Ancient manuscripts are frequently damaged, containing gaps in the text known as lacunae. In this paper, we present a bidirectional RNN model for character prediction of Coptic characters in manuscript lacunae. Our best model performs with 72% accuracy on single character reconstruction, but falls to 37% when reconstructing lacunae of various lengths. While not suitable for definitive manuscript reconstruction, we argue that our RNN model can help scholars rank the likelihood of textual reconstructions. As evidence, we use our RNN model to rank reconstructions in two early Coptic manuscripts. Our investigation shows that neural models can augment traditional methods of textual restoration, providing scholars with an additional tool to assess lacunae in Coptic manuscripts.
As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for Information Retrieval (IR) and other downstream applications such as controllable summarization. In this paper, we present and evaluate GUMsley, the first entity salience dataset covering all named and non-named salient entities for 12 genres of English text, aligned with entity types, Wikification links and full coreference resolution annotations. We promote a strict definition of salience using human summaries and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement for salience based on whether a source entity is mentioned in the summary. Our evaluation shows poor performance by pre-trained SOTA summarization models and zero-shot LLM prompting in capturing salient entities in generated summaries. We also show that predicting or providing salient entities to several model architectures enhances performance and helps derive higher-quality summaries by alleviating the entity hallucination problem in existing abstractive summarization.
This paper presents DISRPT, a multilingual, multi-domain, and cross-framework benchmark dataset for discourse processing, covering the tasks of discourse unit segmentation, connective identification, and relation classification. DISRPT includes 13 languages, with data from 24 corpora covering about 4 millions tokens and around 250,000 discourse relation instances from 4 discourse frameworks: RST, SDRT, PDTB, and Discourse Dependencies. We present an overview of the data, its development across three NLP shared tasks on discourse processing carried out in the past five years, and the latest modifications and added extensions. We also carry out an evaluation of state-of-the-art multilingual systems trained on the data for each task, showing plateau performance on segmentation, but important room for improvement for connective identification and relation classification. The DISRPT benchmark employs a unified format that we make available on GitHub and HuggingFace in order to encourage future work on discourse processing across languages, domains, and frameworks.
Singleton mentions, i.e. entities mentioned only once in a text, are important to how humans understand discourse from a theoretical perspective. However previous attempts to incorporate their detection in end-to-end neural coreference resolution for English have been hampered by the lack of singleton mention spans in the OntoNotes benchmark. This paper addresses this limitation by combining predicted mentions from existing nested NER systems and features derived from OntoNotes syntax trees. With this approach, we create a near approximation of the OntoNotes dataset with all singleton mentions, achieving ~94% recall on a sample of gold singletons. We then propose a two-step neural mention and coreference resolution system, named SPLICE, and compare its performance to the end-to-end approach in two scenarios: the OntoNotes test set and the out-of-domain (OOD) OntoGUM corpus. Results indicate that reconstructed singleton training yields results comparable to end-to-end systems for OntoNotes, while improving OOD stability (+1.1 avg. F1). We conduct error analysis for mention detection and delve into its impact on coreference clustering, revealing that precision improvements deliver more substantial benefits than increases in recall for resolving coreference chains.
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements—for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders—are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a ‘UCxn’ annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.
The aim of the Universal Anaphora initiative is to push forward the state of the art in anaphora and anaphora resolution by expanding the aspects of anaphoric interpretation which are or can be reliably annotated in anaphoric corpora, producing unified standards to annotate and encode these annotations, delivering datasets encoded according to these standards, and developing methods for evaluating models that carry out this type of interpretation. Although several papers on aspects of the initiative have appeared, no overall description of the initiative’s goals, proposals and achievements has been published yet except as an online draft. This paper aims to fill this gap, as well as to discuss its progress so far.
Despite recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), hierarchical discourse parsing in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory remains challenging, and our understanding of the reasons for this are as yet limited. In this paper, we examine and model some of the factors associated with parsing difficulties in previous work: the existence of implicit discourse relations, challenges in identifying long-distance relations, out-of-vocabulary items, and more. In order to assess the relative importance of these variables, we also release two annotated English test-sets with explicit correct and distracting discourse markers associated with gold standard RST relations. Our results show that as in shallow discourse parsing, the explicit/implicit distinction plays a role, but that long-distance dependencies are the main challenge, while lack of lexical overlap is less of a problem, at least for in-domain parsing. Our final model is able to predict where errors will occur with an accuracy of 76.3% for the bottom-up parser and 76.6% for the top-down parser.
