In this paper, we present a Text Summarisation tool, compendium, capable of generating the most common types of summaries. Regarding the input, single- and multi-document summaries can be produced; as the output, the summaries can be extractive or abstractive-oriented; and finally, concerning their purpose, the summaries can be generic, query-focused, or sentiment-based. The proposed architecture for compendium is divided in various stages, making a distinction between core and additional stages. The former constitute the backbone of the tool and are common for the generation of any type of summary, whereas the latter are used for enhancing the capabilities of the tool. The main contributions of compendium with respect to the state-of-the-art summarisation systems are that (i) it specifically deals with the problem of redundancy, by means of textual entailment; (ii) it combines statistical and cognitive-based techniques for determining relevant content; and (iii) it proposes an abstractive-oriented approach for facing the challenge of abstractive summarisation. The evaluation performed in different domains and textual genres, comprising traditional texts, as well as texts extracted from the Web 2.0, shows that compendium is very competitive and appropriate to be used as a tool for generating summaries.

The noun compound – a sequence of nouns which functions as a single noun – is very common in English texts. No language processing system should ignore expressions like steel soup pot cover if it wants to be serious about such high-end applications of computational linguistics as question answering, information extraction, text summarization, machine translation – the list goes on. Processing noun compounds, however, is far from trouble-free. For one thing, they can be bracketed in various ways: is it steel soup, steel pot, or steel cover? Then there are relations inside a compound, annoyingly not signalled by any words: does potcontainsoup or is it for cookingsoup? These and many other research challenges are the subject of this special issue.

The answer determines the success of a Question-Answering (QA) system. In redundancy-based QA systems, a common approach is to extract the candidate answers from the information sources and select the most frequent answers as the final answers. However, this strategy has some pitfalls. For instance, if a system is not able to detect equivalences between the candidate answers, their frequencies might be erroneously calculated. Moreover, the user who posed the question should also be taken into account when answering: different persons require different (correct) answers. This can involve the use of suitable vocabulary and/or information details. In these situations, the generation of a response can be a more suitable strategy, instead of the extraction and direct retrieval of the answer from the information sources. The present survey targets the state of the art in the answering task in QA under three different lines of research. First, we present several works that focus on relating candidate answers. Then, we recover the concept of cooperative answer – a correct, useful, and non-misleading answer – and we bring up attempts to address cooperative answering. Finally, we investigate the research community endeavors on response generation. We will also present our perspective on each of these three topics throughout this paper.

Measuring lexical semantic relatedness is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is often a prerequisite to many complex NLP tasks. Despite an extensive amount of work dedicated to this area of research, there is a lack of an up-to-date survey in the field. This paper aims to address this issue with a study that is focused on four perspectives: (i) a comparative analysis of background information resources that are essential for measuring lexical semantic relatedness; (ii) a review of the literature with a focus on recent methods that are not covered in previous surveys; (iii) discussion of the studies in the biomedical domain where novel methods have been introduced but inadequately communicated across the domain boundaries; and (iv) an evaluation of lexical semantic relatedness methods and a discussion of useful lessons for the development and application of such methods. In addition, we discuss a number of issues in this field and suggest future research directions. It is believed that this work will be a valuable reference to researchers of lexical semantic relatedness and substantially support the research activities in this field.

This article addresses the problem of generating good example contexts to help children learn vocabulary. We describe VEGEMATIC, a system that constructs such contexts by concatenating overlapping five-grams from Google's N-gram corpus. We propose and operationalize a set of constraints to identify good contexts. VEGEMATIC uses these constraints to filter, cluster, score, and select example contexts. An evaluation experiment compared the resulting contexts against human-authored example contexts (e.g., from children's dictionaries and children's stories). Based on rating by an expert blind to source, their average quality was comparable to story sentences, though not as good as dictionary examples. A second experiment measured the percentage of generated contexts rated by lay judges as acceptable, and how long it took to rate them. They accepted only 28% of the examples, but averaged only 27 seconds to find the first acceptable example for each target word. This result suggests that hand-vetting VEGEMATIC's output may supply example contexts faster than creating them manually.

We discuss the problem of interpreting noun compounds such as colon cancer tumor suppressor protein, which pose major challenges for the automatic interpretation of English written text. We present an overview of the more general process of compounding and of noun compounds in particular, as well as of their syntax and semantics from both theoretical and computational linguistics viewpoint with an emphasis on the latter. Our main focus is on computational approaches to the syntax and semantics of noun compounds: we describe the problems, present the challenges, and discuss the most important lines of research. We also show how understanding noun compound syntax and semantics could help solve textual entailment problems, which would be potentially useful for a number of NLP applications, and which we believe to be an important direction for future research.

