Category Archives: Project: NewsReader

LREC2016

CLTL papers, oral presentations, poster & demo sessions at LREC2016: 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 23-28 May 2016, Portorož (Slovenia)

LREC2016 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 23-28 May 2016, Portorož Slovenia

LREC2016 Conference Programme

Monday 23 May 2016

11.00 – 11.45 (Session 2: Lightning talks part II)
Multilingual Event Detection using the NewsReader Pipelines”, by Agerri R, I. Aldabe, E. Laparra, G. Rigau, A. Fokkens, P. Huijgen, R. Izquierdo, M. van Erp, Piek Vossen, A. Minard, B. Magnini

Abstract
We describe a novel modular system for cross-lingual event extraction for English, Spanish,, Dutch and Italian texts. The system consists of a ready-to-use modular set of advanced multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. The pipeline integrates modules for basic NLP processing as well as more advanced tasks such as cross-lingual Named Entity Linking, Semantic Role Labeling and time normalization. Thus, our cross-lingual framework allows for the interoperable semantic interpretation of events, participants, locations and time, as well as the relations between them.

Tuesday 24 May 2016

09:15 – 10:30 Oral Session 1
Stereotyping and Bias in the Flickr30k Dataset” by Emiel van Miltenburg

Abstract
An untested assumption behind the crowdsourced descriptions of the images in the Flickr30k dataset (Young et al., 2014) is that they “focus only on the information that can be obtained from the image alone” (Hodosh et al., 2013, p. 859). This paper presents some evidence against this assumption, and provides a list of biases and unwarranted inferences that can be found in the Flickr30k dataset. Finally, it considers methods to find examples of these, and discusses how we should deal with stereotypedriven descriptions in future applications.

Day 1, Wednesday 25 May 2016

11:35 – 13:15 Area 1 – P04 Information Extraction and Retrieval
NLP and public engagement: The case of the Italian School Reform” by Tommaso Caselli, Giovanni Moretti, Rachele Sprugnoli, Sara Tonelli, Damien Lanfrey and Donatella Solda Kutzman

Abstract
In this paper we present PIERINO (PIattaforma per l’Estrazione e il Recupero di INformazione Online), a system that was implemented in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research to analyse the citizens’ comments given in #labuonascuola survey. The platform includes various levels of automatic analysis such as key-concept extraction and word co-occurrences. Each analysis is displayed through an intuitive view using different types of visualizations, for example radar charts and sunburst. PIERINO was effectively used to support shaping the last Italian school reform, proving the potential of NLP in the context of policy making.

15:05 – 16:05 Emerald 2 – O8 Named Entity Recognition
Context-enhanced Adaptive Entity Linking” by Giuseppe Rizzo, Filip Ilievski, Marieke van Erp, Julien Plu and Raphael Troncy

Abstract
More and more knowledge bases are publicly available as linked data. Since these knowledge bases contain structured descriptions of real-world entities, they can be exploited by entity linking systems that anchor entity mentions from text to the most relevant resources describing those entities. In this paper, we investigate adaptation of the entity linking task using contextual knowledge. The key intuition is that entity linking can be customized depending on the textual content, as well as on the application that would make use of the extracted information. We present an adaptive approach that relies on contextual knowledge from text to enhance the performance of ADEL, a hybrid linguistic and graph-based entity linking system. We evaluate our approach on a domain-specific corpus consisting of annotated WikiNews articles.

16:45 – 18:05 – Area 1 – P12
GRaSP: A multi-layered annotation scheme for perspectives” by Chantal van Son, Tommaso Caselli, Antske Fokkens, Isa Maks, Roser Morante, Lora Aroyo and Piek Vossen

Abstract / Poster
This paper presents a framework and methodology for the annotation of perspectives in text. In the last decade, different aspects of linguistic encoding of perspectives have been targeted as separated phenomena through different annotation initiatives. We propose an annotation scheme that integrates these different phenomena. We use a multilayered annotation approach, splitting the annotation of different aspects of perspectives into small subsequent subtasks in order to reduce the complexity of the task and to better monitor interactions between layers. Currently, we have included four layers of perspective annotation: events, attribution, factuality and opinion. The annotations are integrated in a formal model called GRaSP, which provides the means to represent instances (e.g. events, entities) and propositions in the (real or assumed) world in relation to their mentions in text. Then, the relation between the source and target of a perspective is characterized by means of perspective annotations. This enables us to place alternative perspectives on the same entity, event or proposition next to each other.

