Bolette Sandford Pedersen

Also published as: Bo Pedersen, Bolette Pedersen, Bolette S. Pedersen, Bolette Sandford Pedersen


2023

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Probing for Hyperbole in Pre-Trained Language Models
Nina Schneidermann | Daniel Hershcovich | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Hyperbole is a common figure of speech, which is under-explored in NLP research. In this study, we conduct edge and minimal description length (MDL) probing experiments on three pre-trained language models (PLMs) in an attempt to explore the extent to which hyperbolic information is encoded in these models. We use both word-in-context and sentence-level representations as model inputs as a basis for comparison. We also annotate 63 hyperbole sentences from the HYPO dataset according to an operational taxonomy to conduct an error analysis to explore the encoding of different hyperbole categories. Our results show that hyperbole is to a limited extent encoded in PLMs, and mostly in the final layers. They also indicate that hyperbolic information may be better encoded by the sentence-level representations, which, due to the pragmatic nature of hyperbole, may therefore provide a more accurate and informative representation in PLMs. Finally, the inter-annotator agreement for our annotations, a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.339, suggest that the taxonomy categories may not be intuitive and need revision or simplification.

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The DA-ELEXIS Corpus - a Sense-Annotated Corpus for Danish with Parallel Annotations for Nine European Languages
Bolette Pedersen | Sanni Nimb | Sussi Olsen | Thomas Troelsgård | Ida Flörke | Jonas Jensen | Henrik Lorentzen
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023)

In this paper, we present the newly compiled DA-ELEXIS Corpus, which is one of the largest sense-annotated corpora available for Danish, and the first one to be annotated with the Danish wordnet, DanNet. The corpus is part of a European initiative, the ELEXIS project, and has corresponding parallel annotations in nine other European languages. As such it functions as a cross-lingual evaluative benchmark for a series of low and medium resourced European language. We focus here on the Danish annotation process, i.e. on the annotation scheme including annotation guidelines and a primary sense inventory constituted by DanNet as well as the fall-back sense inventory namely The Danish Dictionary (DDO). We analyse and discuss issues such as out of vocabulary (OOV) problems, problems with sense granularity and missing senses (in particular for verbs), and how to semantically tag multiword expressions (MWE), which prove to occur very frequently in the Danish corpus. Finally, we calculate the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) and show how IAA has improved during the annotation process. The openly available corpus contains 32,524 tokens of which sense annotations are given for all content words, amounting to 7,322 nouns, 3,099 verbs, 2,626 adjectives, and 1,677 adverbs.

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Sentiment Classification of Historical Danish and Norwegian Literary Texts
Ali Allaith | Kirstine Degn | Alexander Conroy | Bolette Pedersen | Jens Bjerring-Hansen | Daniel Hershcovich
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Sentiment classification is valuable for literary analysis, as sentiment is crucial in literary narratives. It can, for example, be used to investigate a hypothesis in the literary analysis of 19th-century Scandinavian novels that the writing of female authors in this period was characterized by negative sentiment, as this paper shows. In order to enable a data-driven analysis of this hypothesis, we create a manually annotated dataset of sentence-level sentiment annotations for novels from this period and use it to train and evaluate various sentiment classification methods. We find that pre-trained multilingual language models outperform models trained on modern Danish, as well as classifiers based on lexical resources. Finally, in classifier-assisted corpus analysis, we confirm the literary hypothesis regarding the author’s gender and further shed light on the temporal development of the trend. Our dataset and trained models will be useful for future analysis of historical Danish and Norwegian literary texts.

2022

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Evaluating a New Danish Sentiment Resource: the Danish Sentiment Lexicon, DSL
Nina Schneidermann | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Linked Data

In this paper, we evaluate a new sentiment lexicon for Danish, the Danish Sentiment Lexicon (DSL), to gain input regarding how to carry out the final adjustments of the lexicon. A feature of the lexicon that differentiates it from other sentiment resources for Danish is that it is linked to a large number of other Danish lexical resources via the DDO lemma and sense inventory and the LLOD via the Danish wordnet, DanNet. We perform our evaluation on four datasets labeled with sentiments. In addition, we compare the lexicon against two existing benchmarks for Danish: the Afinn and the Sentida resources. We observe that DSL performs mostly comparably to the existing resources, but that more fine-grained explorations need to be done in order to fully exploit its possibilities given its linking properties.