Scientific literature is an important medium for disseminating scientific knowledge. However, in recent times, a dramatic increase in research output has resulted in challenges for the research community. An increasing need is felt for tools that exploit the full content of an article and provide insightful services with value beyond quantitative measures such as impact factors and citation counts. However, the intricacies of language and thought, and the unstructured format of research articles present challenges in providing such services. The identification of sentence contexts that encode the role of specific sentences in advancing an article's scientific argument can facilitate in developing intelligent tools for the research community. This paper describes our research work in this direction. First, we investigate the possibility of identifying contexts associated with sentences and propose a scheme of thirteen context type definitions for sentences, based on the generic rhetorical pattern found in scientific articles. We then present the results of our experiments using sequential classifiers – conditional random fields – for achieving automatic context identification. We also describe our Semantic Web application developed for providing citation context based information services for the research community. Finally, we present a comparison and analysis of our results with similar studies and explain the distinct features of our application.

The paper presents a novel unified algorithm for aligning sentences with their translations in bilingual data. With the help of ideas from a stack-based dynamic programming decoder for speech recognition (Ney 1984), the search is parametrized in a novel way such that the unified algorithm can be used on various types of data that have been previously handled by separate implementations: the extracted text chunk pairs can be either sub-sentential pairs, one-to-one, or many-to-many sentence-level pairs. The one-stage search algorithm is carried out in a single run over the data. Its memory requirements are independent of the length of the source document, and it is applicable to sentence-level parallel as well as comparable data. With the help of a unified beam-search candidate pruning, the algorithm is very efficient: it avoids any document-level pre-filtering and uses less restrictive sentence-level filtering. Results are presented on a Russian–English, a Spanish–English, and an Arabic–English extraction task. Based on simple word-based scoring features, text chunk pairs are extracted out of several trillion candidates, where the search is carried out on 300 processors in parallel.

Unsupervised Authorship Analysis (UAA) aims to cluster documents by authorship without knowing the authorship of any documents. An important factor in UAA is the method for calculating the distance between documents. This choice of the authorship distance method is considered more critical to the end result than the choice of cluster analysis algorithm. One method for measuring the correlation between a distance metric and a labelling (such as class values or clusters) is the Silhouette Coefficient (SC). The SC can be leveraged by measuring the correlation between the authorship distance method and the true authorship, evaluating the quality of the distance method. However, we show that the SC can be severely affected by outliers. To address this issue, we introduce the Positive Silhouette Coefficient, given as the proportion of instances with a positive SC value. This metric is not easily altered by outliers and produces a more robust metric. A large number of authorship distance methods are then compared using the PSC, and the findings are presented. This research provides an insight into the efficacy of methods for UAA and presents a framework for testing authorship distance methods.

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to computational modeling and understanding of social and cultural phenomena in multi-party dialogues. We developed a two-tier approach in which we first detect and classify certain sociolinguistic behaviors, including topic control, disagreement, and involvement, that serve as first-order models from which presence the higher level social roles, such as leadership, may be inferred.

This paper presents TrendStream, a versatile architecture for very large word n-gram datasets. Designed for speed, flexibility, and portability, TrendStream uses a novel trie-based architecture, features lossless compression, and provides optimization for both speed and memory use. In addition to literal queries, it also supports fast pattern matching searches (with wildcards or regular expressions), on the same data structure, without any additional indexing. Language models are updateable directly in the compiled binary format, allowing rapid encoding of existing tabulated collections, incremental generation of n-gram models from streaming text, and merging of encoded compiled files. This architecture offers flexible choices for loading and memory utilization: fast memory-mapping of a multi-gigabyte model, or on-demand partial data loading with very modest memory requirements. The implemented system runs successfully on several different platforms, under different operating systems, even when the n-gram model file is much larger than available memory. Experimental evaluation results are presented with the Google Web1T collection and the Gigaword corpus.

This paper presents a classification-based approach to noun–noun compound interpretation within the statistical learning framework of kernel methods. In this framework, the primary modelling task is to define measures of similarity between data items, formalised as kernel functions. We consider the different sources of information that are useful for understanding compounds and proceed to define kernels that compute similarity between compounds in terms of these sources. In particular, these kernels implement intuitive notions of lexical and relational similarity and can be computed using distributional information extracted from text corpora. We report performance on classification experiments with three semantic relation inventories at different levels of granularity, demonstrating in each case that combining lexical and relational information sources is beneficial and gives better performance than either source taken alone. The data used in our experiments are taken from general English text, but our methods are also applicable to other domains and potentially to other languages where noun–noun compounding is frequent and productive.