We present GENTLE, a new mixed-genre English challenge corpus totaling 17K tokens and consisting of 8 unusual text types for out-of-domain evaluation: dictionary entries, esports commentaries, legal documents, medical notes, poetry, mathematical proofs, syllabuses, and threat letters. GENTLE is manually annotated for a variety of popular NLP tasks, including syntactic dependency parsing, entity recognition, coreference resolution, and discourse parsing. We evaluate state-of-the-art NLP systems on GENTLE and find severe degradation for at least some genres in their performance on all tasks, which indicates GENTLE’s utility as an evaluation dataset for NLP systems.
In this paper, we present strong baselines for the task of Feedback Comment Generation for Writing Learning. Given a sentence and an error span, the task is to generate a feedback comment explaining the error. Sentences and feedback comments are both in English. We experiment with LLMs and also create multiple pseudo datasets for the task, investigating how it affects the performance of our system. We present our results for the task along with extensive analysis of the generated comments with the aim of aiding future studies in feedback comment generation for English language learners.
In 2023, the third iteration of the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking) was held, dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms. Following the success of the 2019and 2021 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification, this iteration has added 10 new corpora, including 2 new languages (Thai and Italian) and 3 discourse treebanks annotated in the discourse dependency representation in addition to the previously included frameworks: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper, we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers 26 datasets across 13 languages, survey and compare submitted systems, and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.
Automatic summarization with pre-trained language models has led to impressively fluent results, but is prone to ‘hallucinations’, low performance on non-news genres, and outputs which are not exactly summaries. Targeting ACL 2023’s ‘Reality Check’ theme, we present GUMSum, a small but carefully crafted dataset of English summaries in 12 written and spoken genres for evaluation of abstractive summarization. Summaries are highly constrained, focusing on substitutive potential, factuality, and faithfulness. We present guidelines and evaluate human agreement as well as subjective judgments on recent system outputs, comparing general-domain untuned approaches, a fine-tuned one, and a prompt-based approach, to human performance. Results show that while GPT3 achieves impressive scores, it still underperforms humans, with varying quality across genres. Human judgments reveal different types of errors in supervised, prompted, and human-generated summaries, shedding light on the challenges of producing a good summary.
Recent advances in discourse parsing performance create the impression that, as in other NLP tasks, performance for high-resource languages such as English is finally becoming reliable. In this paper we demonstrate that this is not the case, and thoroughly investigate the impact of data diversity on RST parsing stability. We show that state-of-the-art architectures trained on the standard English newswire benchmark do not generalize well, even within the news domain. Using the two largest RST corpora of English with text from multiple genres, we quantify the impact of genre diversity in training data for achieving generalization to text types unseen during training. Our results show that a heterogeneous training regime is critical for stable and generalizable models, across parser architectures. We also provide error analyses of model outputs and out-of-domain performance. To our knowledge, this study is the first to fully evaluate cross-corpus RST parsing generalizability on complete trees, examine between-genre degradation within an RST corpus, and investigate the impact of genre diversity in training data composition.
Recent efforts to consolidate guidelines and treebanks in the Universal Dependencies project raise the expectation that joint training and dataset comparison is increasingly possible for high-resource languages such as English, which have multiple corpora. Focusing on the two largest UD English treebanks, we examine progress in data consolidation and answer several questions: Are UD English treebanks becoming more internally consistent? Are they becoming more like each other and to what extent? Is joint training a good idea, and if so, since which UD version? Our results indicate that while consolidation has made progress, joint models may still suffer from inconsistencies, which hamper their ability to leverage a larger pool of training data.
We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English language. Collected from two online forums, the >70k questions (from English learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning, fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general properties of English vocabulary and grammar as well as explanations about specific (correct and incorrect) usage examples. Unlike most NLP datasets, this corpus is metalinguistic—it consists of language about language. As such, it can facilitate investigations of the metalinguistic capabilities of NLU models, as well as educational applications in the language learning domain. To study this, we define a free-form question answering task on our dataset and conduct evaluations on multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) to analyze their capacity to generate metalinguistic answers.