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Compiling a Suitable Level of Sense Granularity in a Lexicon for AI Purposes: The Open Source COR Lexicon
Bolette Pedersen | Nathalie Carmen Hau Sørensen | Sanni Nimb | Ida Flørke | Sussi Olsen | Thomas Troelsgård
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present The Central Word Register for Danish (COR), which is an open source lexicon project for general AI purposes funded and initiated by the Danish Agency for Digitisation as part of an AI initiative embarked by the Danish Government in 2020. We focus here on the lexical semantic part of the project (COR-S) and describe how we – based on the existing fine-grained sense inventory from Den Danske Ordbog (DDO) – compile a more AI suitable sense granularity level of the vocabulary. A three-step methodology is applied: We establish a set of linguistic principles for defining core senses in COR-S and from there, we generate a hand-crafted gold standard of 6,000 lemmas depicting how to come from the fine-grained DDO sense to the COR inventory. Finally, we experiment with a number of language models in order to automatize the sense reduction of the rest of the lexicon. The models comprise a ruled-based model that applies our linguistic principles in terms of features, a word2vec model using cosine similarity to measure the sense proximity, and finally a deep neural BERT model fine-tuned on our annotations. The rule-based approach shows best results, in particular on adjectives, however, when focusing on the average polysemous vocabulary, the BERT model shows promising results too.

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A Thesaurus-based Sentiment Lexicon for Danish: The Danish Sentiment Lexicon
Sanni Nimb | Sussi Olsen | Bolette Pedersen | Thomas Troelsgård
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes how a newly published Danish sentiment lexicon with a high lexical coverage was compiled by use of lexicographic methods and based on the links between groups of words listed in semantic order in a thesaurus and the corresponding word sense descriptions in a comprehensive monolingual dictionary. The overall idea was to identify negative and positive sections in a thesaurus, extract the words from these sections and combine them with the dictionary information via the links. The annotation task of the dataset included several steps, and was based on the comparison of synonyms and near synonyms within a semantic field. In the cases where one of the words were included in the smaller Danish sentiment lexicon AFINN, its value there was used as inspiration and expanded to the synonyms when appropriate. In order to obtain a more practical lexicon with overall polarity values at lemma level, all the senses of the lemma were afterwards compared, taking into consideration dictionary information such as usage, style and frequency. The final lexicon contains 13,859 Danish polarity lemmas and includes morphological information. It is freely available at https://github.com/dsldk/danish-sentiment-lexicon (licence CC-BY-SA 4.0 International).

2021

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DanNet2: Extending the coverage of adjectives in DanNet based on thesaurus data (project presentation)
Sanni Nimb | Bolette Pedersen | Sussi Olsen
Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference

The paper describes work in progress in the DanNet2 project financed by the Carlsberg Foundation. The project aim is to extend the original Danish wordnet, DanNet, in several ways. Main focus is on extension of the coverage and description of the adjectives, a part of speech that was rather sparsely described in the original wordnet. We describe the methodology and initial work of semi-automatically transferring adjectives from the Danish Thesaurus to the wordnet with the aim of easily enlarging the coverage from 3,000 to approx. 13,000 adjectival synsets. Transfer is performed by manually encoding all missing adjectival subsection headwords from the thesaurus and thereafter employing a semi-automatic procedure where adjectives from the same subsection are transferred to the wordnet as either 1) near synonyms to the section’s headword, 2) hyponyms to the section’s headword, or 3) as members of the same synset as the headword. We also discuss how to deal with the problem of multiple representations of the same sense in the thesaurus, and present other types of information from the thesaurus that we plan to integrate, such as thematic and sentiment information.

