In this system demonstration paper, we present an open-source web-based application with a responsive design for modular semantic frame annotation (SFA). Besides letting experienced and inexperienced users do suggestion-based and slightly-controlled annotations, the system keeps track of the time and changes during the annotation process and stores the users’ confidence with the current annotation. This collected metadata can be used to get insights regarding the difficulty of an annotation with the same type or frame or can be used as an input of an annotation cost measurement for an active learning algorithm. The tool was already used to build a manually annotated corpus with semantic frames and its arguments for task 2 of SemEval 2019 regarding unsupervised lexical frame induction (QasemiZadeh et al., 2019). Although English sentences from the Wall Street Journal corpus of the Penn Treebank were annotated for this task, it is also possible to use the proposed tool for the annotation of sentences in other languages.

This paper presents Unsupervised Lexical Frame Induction, Task 2 of the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation in 2019. Given a set of prespecified syntactic forms in context, the task requires that verbs and their arguments be clustered to resemble semantic frame structures. Results are useful in identifying polysemous words, i.e., those whose frame structures are not easily distinguished, as well as discerning semantic relations of the arguments. Evaluation of unsupervised frame induction methods fell into two tracks: Task A) Verb Clustering based on FrameNet 1.7; and B) Argument Clustering, with B.1) based on FrameNet’s core frame elements, and B.2) on VerbNet 3.2 semantic roles. The shared task attracted nine teams, of whom three reported promising results. This paper describes the task and its data, reports on methods and resources that these systems used, and offers a comparison to human annotation.

This paper describes the PARSEME Shared Task 1.1 on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions. We present the annotation methodology, focusing on changes from last year’s shared task. Novel aspects include enhanced annotation guidelines, additional annotated data for most languages, corpora for some new languages, and new evaluation settings. Corpora were created for 20 languages, which are also briefly discussed. We report organizational principles behind the shared task and the evaluation metrics employed for ranking. The 17 participating systems, their methods and obtained results are also presented and analysed.

We describe the TRAPACC system and its variant TRAPACCS that participated in the closed track of the PARSEME Shared Task 2018 on labeling verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). TRAPACC is a modified arc-standard transition system based on Constant and Nivre’s (2016) model of joint syntactic and lexical analysis in which the oracle is approximated using a classifier. For TRAPACC, the classifier consists of a data-independent dimension reduction and a convolutional neural network (CNN) for learning and labelling transitions. TRAPACCS extends TRAPACC by replacing the softmax layer of the CNN with a support vector machine (SVM). We report the results obtained for 19 languages, for 8 of which our system yields the best results compared to other participating systems in the closed-track of the shared task.

This paper describes the first task on semantic relation extraction and classification in scientific paper abstracts at SemEval 2018. The challenge focuses on domain-specific semantic relations and includes three different subtasks. The subtasks were designed so as to compare and quantify the effect of different pre-processing steps on the relation classification results. We expect the task to be relevant for a broad range of researchers working on extracting specialized knowledge from domain corpora, for example but not limited to scientific or bio-medical information extraction. The task attracted a total of 32 participants, with 158 submissions across different scenarios.

We present a method for unsupervised lexical frame acquisition at the syntax–semantics interface. Given a set of input strings derived from dependency parses, our method generates a set of clusters that resemble lexical frame structures. Our work is motivated not only by its practical applications (e.g., to build, or expand the coverage of lexical frame databases), but also to gain linguistic insight into frame structures with respect to lexical distributions in relation to grammatical structures. We model our task using a hierarchical Bayesian network and employ tools and methods from latent variable probabilistic context free grammars (L-PCFGs) for statistical inference and parameter fitting, for which we propose a new split and merge procedure. We show that our model outperforms several baselines on a portion of the Wall Street Journal sentences that we have newly annotated for evaluation purposes.

This paper describes the HHU system that participated in Task 2 of SemEval 2017, Multilingual and Cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity. We introduce our unsupervised embedding learning technique and describe how it was employed and configured to address the problems of monolingual and multilingual word similarity measurement. This paper reports from empirical evaluations on the benchmark provided by the task’s organizers.

