In this paper, we address the tasks of recognition and interpretation of affect communicated through text messaging in online communication environments. Specifically, we focus on Instant Messaging (IM) or blogs, where people use an informal or garbled style of writing. We introduced a novel rule-based linguistic approach for affect recognition from text. Our Affect Analysis Model (AAM) was designed to deal with not only grammatically and syntactically correct textual input, but also informal messages written in an abbreviated or expressive manner. The proposed rule-based approach processes each sentence in stages, including symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. Our method is capable of processing sentences of different complexity, including simple, compound, complex (with complement and relative clauses) and complex–compound sentences. Affect in text is classified into nine emotion categories (or neutral). The strength of the resulting emotional state depends on vectors of emotional words, relations among them, tense of the analysed sentence and availability of first person pronouns. The evaluation of the Affect Analysis Model algorithm showed promising results regarding its capability to accurately recognize fine-grained emotions reflected in sentences from diary-like blog posts (averaged accuracy is up to 77 per cent), fairy tales (averaged accuracy is up to 70.2 per cent) and news headlines (our algorithm outperformed eight other systems on several measures).

The generation of referring expressions is a central topic in computational linguistics. Natural referring expressions – both definite references like ‘the baseball cap’ and pronouns like ‘it’ – are dependent on discourse context. We examine the practical implications of context-dependent referring expression generation for the design of spoken systems. Currently, not all spoken systems have the goal of generating natural referring expressions. Many researchers believe that the context-dependency of natural referring expressions actually makes systems less usable. Using the dual-task paradigm, we demonstrate that generating natural referring expressions that are dependent on discourse context reduces cognitive load. Somewhat surprisingly, we also demonstrate that practice does not improve cognitive load in systems that generate consistent (context-independent) referring expressions. We discuss practical implications for spoken systems as well as other areas of referring expression generation.

We show how a quantitative context may be established for what is essentially qualitative in nature by topologically embedding a lexicon (here, WordNet) in a complete metric space. This novel transformation establishes a natural connection between the order relation in the lexicon (e.g., hyponymy) and the notion of distance in the metric space, giving rise to effective word-level and document-level lexical semantic distance measures. We provide a formal account of the topological transformation and demonstrate the value of our metrics on several experiments involving information retrieval and document clustering tasks.

We explore the use of independent component analysis (ICA) for the automatic extraction of linguistic roles or features of words. The extraction is based on the unsupervised analysis of text corpora. We contrast ICA with singular value decomposition (SVD), widely used in statistical text analysis, in general, and specifically in latent semantic analysis (LSA). However, the representations found using the SVD analysis cannot easily be interpreted by humans. In contrast, ICA applied on word context data gives distinct features which reflect linguistic categories. In this paper, we provide justification for our approach called WordICA, present the WordICA method in detail, compare the obtained results with traditional linguistic categories and with the results achieved using an SVD-based method, and discuss the use of the method in practical natural language engineering solutions such as machine translation systems. As the WordICA method is based on unsupervised learning and thus provides a general means for efficient knowledge acquisition, we foresee that the approach has a clear potential for practical applications.

This paper focuses on an important step in the creation of a system of meaning representation and the development of semantically annotated parallel corpora, for use in applications such as machine translation, question answering, text summarization, and information retrieval. The work described below constitutes the first effort of any kind to annotate multiple translations of foreign-language texts with interlingual content. Three levels of representation are introduced: deep syntactic dependencies (IL0), intermediate semantic representations (IL1), and a normalized representation that unifies conversives, nonliteral language, and paraphrase (IL2). The resulting annotated, multilingually induced, parallel corpora will be useful as an empirical basis for a wide range of research, including the development and evaluation of interlingual NLP systems and paraphrase-extraction systems as well as a host of other research and development efforts in theoretical and applied linguistics, foreign language pedagogy, translation studies, and other related disciplines.

This paper presents a novel approach to ontology localization with the objective of obtaining multilingual ontologies. Within the ontology development process, ontology localization has been defined as the activity of adapting an ontology to a concrete linguistic and cultural community. Depending on the ontology layers – terminological and/or conceptual – involved in the ontology localization activity, three heterogeneous multilingual ontology metamodels have been identified, of which we propose one of them. Our proposal consists in associating the ontology metamodel to an external model for representing and structuring lexical and terminological data in different natural languages. Our model has been called Linguistic Information Repository (LIR). The main advantages of this modelling modality rely on its flexibility by allowing (1) the enrichment of any ontology element with as much linguistic information as needed by the final application, and (2) the establishment of links among linguistic elements within and across different natural languages. The LIR model has been designed as an ontology of linguistic elements and is currently available in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The set of lexical and terminological data that it provides to ontology elements enables the localization of any ontology to a certain linguistic and cultural universe. The LIR has been evaluated against the multilingual requirements of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in the framework of the NeOn project. It has proven to solve multilingual representation problems related to the establishment of well-defined relations among lexicalizations within and across languages, as well as conceptualization mismatches among different languages. Finally, we present an extension to the Ontology Metadata Vocabulary, the so-called LexOMV, with the aim of reporting on multilinguality at the ontology metadata level. By adding this contribution to the LIR model, we account for multilinguality at the three levels of an ontology: data level, knowledge representation level and metadata level.

We investigate the use of instance-based ranking methods for surface realization in natural language generation. Our approach to instance-based natural language generation (IBNLG) employs two components: a rule system that ‘overgenerates’ a number of realization candidates from a meaning representation and an instance-based ranker that scores the candidates according to their similarity to examples taken from a training corpus. We develop an efficient search technique for identifying the optimal candidate based on a novel extension of the A* algorithm. The rule system is produced automatically from a semantically annotated fragment of the Penn Treebank II containing management succession texts. We detail the annotation scheme and grammar induction algorithm and evaluate the efficiency and output of the generator. We also discuss issues such as input coverage (completeness) and fluency that are relevant to surface generation in general.