2020

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Building Sense Representations in Danish by Combining Word Embeddings with Lexical Resources
Ida Rørmann Olsen | Bolette Pedersen | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the 2020 Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography

Our aim is to identify suitable sense representations for NLP in Danish. We investigate sense inventories that correlate with human interpretations of word meaning and ambiguity as typically described in dictionaries and wordnets and that are well reflected distributionally as expressed in word embeddings. To this end, we study a number of highly ambiguous Danish nouns and examine the effectiveness of sense representations constructed by combining vectors from a distributional model with the information from a wordnet. We establish representations based on centroids obtained from wordnet synests and example sentences as well as representations established via are tested in a word sense disambiguation task. We conclude that the more information extracted from the wordnet entries (example sentence, definition, semantic relations) the more successful the sense representation vector.

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A Multilingual Evaluation Dataset for Monolingual Word Sense Alignment
Sina Ahmadi | John Philip McCrae | Sanni Nimb | Fahad Khan | Monica Monachini | Bolette Pedersen | Thierry Declerck | Tanja Wissik | Andrea Bellandi | Irene Pisani | Thomas Troelsgård | Sussi Olsen | Simon Krek | Veronika Lipp | Tamás Váradi | László Simon | András Gyorffy | Carole Tiberius | Tanneke Schoonheim | Yifat Ben Moshe | Maya Rudich | Raya Abu Ahmad | Dorielle Lonke | Kira Kovalenko | Margit Langemets | Jelena Kallas | Oksana Dereza | Theodorus Fransen | David Cillessen | David Lindemann | Mikel Alonso | Ana Salgado | José Luis Sancho | Rafael-J. Ureña-Ruiz | Jordi Porta Zamorano | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova | Zara Kancheva | Ivaylo Radev | Ranka Stanković | Andrej Perdih | Dejan Gabrovsek
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Aligning senses across resources and languages is a challenging task with beneficial applications in the field of natural language processing and electronic lexicography. In this paper, we describe our efforts in manually aligning monolingual dictionaries. The alignment is carried out at sense-level for various resources in 15 languages. Moreover, senses are annotated with possible semantic relationships such as broadness, narrowness, relatedness, and equivalence. In comparison to previous datasets for this task, this dataset covers a wide range of languages and resources and focuses on the more challenging task of linking general-purpose language. We believe that our data will pave the way for further advances in alignment and evaluation of word senses by creating new solutions, particularly those notoriously requiring data such as neural networks. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/elexis-eu/MWSA.

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World Class Language Technology - Developing a Language Technology Strategy for Danish
Sabine Kirchmeier | Bolette Pedersen | Sanni Nimb | Philip Diderichsen | Peter Juel Henrichsen
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Although Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in Europe, no coordinated efforts have been made in recent years to support the Danish language with regard to language technology and artificial intelligence. In March 2019, however, the Danish government adopted a new, ambitious strategy for LT and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we describe the process behind the development of the language-related parts of the strategy: A Danish Language Technology Committee was constituted and a comprehensive series of workshops were organized in which users, suppliers, developers, and researchers gave their valuable input based on their experiences. We describe how, based on this experience, the focus areas and recommendations for the LT strategy were established, and which steps are currently taken in order to put the strategy into practice.

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The European Language Technology Landscape in 2020: Language-Centric and Human-Centric AI for Cross-Cultural Communication in Multilingual Europe
Georg Rehm | Katrin Marheinecke | Stefanie Hegele | Stelios Piperidis | Kalina Bontcheva | Jan Hajič | Khalid Choukri | Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Gerhard Backfried | Christoph Prinz | José Manuel Gómez-Pérez | Luc Meertens | Paul Lukowicz | Josef van Genabith | Andrea Lösch | Philipp Slusallek | Morten Irgens | Patrick Gatellier | Joachim Köhler | Laure Le Bars | Dimitra Anastasiou | Albina Auksoriūtė | Núria Bel | António Branco | Gerhard Budin | Walter Daelemans | Koenraad De Smedt | Radovan Garabík | Maria Gavriilidou | Dagmar Gromann | Svetla Koeva | Simon Krek | Cvetana Krstev | Krister Lindén | Bernardo Magnini | Jan Odijk | Maciej Ogrodniczuk | Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson | Mike Rosner | Bolette Pedersen | Inguna Skadiņa | Marko Tadić | Dan Tufiș | Tamás Váradi | Kadri Vider | Andy Way | François Yvon
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