Spelling errors in digital documents are often caused by operational and cognitive mistakes, or by the lack of full knowledge about the language of the written documents. Computer-assisted solutions can help to detect and suggest replacements. In this paper, we present a new string distance metric for the Persian language to rank respelling suggestions of a misspelled Persian word by considering the effects of keyboard layout on typographical spelling errors as well as the homomorphic and homophonic aspects of words for orthographical misspellings. We also consider the misspellings caused by disregarded diacritics. Since the proposed string distance metric is custom-designed for the Persian language, we present the spelling aspects of the Persian language such as homomorphs, homophones, and diacritics. We then present our statistical analysis of a set of large Persian corpora to identify the causes and the types of Persian spelling errors. We show that the proposed string distance metric has a higher mean average precision and a higher mean reciprocal rank in ranking respelling candidates of Persian misspellings in comparison with other metrics such as the Hamming, Levenshtein, Damerau–Levenshtein, Wagner–Fischer, and Jaro–Winkler metrics.

Authorship Analysis aims to extract information about the authorship of documents from features within those documents. Typically, this is performed as a classification task with the aim of identifying the author of a document, given a set of documents of known authorship. Alternatively, unsupervised methods have been developed primarily as visualisation tools to assist the manual discovery of clusters of authorship within a corpus by analysts. However, there is a need in many fields for more sophisticated unsupervised methods to automate the discovery, profiling and organisation of related information through clustering of documents by authorship. An automated and unsupervised methodology for clustering documents by authorship is proposed in this paper. The methodology is named NUANCE, for n-gram Unsupervised Automated Natural Cluster Ensemble. Testing indicates that the derived clusters have a strong correlation to the true authorship of unseen documents.

In this paper, we discuss the results of a new unsupervised and computationally lightweight scoring of how two words are morphologically related to each other. This measure is meant to be an alternative to stemming, radicals (root) extraction, and morphological analysis in a wide range of applications; especially information extraction related ones. Compared to light stemming, which seems to be the most convenient approach for systems with efficiency concerns, our measure does not neglect unconditionally a prefix or a suffix as the light stemming does. Instead, our measure takes into account all letters of the word but with different weights. This prevents the missing of a significant letter. Compared to heavy stemming, morphological analysis, or radicals extraction, which rely on dictionaries and compatibility databases, our measure does not rely on any language-specific morphology knowledge. This makes our approach unsupervised and theoretically language independent and computationally much lighter. Our tests targeted Arabic: a Semitic language recognized to have a complex morphology due to its highly inflectional lexicon.

Many English noun pairs suggest an almost limitless array of semantic interpretation. A fruit bowl might be described as a bowl for fruit, a bowl that contains fruit, a bowl for holding fruit, or even (perhaps in a modern sculpture class), a bowl made out of fruit. These interpretations vary in syntax, semantic denotation, plausibility, and level of semantic detail. For example, a headache pill is usually a pill for preventing headaches, but might, perhaps in the context of a list of side effects, be a pill that can cause headaches (Levi, J. N. 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York: Academic Press.). In addition to lexical ambiguity, both relational ambiguity and relational vagueness make automatic semantic interpretation of these combinations difficult. While humans parse these possibilities with ease, computational systems are only recently gaining the ability to deal with the complexity of lexical expressions of semantic relations. In this paper, we describe techniques for paraphrasing the semantic relations that can hold between nouns in a noun compound, using a semi-supervised probabilistic method to rank candidate paraphrases of semantic relations, and describing a new method for selecting plausible relational paraphrases at arbitrary levels of semantic specification. These methods are motivated by the observation that existing semantic relation classification schemes often exhibit a highly skewed class distribution, and that lexical paraphrases of semantic relations vary widely in semantic precision.

SMS language presents special phenomena and important deviations from natural language. Every day, an impressive amount of chat messages, SMS messages, and e-mails are sent all over the world. This widespread use makes important the development of systems that normalize SMS language into natural language. However, typical machine translation approaches are difficult to adapt to SMS language because of many irregularities that are shown by this kind of language. This paper presents a new approach for SMS normalization that combines lexical and phonological translation techniques with disambiguation algorithms at two different levels: lexical and semantic. The method proposed does not depend on big annotated corpus, which is difficult to build and is applied in two different domains showing its easiness of adaptation across different languages and domains. The results obtained by the system outperform some of the existing methods of SMS normalization despite the fact that the Spanish language and the corpus created have some features that complicate the normalization task.

This paper presents a study on the interpretation and bracketing of noun compounds (‘NCs’) based on lexical semantics. Our primary goal is to develop a method to automatically interpret NCs through the use of semantic relations. Our NC interpretation method is based on lexical similarity with tagged NCs, based on lexical similarity measures derived from WordNet. We apply the interpretation method to both two- and three-term NC interpretation based on semantic roles. Finally, we demonstrate that our NC interpretation method can boost the coverage and accuracy of NC bracketing.