18:10 – 19:10 – Area 2 – P16 Ontologies
The Event and Implied Situation Ontology: Application and Evaluation” by Roxane Segers, Marco Rospocher, Piek Vossen, Egoitz Laparra, German Rigau, Anne-Lyse Minard

Abstract / Poster
This paper presents the Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO), a manually constructed resource which formalizes the pre and post situations of events and the roles of the entities affected by an event. The ontology is built on top of existing resources such as WordNet, SUMO and FrameNet. The ontology is injected to the Predicate Matrix, a resource that integrates predicate and role information from amongst others FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank, NomBank and WordNet. We illustrate how these resources are used on large document collections to detect information that otherwise would have remained implicit. The ontology is evaluated on two aspects: recall and precision based on a manually annotated corpus and secondly, on the quality of the knowledge inferred by the situation assertions in the ontology. Evaluation results on the quality of the system show that 50% of the events typed and enriched with ESO assertions are correct.

Day 2, Thursday 26 May 2016

10.25 – 10.45 – O20
Addressing the MFS bias in WSD systems” by Marten Postma, Ruben Izquierdo, Eneko Agirre, German Rigau and Piek Vossen

Abstract
This paper presents a framework and methodology for the annotation of perspectives in text. In the last decade, different aspects of linguistic encoding of perspectives have been targeted as separated phenomena through different annotation initiatives. We propose an annotation scheme that integrates these different phenomena. We use a multilayered annotation approach, splitting the annotation of different aspects of perspectives into small subsequent subtasks in order to reduce the complexity of the task and to better monitor interactions between layers. Currently, we have included four layers of perspective annotation: events, attribution, factuality and opinion. The annotations are integrated in a formal model called GRaSP, which provides the means to represent instances (e.g. events, entities) and propositions in the (real or assumed) world in relation to their mentions in text. Then, the relation between the source and target of a perspective is characterized by means of perspective annotations. This enables us to place alternative perspectives on the same entity, event or proposition next to each other.

11.45 – 13.05 – Area 2 – P25
The VU Sound Corpus: Adding more fine-grained annotations to the Freesound database” by Emiel van Miltenburg, Benjamin Timmermans and Lora Aroyo

Day 3, Friday 27 May 2016

10.45 – 11.05 – O38
Temporal Information Annotation: Crowd vs. Experts” by Tommaso Caselli, Rachele Sprugnoli and Oana Inel

Abstract
This paper describes two sets of crowdsourcing experiments on temporal information annotation conducted on two languages, i.e., English and Italian. The first experiment, launched on the CrowdFlower platform, was aimed at classifying temporal relations given target entities. The second one, relying on the CrowdTruth metric, consisted in two subtasks: one devoted to the recognition of events and temporal expressions and one to the detection and classification of temporal relations. The outcomes of the experiments suggest a valuable use of crowdsourcing annotations also for a complex task like Temporal Processing.

12.45 – 13.05 – O42
Crowdsourcing Salient Information from News and Tweets” by Oana Inel, Tommaso Caselli and Lora Aroyo

Abstract
The increasing streams of information pose challenges to both humans and machines. On the one hand, humans need to identify relevant information and consume only the information that lies at their interests. On the other hand, machines need to understand the information that is published in online data streams and generate concise and meaningful overviews. We consider events as prime factors to query for information and generate meaningful context. The focus of this paper is to acquire empirical insights for identifying salience features in tweets and news about a target event, i.e., the event of “whaling”. We first derive a methodology to identify such features by building up a knowledge space of the event enriched with relevant phrases, sentiments and ranked by their novelty. We applied this methodology on tweets and we have performed preliminary work towards adapting it to news articles. Our results show that crowdsourcing text relevance, sentiments and novelty (1) can be a main step in identifying salient information, and (2) provides a deeper and more precise understanding of the data at hand compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

14:55 – 16:15 – Area 2- P54
Two architectures for parallel processing for huge amounts of text” by Mathijs Kattenberg, Zuhaitz Beloki, Aitor Soroa, Xabier Artola, Antske Fokkens, Paul Huygen and Kees Verstoep

Abstract
This paper presents two alternative NLP architectures to analyze massive amounts of documents, using parallel processing. The two architectures focus on different processing scenarios, namely batch-processing and streaming processing. The batch-processing scenario aims at optimizing the overall throughput of the system, i.e., minimizing the overall time spent on processing all documents. The streaming architecture aims to minimize the time to process real-time incoming documents
and is therefore especially suitable for live feeds. The paper presents experiments with both architectures, and reports the overall gain when they are used for batch as well as for streaming processing. All the software described in the paper is publicly available under free licenses.