A lack of large-scale human-annotated data has hampered the hierarchical discourse parsing of Chinese. In this paper, we present GCDT, the largest hierarchical discourse treebank for Mandarin Chinese in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). GCDT covers over 60K tokens across five genres of freely available text, using the same relation inventory as contemporary RST treebanks for English. We also report on this dataset’s parsing experiments, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores for Chinese RST parsing and RST parsing on the English GUM dataset, using cross-lingual training in Chinese and English with multilingual embeddings.
Foundational Hebrew NLP tasks such as segmentation, tagging and parsing, have relied to date on various versions of the Hebrew Treebank (HTB, Sima’an et al. 2001). However, the data in HTB, a single-source newswire corpus, is now over 30 years old, and does not cover many aspects of contemporary Hebrew on the web. This paper presents a new, freely available UD treebank of Hebrew stratified from a range of topics selected from Hebrew Wikipedia. In addition to introducing the corpus and evaluating the quality of its annotations, we deploy automatic validation tools based on grew (Guillaume, 2021), and conduct the first cross domain parsing experiments in Hebrew. We obtain new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on UD NLP tasks, using a combination of the latest language modelling and some incremental improvements to existing transformer based approaches. We also release a new version of the UD HTB matching annotation scheme updates from our new corpus.
Recent advances in standardization for annotated language resources have led to successful large scale efforts, such as the Universal Dependencies (UD) project for multilingual syntactically annotated data. By comparison, the important task of coreference resolution, which clusters multiple mentions of entities in a text, has yet to be standardized in terms of data formats or annotation guidelines. In this paper we present CorefUD, a multilingual collection of corpora and a standardized format for coreference resolution, compatible with morphosyntactic annotations in the UD framework and including facilities for related tasks such as named entity recognition, which forms a first step in the direction of convergence for coreference resolution across languages.
BERT-style contextualized word embedding models are critical for good performance in most NLP tasks, but they are data-hungry and therefore difficult to train for low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate whether a combination of greatly reduced model size and two linguistically rich auxiliary pretraining tasks (part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing) can help produce better BERTs in a low-resource setting. Results from 7 diverse languages indicate that our model, MicroBERT, is able to produce marked improvements in downstream task evaluations, including gains up to 18% for parser LAS and 11% for NER F1 compared to an mBERT baseline, and we achieve these results with less than 1% of the parameter count of a multilingual BERT base–sized model. We conclude that training very small BERTs and leveraging any available labeled data for multitask learning during pretraining can produce models which outperform both their multilingual counterparts and traditional fixed embeddings for low-resource languages.
Large scale annotation of rich multilayer corpus data is expensive and time consuming, motivating approaches that integrate high quality automatic tools with active learning in order to prioritize human labeling of hard cases. A related challenge in such scenarios is the concurrent management of automatically annotated data and human annotated data, particularly where different subsets of the data have been corrected for different types of annotation and with different levels of confidence. In this paper we present [REDACTED], a collaborative, version-controlled online annotation environment for multilayer corpus data which includes integrated provenance and confidence metadata for each piece of information at the document, sentence, token and annotation level. We present a case study on improving annotation quality in an existing multilayer parse bank of English called AMALGUM, focusing on active learning in corpus preprocessing, at the surprisingly challenging level of sentence segmentation. Our results show improvements to state-of-the-art sentence segmentation and a promising workflow for getting “silver” data to approach gold standard quality.
Previous work on Entity Linking has focused on resources targeting non-nested proper named entity mentions, often in data from Wikipedia, i.e. Wikification. In this paper, we present and evaluate WikiGUM, a fully wikified dataset, covering all mentions of named entities, including their non-named and pronominal mentions, as well as mentions nested within other mentions. The dataset covers a broad range of 12 written and spoken genres, most of which have not been included in Entity Linking efforts to date, leading to poor performance by a pretrained SOTA system in our evaluation. The availability of a variety of other annotations for the same data also enables further research on entities in context.
SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. This paper provides a dataset and comprehensive evaluation showing that the latest neural LM based end-to-end systems degrade very substantially out of domain. We make an OntoNotes-like coreference dataset called OntoGUM publicly available, converted from GUM, an English corpus covering 12 genres, using deterministic rules, which we evaluate. Thanks to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations in GUM, we are able to create the largest human-annotated coreference corpus following the OntoNotes guidelines, and the first to be evaluated for consistency with the OntoNotes scheme. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.