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Towards a Gold Standard for Evaluating Danish Word Embeddings
Nina Schneidermann | Rasmus Hvingelby | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents the process of compiling a model-agnostic similarity goal standard for evaluating Danish word embeddings based on human judgments made by 42 native speakers of Danish. Word embeddings resemble semantic similarity solely by distribution (meaning that word vectors do not reflect relatedness as differing from similarity), and we argue that this generalization poses a problem in most intrinsic evaluation scenarios. In order to be able to evaluate on both dimensions, our human-generated dataset is therefore designed to reflect the distinction between relatedness and similarity. The goal standard is applied for evaluating the “goodness” of six existing word embedding models for Danish, and it is discussed how a relatively low correlation can be explained by the fact that semantic similarity is substantially more challenging to model than relatedness, and that there seems to be a need for future human judgments to measure similarity in full context and along more than a single spectrum.

2019

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Merging DanNet with Princeton Wordnet
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Sanni Nimb | Ida Rørmann Olsen | Sussi Olsen
Proceedings of the 10th Global Wordnet Conference

In this paper we describe the merge of the Danish wordnet, DanNet, with Princeton Wordnet applying a two-step approach. We first link from the English Princeton core to Danish (5,000 base concepts) and then proceed to linking the rest of the Danish vocabulary to English, thus going from Danish to English. Since the Danish wordnet is built bottom-up from Danish lexica and corpora, all taxonomies are monolingually based and thus not necessarily directly compatible with the coverage and structure of the Princeton WordNet. This fact proves to pose some challenges to the linking procedure since a considerable number of the links cannot be realised via the preferred cross-language synonym link which implies a more or less precise correlation between the two concepts. Instead, a subpart of the links are realised through near synonym or hyponymy links to compensate for the fact that no precise translation can be found in the target resource. The tool WordnetLoom is currently used for manual linking but procedures for a more automatic procedure in future is discussed. We conclude that the two resources actually differ from each other quite more than expected, both vocabulary and structure-wise.

2018

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A Danish FrameNet Lexicon and an Annotated Corpus Used for Training and Evaluating a Semantic Frame Classifier
Bolette Pedersen | Sanni Nimb | Anders Søgaard | Mareike Hartmann | Sussi Olsen
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Towards a principled approach to sense clustering – a case study of wordnet and dictionary senses in Danish
Bolette Pedersen | Manex Agirrezabal | Sanni Nimb | Ida Olsen | Sussi Olsen
Proceedings of the 9th Global Wordnet Conference

Our aim is to develop principled methods for sense clustering which can make existing lexical resources practically useful in NLP – not too fine-grained to be operational and yet finegrained enough to be worth the trouble. Where traditional dictionaries have a highly structured sense inventory typically describing the vocabulary by means of mainand subsenses, wordnets are generally fine-grained and unstructured. We present a series of clustering and annotation experiments with 10 of the most polysemous nouns in Danish. We combine the structured information of a traditional Danish dictionary with the ontological types found in the Danish wordnet, DanNet. This constellation enables us to automatically cluster senses in a principled way and improve inter-annotator agreement and wsd performance.

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ELEXIS - a European infrastructure fostering cooperation and information exchange among lexicographical research communities
Bolette Pedersen | John McCrae | Carole Tiberius | Simon Krek
Proceedings of the 9th Global Wordnet Conference

The paper describes objectives, concept and methodology for ELEXIS, a European infrastructure fostering cooperation and information exchange among lexicographical research communities. The infrastructure is a newly granted project under the Horizon 2020 INFRAIA call, with the topic Integrating Activities for Starting Communities. The project is planned to start in January 2018.

2016

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The SemDaX Corpus ― Sense Annotations with Scalable Sense Inventories
Bolette Pedersen | Anna Braasch | Anders Johannsen | Héctor Martínez Alonso | Sanni Nimb | Sussi Olsen | Anders Søgaard | Nicolai Hartvig Sørensen
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

We launch the SemDaX corpus which is a recently completed Danish human-annotated corpus available through a CLARIN academic license. The corpus includes approx. 90,000 words, comprises six textual domains, and is annotated with sense inventories of different granularity. The aim of the developed corpus is twofold: i) to assess the reliability of the different sense annotation schemes for Danish measured by qualitative analyses and annotation agreement scores, and ii) to serve as training and test data for machine learning algorithms with the practical purpose of developing sense taggers for Danish. To these aims, we take a new approach to human-annotated corpus resources by double annotating a much larger part of the corpus than what is normally seen: for the all-words task we double annotated 60% of the material and for the lexical sample task 100%. We include in the corpus not only the adjucated files, but also the diverging annotations. In other words, we consider not all disagreement to be noise, but rather to contain valuable linguistic information that can help us improve our annotation schemes and our learning algorithms.