14:55 – 15:15 Emerald 1 – O47
Evaluating Entity Linking: An Analysis of Current Benchmark Datasets and a Roadmap for Doing a Better Job” by Marieke van Erp, Pablo Mendes, Heiko Paulheim, Filip Ilievski, Julien Plu, Giuseppe Rizzo and Joerg Waitelonis

Abstract
Entity linking has become a popular task in both natural language processing and semantic web communities. However, we find that the benchmark datasets for entity linking tasks do not accurately evaluate entity linking systems. In this paper, we aim to chart the strengths and weaknesses of current benchmark datasets and sketch a roadmap for the community to devise better benchmark datasets.

15.35 – 15.55 – O48
MEANTIME, the NewsReader Multilingual Event and Time Corpus” by Anne-Lyse Minard, Manuela Speranza, Ruben Urizar, Begoña Altuna, Marieke van Erp, Anneleen Schoen and Chantal van Son

Abstract
In this paper, we present the NewsReader MEANTIME corpus, a semantically annotated corpus of Wikinews articles. The corpus consists of 480 news articles, i.e. 120 English news articles and their translations in Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. MEANTIME contains annotations at different levels. The document-level annotation includes markables (e.g. entity mentions, event mentions, time expressions, and numerical expressions), relations between markables (modeling, for example, temporal information and semantic role labeling), and entity and event intra-document coreference. The corpus-level annotation includes entity and event cross-document coreference. Semantic annotation on the English section was performed manually; for the annotation in Italian, Spanish, and (partially) Dutch, a procedure was devised to automatically project the annotations on the English texts onto the translated texts, based on the manual alignment of the annotated elements; this enabled us not only to speed up the annotation process but also provided cross-lingual coreference. The English section of the corpus was extended with timeline annotations for the SemEval 2015 TimeLine shared task. The First CLIN Dutch Shared Task at CLIN26 was based on the Dutch section, while the EVALITA 2016 FactA (Event Factuality Annotation) shared task, based on the Italian section, is currently being organized.

Video release: Meet NewsReader’s Reading Machine

A Reading Machine in 4 languages

Meet NewsReader’s Reading Machine! — Video explaining NewsReader’s Reading Machine

The volume of news data is enormous and expanding, covering billions of archived documents with millions of documents added daily. These documents are also getting more and more interconnected with knowledge from other sources such as biographies and company databases. NewsReader built a system that extracts what happened to whom, when and where from these sources and stores them in a structured database, enabling more precise search over this immense stack of information. Currently, our system supports English, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. Pilot projects are underway with government and financial information specialists, but the system can be useful to anyone looking to make sense of large amounts of news text.

NewsReader in a nutshell

NewsReader in a nutshell — From Newspapers to Knowledge, Visualised
NewsReader_in_a_NutshellThe project is described in this brochure (PDF).

http://www.newsreader-project.eu/

Logos_Partners

LREC2016 Accepted Papers

CLTL has 11 accepted papers at LREC2016. We’ll see you in Portorož in May!

ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Evaluating Entity Linking: An Analysis of Current Benchmark Datasets and a Roadmap for Doing a Better Job ”  by Marieke van Erp, Pablo Mendes, Heiko Paulheim, Filip Ilievski, Julien Plu, Giuseppe Rizzo and Joerg Waitelonis

Context-enhanced Adaptive Entity Linking” by Giuseppe Rizzo, Filip Ilievski, Marieke van Erp, Julien Plu and Raphael Troncy

MEANTIME, the NewsReader Multilingual Event and Time Corpus” by Anne-Lyse Minard, Manuela Speranza, Ruben Urizar, Begoña Altuna, Marieke van Erp, Anneleen Schoen and Chantal van Son

Crowdsourcing Salient Information from News and Tweets” by Oana Inel, Tommaso Caselli and Lora Aroyo

