed by the mapping of terms onto their underlying sense descriptions, such that all vectors co-exist in the same semantic space. As a result, for each term we have thus the “blended” terminological vector along with those describing all senses associated to that term. LESSLEX has been tested on three tasks relevant to lexical semantics: conceptual similarity, contextual similarity, and semantic text similarity. We experimented over the principal data sets for such tasks in their multilingual and crosslingual variants, improving on or closely approaching state-of-the-art results. We conclude by arguing that LESSLEX vectors may be relevant for practical applications and for research on conceptual and lexical access and competence.

In this paper we report on the participation of the MERALI system to the SemEval Task 2 Subtask 1. The MERALI system approaches conceptual similarity through a simple, cognitively inspired, heuristics; it builds on a linguistic resource, the TTCS-e, that relies on BabelNet, NASARI and ConceptNet. The linguistic resource in fact contains a novel mixture of common-sense and encyclopedic knowledge. The obtained results point out that there is ample room for improvement, so that they are used to elaborate on present limitations and on future steps.

In this paper we introduce the TTCS^ℰ, a linguistic resource that relies on BabelNet, NASARI and ConceptNet, that has now been used to compute the conceptual similarity between concept pairs. The conceptual representation herein provides uniform access to concepts based on BabelNet synset IDs, and consists of a vector-based semantic representation which is compliant with the Conceptual Spaces, a geometric framework for common-sense knowledge representation and reasoning. The TTCS^ℰ has been evaluated in a preliminary experimentation on a conceptual similarity task.