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An empirically grounded expansion of the supersense inventory
Hector Martinez Alonso | Anders Johannsen | Sanni Nimb | Sussi Olsen | Bolette Pedersen
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)

In this article we present an expansion of the supersense inventory. All new super-senses are extensions of members of the current inventory, which we postulate by identifying semantically coherent groups of synsets. We cover the expansion of the already-established supernsense inventory for nouns and verbs, the addition of coarse supersenses for adjectives in absence of a canonical supersense inventory, and super-senses for verbal satellites. We evaluate the viability of the new senses examining the annotation agreement, frequency and co-ocurrence patterns.

2015

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Supersense tagging for Danish
Héctor Martínez Alonso | Anders Johannsen | Sussi Olsen | Sanni Nimb | Nicolai Hartvig Sørensen | Anna Braasch | Anders Søgaard | Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2015)

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Proceedings of the workshop on Semantic resources and semantic annotation for Natural Language Processing and the Digital Humanities at NODALIDA 2015
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Sussi Olsen | Lars Borin
Proceedings of the workshop on Semantic resources and semantic annotation for Natural Language Processing and the Digital Humanities at NODALIDA 2015

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Coarse-grained sense annotation of Danish across textual domains
Sussi Olsen | Bolette S. Pedersen | Héctor Martínez Alonso | Anders Johannsen
Proceedings of the workshop on Semantic resources and semantic annotation for Natural Language Processing and the Digital Humanities at NODALIDA 2015

2014

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The Strategic Impact of META-NET on the Regional, National and International Level
Georg Rehm | Hans Uszkoreit | Sophia Ananiadou | Núria Bel | Audronė Bielevičienė | Lars Borin | António Branco | Gerhard Budin | Nicoletta Calzolari | Walter Daelemans | Radovan Garabík | Marko Grobelnik | Carmen García-Mateo | Josef van Genabith | Jan Hajič | Inma Hernáez | John Judge | Svetla Koeva | Simon Krek | Cvetana Krstev | Krister Lindén | Bernardo Magnini | Joseph Mariani | John McNaught | Maite Melero | Monica Monachini | Asunción Moreno | Jan Odijk | Maciej Ogrodniczuk | Piotr Pęzik | Stelios Piperidis | Adam Przepiórkowski | Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson | Michael Rosner | Bolette Pedersen | Inguna Skadiņa | Koenraad De Smedt | Marko Tadić | Paul Thompson | Dan Tufiş | Tamás Váradi | Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Kadri Vider | Jolanta Zabarskaite
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

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CLARA: A New Generation of Researchers in Common Language Resources and Their Applications
Koenraad De Smedt | Erhard Hinrichs | Detmar Meurers | Inguna Skadiņa | Bolette Pedersen | Costanza Navarretta | Núria Bel | Krister Lindén | Markéta Lopatková | Jan Hajič | Gisle Andersen | Przemyslaw Lenkiewicz
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

CLARA (Common Language Resources and Their Applications) is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network which ran from 2009 until 2014 with the aim of providing researcher training in crucial areas related to language resources and infrastructure. The scope of the project was broad and included infrastructure design, lexical semantic modeling, domain modeling, multimedia and multimodal communication, applications, and parsing technologies and grammar models. An international consortium of 9 partners and 12 associate partners employed researchers in 19 new positions and organized a training program consisting of 10 thematic courses and summer/winter schools. The project has resulted in new theoretical insights as well as new resources and tools. Most importantly, the project has trained a new generation of researchers who can perform advanced research and development in language resources and technologies.