Temporal Information Annotation: Crowd vs. Experts” by Tommaso Caselli, Rachele Sprugnoli and Oana Inel

Addressing the MFS bias in WSD systems” by Marten Postma, Ruben Izquierdo, Eneko Agirre, German Rigau and Piek Vossen

POSTER/DEMO PRESENTATIONS

A multi-layered annotation scheme for perspectives” by Chantal van Son, Tommaso Caselli, Antske Fokkens, Isa Maks, Roser Morante, Lora Aroyo and Piek Vossen

The VU Sound Corpus: Adding more fine-grained annotations to the Freesound database” by Emiel van Miltenburg, Benjamin Timmermans and Lora Aroyo

NLP and public engagement: The case of the Italian School Reform” by Tommaso Caselli, Giovanni Moretti, Rachele Sprugnoli, Sara Tonelli, Damien Lanfrey and Donatella Solda Kutzman

Two architectures for parallel processing for huge amounts of text” by Mathijs Kattenberg, Zuhaitz Beloki, Aitor Soroa, Xabier Artola, Antske Fokkens, Paul Huygen and Kees Verstoep

“The Event and Implied Situation Ontology: Application and Evaluation” by Roxane Segers, Marco Rospocher, Piek Vossen, Egoitz Laparra, German Rigau, Anne-Lyse Minard

Press release VU University on NewsReader: Join the hackathon!

VU-hoogleraar en Spinozawinnaar Piek Vossen presenteert NewsReader
Ontdek ook zelf deze nieuwe technologie die het nieuws leest

In 2013 startte Piek Vossen (hoogleraar computationele lexicologie), samen met onderzoekers in Trento en San Sebastian en met de bedrijven LexisNexis (NL), SynerScope (NL) en het Engelse ScraperWiki het NewsReader project om een computerprogramma te ontwikkelen dat dagelijks het nieuws ‘leest’ en precies bijhoudt wat, wanneer, waar gebeurd is in de wereld en wie er bij betrokken is. Het project kreeg hiervoor 2,8 miljoen euro subsidie van de Europese Commissie.

SynerScope‘s visualization: extraction from 1.26M news articles

Nieuws lezen in vier talen
In afgelopen 3 jaar hebben de onderzoekers een technologie ontwikkeld om de computer automatisch het nieuws te laten lezen in vier talen. Uit miljoenen krantenartikelen is nu een doorzoekbare database gemaakt waarin duplicaten zijn ontdubbeld, complementerende informatie uit verschillende berichten op een slimme manier samengevoegd is en is de informatie verrijkt met fijnmazige types zodat je niet alleen op persoonsnamen zoals ‘Mark Rutte’ en `Diederik Samsom’ kunt zoeken, maar ook op entiteiten van het type ‘politicus’.

Presentatie NewsReader
Op dinsdagmiddag 24 november 2015 organiseert de onderzoeksgroep Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL) van Piek Vossen een workshop waarin de eindresultaten van het project gepresenteerd worden. Ook zijn er diverse sprekers die hun visie op het project geven, zoals VU-hoogleraar Frank van Harmelen (Knowledge Representation & Reasoning), Bernardo Magnini, onderzoeker bij FBK in Trento en Sybren Kooistra, data journalist bij de Volkskrant en medebedenker en hoofredacteur van Yournalism, het platform voor onderzoeksjournalistiek.

Doe mee met de Hackathon!
Op 25 november kunnen gebruikers zelf aan de slag met de nieuwsdatabase die is opgebouwd uit miljoenen krantenartikelen. Meer informatie en aanmelden.

NewsReader Workshop & Hackathon, Nov. 24—25 2015

Car Wars: Industrial Heroes Going Down Fighting

On 24 and 25 November 2015, we will showcase the NewsReader project and invite you to come explore our technology and its results yourself during our NewsReader Workshop and Hackathon.

Event Details
We have developed a powerful new tool called ‘NewsReader’ which utilises natural language understanding and semantic web technology. This helps you to better understand the interactions between companies and key individuals, derived from news articles.
Our dataset encompasses 12 years of news charting the struggle of automotive players to rule the global market, to satisfy the expectations of the shareholders, and their suffering from the financial crisis and new economies: industrial heroes going down!

