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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.