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Encompassing a spectrum of LT users in the CLARIN-DK Infrastructure
Lina Henriksen | Dorte Haltrup Hansen | Bente Maegaard | Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Claus Povlsen
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

CLARIN-DK is a platform with language resources constituting the Danish part of the European infrastructure CLARIN ERIC. Unlike some other language based infrastructures CLARIN-DK is not solely a repository for upload and storage of data, but also a platform of web services permitting the user to process data in various ways. This involves considerable complications in relation to workflow requirements. The CLARIN-DK interface must guide the user to perform the necessary steps of a workflow; even when the user is inexperienced and perhaps has an unclear conception of the requested results. This paper describes a user driven approach to creating a user interface specification for CLARIN-DK. We indicate how different user profiles determined different crucial interface design options. We also describe some use cases established in order to give illustrative examples of how the platform may facilitate research.

2013

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Nordic and Baltic Wordnets Aligned and Compared through “WordTies”
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Lars Borin | Markus Forsberg | Neeme Kahusk | Krister Lindén | Jyrki Niemi | Niklas Nisbeth | Lars Nygaard | Heili Orav | Eirikur Rögnvaldsson | Mitchell Seaton | Kadri Vider | Kaarlo Voionmaa
Proceedings of the 19th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2013)

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Baltic and Nordic Parts of the European Linguistic Infrastructure
Inguna Skadiņa | Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Lars Borin | Krister Lindén | Gyri Losnegaard | Sussi Olsen | Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Roberts Rozis | Koenraad De Smedt
Proceedings of the 19th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2013)

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Annotation of regular polysemy and underspecification
Héctor Martínez Alonso | Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Núria Bel
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2012

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A voting scheme to detect semantic underspecification
Héctor Martínez Alonso | Núria Bel | Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The following work describes a voting system to automatically classify the sense selection of the complex types Location/Organization and Container/Content, which depend on regular polysemy, as described by the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) . This kind of sense alternations very often presents semantic underspecificacion between its two possible selected senses. This kind of underspecification is not traditionally contemplated in word sense disambiguation systems, as disambiguation systems are still coping with the need of a representation and recognition of underspecification (Pustejovsky, 2009) The data are characterized by the morphosyntactic and lexical enviroment of the headwords and provided as input for a classifier. The baseline decision tree classifier is compared against an eight-member voting scheme obtained from variants of the training data generated by modifications on the class representation and from two different classification algorithms, namely decision trees and k-nearest neighbors. The voting system improves the accuracy for the non-underspecified senses, but the underspecified sense remains difficult to identify

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Towards a richer wordnet representation of properties
Sanni Nimb | Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

This paper discusses how information on properties in a currently developed Danish thesaurus can be transferred to the Danish wordnet, DanNet, and in this way enrich the wordnet with the highly relevant links between properties and their external arguments (i.e. tasty ― food). In spite of the fact that the thesaurus is still under development (two thirds still to be compiled) we perform an automatic transfer of relations from the thesaurus to the wordnet which shows promising results. In all, 2,362 property relations are automatically transferred to DanNet and 2% of the transferred material is manually validated. The pilot validation indicates that approx. 90 % of the transferred relations are correctly assigned whereas around 10% are either erroneous or just not very informative, a fact which, however, can partly be explained by the incompleteness of the material at its current stage. As a further consequence, the experiment has led to a richer specification of the editor guidelines to be used in the last compilation phase of the thesaurus.

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Creation of an Open Shared Language Resource Repository in the Nordic and Baltic Countries
Andrejs Vasiļjevs | Markus Forsberg | Tatiana Gornostay | Dorte Haltrup Hansen | Kristín Jóhannsdóttir | Gunn Lyse | Krister Lindén | Lene Offersgaard | Sussi Olsen | Bolette Pedersen | Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson | Inguna Skadiņa | Koenraad De Smedt | Ville Oksanen | Roberts Rozis
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.