In 2021, we organized the second iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task (Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking). Adding to the 2019 tasks on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection, this iteration of the Shared Task included for the first time a track on discourse relation classification across three formalisms: RST, SDRT, and PDTB. In this paper we review the data included in the Shared Task, which covers nearly 3 million manually annotated tokens from 16 datasets in 11 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.
This paper describes our submission to the DISRPT2021 Shared Task on Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification. Our system, called DisCoDisCo, is a Transformer-based neural classifier which enhances contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) with hand-crafted features, relying on tokenwise sequence tagging for discourse segmentation and connective detection, and a feature-rich, encoder-less sentence pair classifier for relation classification. Our results for the first two tasks outperform SOTA scores from the previous 2019 shared task, and results on relation classification suggest strong performance on the new 2021 benchmark. Ablation tests show that including features beyond CWEs are helpful for both tasks, and a partial evaluation of multiple pretrained Transformer-based language models indicates that models pre-trained on the Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task are optimal for relation classification.
This paper describes the primarily-graduate computational linguistics and NLP curriculum at Georgetown University, a U.S. university that has seen significant growth in these areas in recent years. We reflect on the principles behind our curriculum choices, including recognizing the various academic backgrounds and goals of our students; teaching a variety of skills with an emphasis on working directly with data; encouraging collaboration and interdisciplinary work; and including languages beyond English. We reflect on challenges we have encountered, such as the difficulty of teaching programming skills alongside NLP fundamentals, and discuss areas for future growth.
SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. Zhu et al. (2021) introduced the creation of the OntoGUM corpus for evaluating geralizability of the latest neural LM-based end-to-end systems. This paper covers details of the mapping process which is a set of deterministic rules applied to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations manually annotated in the GUM corpus. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.
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abs Treebanking User-Generated Content: A Proposal for a Unified Representation in Universal Dependencies Manuela Sanguinetti
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Cristina Bosco
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Lauren Cassidy
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Özlem Çetinoğlu
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Alessandra Teresa Cignarella
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Teresa Lynn
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Ines Rehbein
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Josef Ruppenhofer
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Djamé Seddah
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Amir Zeldes Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
The paper presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena of user-generated texts found in web and social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a short, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks - based on available literature - along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The main goal of this paper is to provide a common framework for those teams interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus enabling cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been in the spirit of UD.
We present a freely available, genre-balanced English web corpus totaling 4M tokens and featuring a large number of high-quality automatic annotation layers, including dependency trees, non-named entity annotations, coreference resolution, and discourse trees in Rhetorical Structure Theory. By tapping open online data sources the corpus is meant to offer a more sizable alternative to smaller manually created annotated data sets, while avoiding pitfalls such as imbalanced or unknown composition, licensing problems, and low-quality natural language processing. We harness knowledge from multiple annotation layers in order to achieve a “better than NLP” benchmark and evaluate the accuracy of the resulting resource.
Entity recognition provides semantic access to ancient materials in the Digital Humanities: it exposes people and places of interest in texts that cannot be read exhaustively, facilitates linking resources and can provide a window into text contents, even for texts with no translations. In this paper we present entity recognition for Coptic, the language of Hellenistic era Egypt. We evaluate NLP approaches to the task and lay out difficulties in applying them to a low-resource, morphologically complex language. We present solutions for named and non-named nested entity recognition and semi-automatic entity linking to Wikipedia, relying on robust dependency parsing, feature-based CRF models, and hand-crafted knowledge base resources, enabling high accuracy NER with orders of magnitude less data than those used for high resource languages. The results suggest avenues for research on other languages in similar settings.
Part of speech tagging is a fundamental NLP task often regarded as solved for high-resource languages such as English. Current state-of-the-art models have achieved high accuracy, especially on the news domain. However, when these models are applied to other corpora with different genres, and especially user-generated data from the Web, we see substantial drops in performance. In this work, we study how a state-of-the-art tagging model trained on different genres performs on Web content from unfiltered Reddit forum discussions. We report the results when training on different splits of the data, tested on Reddit. Our results show that even small amounts of in-domain data can outperform the contribution of data an order of magnitude larger coming from other Web domains. To make progress on out-of-domain tagging, we also evaluate an ensemble approach using multiple single-genre taggers as input features to a meta-classifier. We present state of the art performance on tagging Reddit data, as well as error analysis of the results of these models, and offer a typology of the most common error types among them, broken down by training corpus.