The Workshop
Tuesday 24 November 2015, 14:00 – 18:00 Amsterdam Public Library
In this workshop, we will bring together start-ups, companies, researchers and developers to present and discuss the NewsReader project, the technological domains it draws from and future applications for these technologies.
This afternoon will feature invited talks, demos, a panel discussion and a networking reception.
Confirmed Speaker:
Prof. dr. Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Frank van Harmelen is a professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. After studying mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, he moved to the Department of AI in Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for his research on meta-level reasoning.

The Hackathon
Wednesday 25 November 2015, 10:00 – 18:00 Amsterdam Public Library
In June 2014 and January 2015 we ran several hackathons in both London and Amsterdam in which NewsReader enabled the attendees to pull out networks of interactions between entrepreneurs, politicians, companies and thoroughly test drive our technology. This November, we’re releasing a new version of our processing pipeline and we’re scaling up to 10 million processed news articles from sources about the automotive industry to obtain a searchable database of the news. At the hackathon, you can play with this dataset and explore the processing pipeline.
The global automotive industry has a value in the order of $1 trillion annually. The industry comprises a massive network of suppliers, manufacturers, advertisers, marketeers and journalists. Each of these players has his/her own story, often with unexpected origins or endings; one day you may be CEO of a big car company, the next you are out and making pizzas. With NewsReader, you can uncover these stories to reconstruct the past.

This event may be of interest to you if:
You’re interested in natural language processing and/or semantic web technology
You’re a data journalist on an automotive desk;
You’re an analyst sifting daily news looking for information on your company or on competitors;
You’re a data analyst looking to understand how your customers operate their supply chain
You’re an analyst trying to find secondary events that could influence an investment decision;
You’re interested in visualising big data

Attendance is free, but please register by Sunday 22 November 17:00 CET. .

NewsReader helps you find a needle in a haystack.
#NewsReader

Hackathon NewsReader Amsterdam: Jan. 21, 2015

Porsches to Pizza – Hack 6,000,000 automotive news articles #NewsReader

NewsReader_Logo

The global automotive industry has a value of the order of $1 trillion annually.

The industry comprises a massive network of suppliers, manufacturers, advertisers, marketeers and journalists. Attracting and supporting the industry is a significant goal of industrial policy.

On January 21st 2015 we’re running an event which should be of interest if :-

  • You’re a data journalist on an automotive desk;
  • You’re an analyst sifting daily news looking for information on your company or on competitors;
  • You’re a data analyst looking to understand how your customers operate their supply chain;
  • You’re an analyst trying to find secondary events that could influence an investment decision

We’ve developed a powerful new tool called ‘NewsReader’ which utilises natural language understanding and semantic web technology. This helps you to better understand the interactions between companies and key individuals, derived from news articles.

We’re processing 6 million news articles from sources around the world both general and specialist media to obtain a searchable database of the news on the automotive sector and you can play with at our Hack event.

Over summer we ran a Hack Day on news surrounding the World Cup. NewsReader enabled the attendees to pull out networks of interactions between politicians, football players and people in FIFA. Not only who they were interacting with but what they were doing.

Early analysis of the automotive data is giving us some interesting insights. For example, news stories between 2005 and 2009 reported that Porsche was buying an ever larger stake in Volkswagen, prompting speculations that Porsche would take over Volkswagen. However, in 2009 the tables turned and Volkswagen took a majority stake and eventually took over Porsche. Our system is able to discriminate between articles mentioning that Volkswagen was taking over Porsche and vice versa rather than simple co-occurrences that are generally found in aggregated news analysis systems. In the slipstream of this take-over, Wendelin Wiedeking, longtime Porsche senior executive, was fired from Porsche. In 2013 he opened the first of a chain of Italian restaurants. As we have a structured database in which similar events can easily be retrieved, it is a small effort to find out that Jürgen Schrempp, former CEO of DaimlerChrysler, also opened a restaurant after retiring from the car industry.

We are running an event in London on January 30th 2105 and if you cannot make the 21st in Amsterdam you may want to join us there.

NewsReader helps you find a needle in a haystack.

REGISTER FOR HACKATHON AMSTERDAM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/porsches-to-pizza-hack-6000000-automotive-news-articles-newsreader-tickets-14504369961

REGISTER FOR HACKATHON LONDON: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/porsches-to-pizza-hack-6000000-automotive-news-articles-newsreader-tickets-14458478699?aff=efbnen