2011

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Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2011)
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Gunta Nešpore | Inguna Skadiņa
Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2011)

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Identification of sense selection in regular polysemy using shallow features
Héctor Martínez Alonso | Núria Bel | Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2011)

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“Andre ord” – a wordnet browser for the Danish wordnet, DanNet
Anders Johannsen | Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2011)

2010

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Merging Specialist Taxonomies and Folk Taxonomies in Wordnets - A case Study of Plants, Animals and Foods in the Danish Wordnet
Bolette S. Pedersen | Sanni Nimb | Anna Braasch
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

In this paper we investigate the problem of merging specialist taxonomies with the more intuitive folk taxonomies in lexical-semantic resources like wordnets; and we focus in particular on plants, animals and foods. We show that a traditional dictionary like Den Danske Ordbog (DDO) survives well with several inconsistencies between different taxonomies of the vocabulary and that a restructuring is therefore necessary in order to compile a consistent wordnet resource on its basis. To this end, we apply Cruse’s definitions for hyponymies, namely those of natural kinds (such as plants and animals) on the one hand and functional kinds (such as foods) on the other. We pursue this distinction in the development of the Danish wordnet, DanNet, which has recently been built on the basis of DDO and is made open source for all potential users at www.wordnet.dk. Not surprisingly, we conclude that cultural background influences the structure of folk taxonomies quite radically, and that wordnet builders must therefore consider these carefully in order to capture their central characteristics in a systematic way.

2009

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What do we need to know about humans? A view into the DanNet database
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Anna Braasch
Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2009)

2008

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Merging a Syntactic Resource with a WordNet: a Feasibility Study of a Merge between STO and DanNet
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Anna Braasch | Lina Henriksen | Sussi Olsen | Claus Povlsen
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper presents a feasibility study of a merge between SprogTeknologisk Ordbase (STO), which contains morphological and syntactic information, and DanNet, which is a Danish WordNet containing semantic information in terms of synonym sets and semantic relations. The aim of the merge is to develop a richer, composite resource which we believe will have a broader usage perspective than the two seen in isolation. In STO, the organizing principle is based on the observable syntactic features of a lemma’s near context (labeled syntactic units or SynUs). In contrast, the basic unit in DanNet is constituted by semantic senses or - in wordnet terminology - synonym sets (synsets). The merge of the two resources is thus basically to be understood as a linking between SynUs and synsets. In the paper we discuss which parts of the merge can be performed semi-automatically and which parts require manual linguistic matching procedures. We estimate that this manual work will amount to approx. 39% of the lexicon material.

2006

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Query Expansion on Compounds
Bolette Sandford Pedersen
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

Compounds constitute a specific issue in search, in particular in languages where they are written in one word, as is the case for Danish and the other Scandinavian languages. For such languages, expansion of the query compound into separate lemmas is a way of finding the often frequent alternative synonymous phrases in which the content of a compound can also be expressed. However, it is crucial to note that the number of irrelevant hits is generally very high when using this expansion strategy. The aim of this paper is to examine how we can obtain better search results on split compounds, partly by looking at the internal structure of the original compound, partly by analyzing the context in which the split compound occurs. We perform an NP analysis and introduce a new, linguistically based threshold for retrieved hits. The results obtained by using this strategy demonstrate that compound splitting combined with a shallow linguistic analysis focusing on the recognition of NPs can improve search by bringing down the number of irrelevant hits.

2004

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“Human Language Technology Elements in a Knowledge Organisation System - The VID Project”
Costanza Navarretta | Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Dorte Haltrup Hansen
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

This paper describes how Human Language Technologies and linguistic resources are used to support the construction of components of a knowledge organisation system. In particular we focus on methodologies and resources for building a corpus-based domain ontology and extracting relevant metadata information for text chunks from domain-specific corpora.

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Some Tests of an Unsupervised Model of Language Acquisition
Bo Pedersen | Shimon Edelman | Zach Solan | David Horn
Proceedings of the Workshop on Psycho-Computational Models of Human Language Acquisition

2002

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Semantic Lexical Resources Applied to Content-based Querying - the OntoQuery Project
Bolette S. Pedersen | Patrizia Paggio
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)

2000

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Semantic Encoding of Danish Verbs in SIMPLE - Adapting a Verb Framed Model to a Satellite-framed Language
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Sanni Nimb
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’00)

1999

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SIMPLE- Semantic Information for Multifunctional Plurilingual Lexica: Some Examples of Danish” Concrete Nouns
Bolette Sandford Pedersen | Britt Keson
SIGLEX99: Standardizing Lexical Resources

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