This overview summarizes the main contributions of the accepted papers at the 2019 workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2019). Co-located with NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis, the workshop’s aim was to bring together researchers working on corpus-based and computational approaches to discourse relations. In addition to an invited talk, eighteen papers outlined below were presented, four of which were submitted as part of a shared task on elementary discourse unit segmentation and connective detection.
This paper presents a new system for open-ended discourse relation signal annotation in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), implemented on top of an online tool for RST annotation. We discuss existing projects annotating textual signals of discourse relations, which have so far not allowed simultaneously structuring and annotating words signaling hierarchical discourse trees, and demonstrate the design and applications of our interface by extending existing RST annotations in the freely available GUM corpus.
In 2019, we organized the first iteration of a shared task dedicated to the underlying units used in discourse parsing across formalisms: the DISRPT Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection. In this paper we review the data included in the task, which cover 2.6 million manually annotated tokens from 15 datasets in 10 languages, survey and compare submitted systems and report on system performance on each task for both annotated and plain-tokenized versions of the data.
In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University’s entry at the DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.
With the increasing availability of wordnets for ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin, gaps remain in the coverage of less studied languages of antiquity. This paper reports on the construction and evaluation of a new wordnet for Coptic, the language of Late Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt in the first millenium CE. We present our approach to constructing the wordnet which uses multilingual Coptic dictionaries and wordnets for five different languages. We further discuss the results of this effort and outline our on-going/future work.
We investigate the effect of various dependency-based word embeddings on distinguishing between functional and domain similarity, word similarity rankings, and two downstream tasks in English. Variations include word embeddings trained using context windows from Stanford and Universal dependencies at several levels of enhancement (ranging from unlabeled, to Enhanced++ dependencies). Results are compared to basic linear contexts and evaluated on several datasets. We found that embeddings trained with Universal and Stanford dependency contexts excel at different tasks, and that enhanced dependencies often improve performance.
Notional anaphors are pronouns which disagree with their antecedents’ grammatical categories for notional reasons, such as plural to singular agreement in: “the government ... they”. Since such cases are rare and conflict with evidence from strictly agreeing cases (“the government ... it”), they present a substantial challenge to both coreference resolution and referring expression generation. Using the OntoNotes corpus, this paper takes an ensemble approach to predicting English notional anaphora in context on the basis of the largest empirical data to date. In addition to state of the art prediction accuracy, the results suggest that theoretical approaches positing a plural construal at the antecedent’s utterance are insufficient, and that circumstances at the anaphor’s utterance location, as well as global factors such as genre, have a strong effect on the choice of referring expression.
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
We describe and evaluate different approaches to the conversion of gold standard corpus data from Stanford Typed Dependencies (SD) and Penn-style constituent trees to the latest English Universal Dependencies representation (UD 2.2). Our results indicate that pure SD to UD conversion is highly accurate across multiple genres, resulting in around 1.5% errors, but can be improved further to fewer than 0.5% errors given access to annotations beyond the pure syntax tree, such as entity types and coreference resolution, which are necessary for correct generation of several UD relations. We show that constituent-based conversion using CoreNLP (with automatic NER) performs substantially worse in all genres, including when using gold constituent trees, primarily due to underspecification of phrasal grammatical functions.
This paper presents a novel approach to the segmentation of orthographic word forms in contemporary Hebrew, focusing purely on splitting without carrying out morphological analysis or disambiguation. Casting the analysis task as character-wise binary classification and using adjacent character and word-based lexicon-lookup features, this approach achieves over 98% accuracy on the benchmark SPMRL shared task data for Hebrew, and 97% accuracy on a new out of domain Wikipedia dataset, an improvement of ≈4% and 5% over previous state of the art performance.
This paper presents the Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank, the first dependency treebank within the Egyptian subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages. We discuss the composition of the corpus, challenges in adapting the UD annotation scheme to existing conventions for annotating Coptic, and evaluate inter-annotator agreement on UD annotation for the language. Some specific constructions are taken as a starting point for discussing several more general UD annotation guidelines, in particular for appositions, ambiguous passivization, incorporation and object-doubling.