LARA (Learning and Reading Assistant) is an open source platform whose purpose is to support easy conversion of plain texts into multimodal online versions suitable for use by language learners. This involves semi-automatically tagging the text, adding other annotations and recording audio. The platform is suitable for creating texts in multiple languages via crowdsourcing techniques that can be used for teaching a language via reading and listening. We present results of initial experiments by various collaborators where we measure the time required to produce substantial LARA resources, up to the length of short novels, in Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Swedish and Turkish. The first results are encouraging. Although there are some startup problems, the conversion task seems manageable for the languages tested so far. The resulting enriched texts are posted online and are freely available in both source and compiled form.

Using rooted, directed and labeled graphs, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) abstracts away from syntactic features such as word order and does not annotate every constituent in a sentence. AMR has been specified for English and was not supposed to be an Interlingua. However, several studies strived to overcome divergences in the annotations between English AMRs and those of their target languages by refining the annotation specification. Following this line of research, we have started to build the first Turkish AMR corpus by hand-annotating 100 sentences of the Turkish translation of the novel “The Little Prince” and comparing the results with the English AMRs available for the same corpus. The next step is to prepare the Turkish AMR annotation specification for training future annotators.

In order to automate banking processes (e.g. payments, money transfers, foreign trade), we need to extract banking transactions from different types of mediums such as faxes, e-mails, and scanners. Banking orders may be considered as complex documents since they contain quite complex relations compared to traditional datasets used in relation extraction research. In this paper, we present our method to extract intersentential, nested and complex relations from banking orders, and introduce a relation extraction method based on maximal clique factorization technique. We demonstrate 11% error reduction over previous methods.

Code-switching (usage of different languages within a single conversation context in an alternative manner) is a highly increasing phenomenon in social media and colloquial usage which poses different challenges for natural language processing. This paper introduces the first study for the detection of Turkish-English code-switching and also a small test data collected from social media in order to smooth the way for further studies. The proposed system using character level n-grams and conditional random fields (CRFs) obtains 95.6% micro-averaged F1-score on the introduced test data set.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a class of linguistic forms spanning conventional word boundaries that are both idiosyncratic and pervasive across different languages. The structure of linguistic processing that depends on the clear distinction between words and phrases has to be re-thought to accommodate MWEs. The issue of MWE handling is crucial for NLP applications, where it raises a number of challenges. The emergence of solutions in the absence of guiding principles motivates this survey, whose aim is not only to provide a focused review of MWE processing, but also to clarify the nature of interactions between MWE processing and downstream applications. We propose a conceptual framework within which challenges and research contributions can be positioned. It offers a shared understanding of what is meant by “MWE processing,” distinguishing the subtasks of MWE discovery and identification. It also elucidates the interactions between MWE processing and two use cases: Parsing and machine translation. Many of the approaches in the literature can be differentiated according to how MWE processing is timed with respect to underlying use cases. We discuss how such orchestration choices affect the scope of MWE-aware systems. For each of the two MWE processing subtasks and for each of the two use cases, we conclude on open issues and research perspectives.

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project was conceived after the substantial recent interest in unifying annotation schemes across languages. With its own annotation principles and abstract inventory for parts of speech, morphosyntactic features and dependency relations, UD aims to facilitate multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. This paper presents the Turkish IMST-UD Treebank, the first Turkish treebank to be in a UD release. The IMST-UD Treebank was automatically converted from the IMST Treebank, which was also recently released. We describe this conversion procedure in detail, complete with mapping tables. We also present our evaluation of the parsing performances of both versions of the IMST Treebank. Our findings suggest that the UD framework is at least as viable for Turkish as the original annotation framework of the IMST Treebank.

The studies on dependency parsing of Turkish so far gave their results on the Turkish Dependency Treebank. This treebank consists of sentences where gold standard part-of-speech tags are manually assigned to each word and the words forming multi word expressions are also manually determined and combined into single units. For the first time, we investigate the results of parsing Turkish sentences from scratch and observe the accuracy drop at the end of processing raw data. We test one state-of-the art morphological analyzer together with two different morphological disambiguators. We both show separately the accuracy drop due to the automatic morphological processing and to the lack of multi word unit extraction. With this purpose, we use and present a new version of the Turkish Treebank where we detached the multi word expressions (MWEs) into multiple tokens and manually annotated the missing part-of-speech tags of these new tokens.

Word alignment is an important step for machine translation systems. Although the alignment performance between grammatically similar languages is reported to be very high in many studies, the case is not the same for language pairs from different language families. In this study, we are focusing on English-Turkish language pairs. Turkish is a highly agglutinative language with a very productive and rich morphology whereas English has a very poor morphology when compared to this language. As a result of this, one Turkish word is usually aligned with several English words. The traditional models which use word-level alignment approaches generally fail in such circumstances. In this study, we evaluate a Giza++ system by splitting the words into their morphological units (stem and suffixes) and compare the model with the traditional one. For the first time, we evaluate the performance of our aligner on gold standard parallel sentences rather than in a real machine translation system. Our approach reduced the alignment error rate by 40% relative. Finally, a new test corpus of 300 manually aligned sentences is released together with this study.