Non-Negative Randomized Word Embedding We propose a word embedding method which is based on a novel random projection technique. We show that weighting methods such as positive pointwise mutual information (PPMI) can be applied to our models after their construction and at a reduced dimensionality. Hence, the proposed technique can efficiently transfer words onto semantically discriminative spaces while demonstrating high computational performance, besides benefits such as ease of update and a simple mechanism for interoperability. We report the performance of our method on several tasks and show that it yields competitive results compared to neural embedding methods in monolingual corpus-based setups.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are known as a “pain in the neck” for NLP due to their idiosyncratic behaviour. While some categories of MWEs have been addressed by many studies, verbal MWEs (VMWEs), such as to take a decision, to break one’s heart or to turn off, have been rarely modelled. This is notably due to their syntactic variability, which hinders treating them as “words with spaces”. We describe an initiative meant to bring about substantial progress in understanding, modelling and processing VMWEs. It is a joint effort, carried out within a European research network, to elaborate universal terminologies and annotation guidelines for 18 languages. Its main outcome is a multilingual 5-million-word annotated corpus which underlies a shared task on automatic identification of VMWEs. This paper presents the corpus annotation methodology and outcome, the shared task organisation and the results of the participating systems.

We propose and evaluate a method for identifying co-hyponym lexical units in a terminological resource. The principles of term recognition and distributional semantics are combined to extract terms from a similar category of concept. Given a set of candidate terms, random projections are employed to represent them as low-dimensional vectors. These vectors are derived automatically from the frequency of the co-occurrences of the candidate terms and words that appear within windows of text in their proximity (context-windows). In a k-nearest neighbours framework, these vectors are classified using a small set of manually annotated terms which exemplify concept categories. We then investigate the interplay between the size of the corpus that is used for collecting the co-occurrences and a number of factors that play roles in the performance of the proposed method: the configuration of context-windows for collecting co-occurrences, the selection of neighbourhood size (k), and the choice of similarity metric.

This paper introduces the ACL Reference Dataset for Terminology Extraction and Classification, version 2.0 (ACL RD-TEC 2.0). The ACL RD-TEC 2.0 has been developed with the aim of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of term and entity recognition tasks based on specialised text from the computational linguistics domain. This release of the corpus consists of 300 abstracts from articles in the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus, published between 1978–2006. In these abstracts, terms (i.e., single or multi-word lexical units with a specialised meaning) are manually annotated. In addition to their boundaries in running text, annotated terms are classified into one of the seven categories method, tool, language resource (LR), LR product, model, measures and measurements, and other. To assess the quality of the annotations and to determine the difficulty of this annotation task, more than 171 of the abstracts are annotated twice, independently, by each of the two annotators. In total, 6,818 terms are identified and annotated in more than 1300 sentences, resulting in a specialised vocabulary made of 3,318 lexical forms, mapped to 3,471 concepts. We explain the development of the annotation guidelines and discuss some of the challenges we encountered in this annotation task.

People working in an office environment suffer from large volumes of information that they need to manage and access. Frequently, the problem is due to machines not being able to recognise the many implicit relationships between office artefacts, and also due to them not being aware of the context surrounding them. In order to expose these relationships and enrich artefact context, text analytics can be employed over semi-structured and unstructured content, including free text. In this paper, we explain how this strategy is applied and partly evaluated for a specific use-case: supporting the attendees of a calendar event to prepare for the meeting.

In this paper, we propose a method that combines the principles of automatic term recognition and the distributional hypothesis to identify technology terms from a corpus of scientific publications. We employ the random indexing technique to model terms’ surrounding words, which we call the context window, in a vector space at reduced dimension. The constructed vector space and a set of reference vectors, which represents manually annotated technology terms, in a k-nearest-neighbour voting classification scheme are used for term classification. In this paper, we examine a number of parameters that influence the obtained results. First, we inspect several context configurations, i.e. the effect of the context window size, the direction in which co-occurrence counts are collected, and information about the order of words within the context windows. Second, in the k-nearest-neighbour voting scheme, we study the role that neighbourhood size selection plays, i.e. the value of k. The obtained results are similar to word space models. The performed experiments suggest the best performing context are small (i.e. not wider than 3 words), are extended in both directions and encode the word order information. Moreover, the accomplished experiments suggest that the obtained results, to a great extent, are independent of the value of k.

In this paper, we address the problem of extracting technical terms automatically from an unannotated corpus. We introduce a technology term tagger that is based on Liblinear Support Vector Machines and employs linguistic features including Part of Speech tags and Dependency Structures, in addition to user feedback to perform the task of identification of technology related terms. Our experiments show the applicability of our approach as witnessed by acceptable results on precision and recall.