Presentations Mini-seminar: Disambiguating entities and their roles in texts based on background knowledge on December 12, 2014:

– Introduction (pdf) by Prof. dr. Piek Vossen
– Towards a Dutch FrameNet-style Semantic Role Labeler (pdf) Presentation by Chantal van Son
– Named Entity Disambiguation with two-stage coherence optimization (pdf) Presentation by Filip Ilievski

Invitation below:

Mini-seminar: Disambiguating entities and their roles in texts based on background knowledge

Dear all,

We cordially invite you to our mini-seminar “Disambiguating entities and their roles in texts based on background knowledge ” in which we will present our Master’s thesis topics and the current/future work. It will take place on Friday, December 12 from 10:00 to 12:00 in room C-121 (W&N Building).

An array of text processing tools is currently used to extract events, recognize and link entities, and discover relations between the two. We, Filip Ilievski and Chantal van Son, tackle these type of Natural Language Processing tasks by using background knowledge from lexical resources and the Semantic Web. The disambiguation of entities and their context is in the core of both approaches: Filip’s thesis aims to disambiguate them by determining their identity while Chantal’s thesis aims at disambiguating the roles they play in context. You can find the descriptions of both projects below.

Prof. Piek Vossen will kick-off the mini-seminar by depicting the background of the problem and presenting the existing approaches. Prof. Frank van Harmelen will conclude the event with a discussion on the integration of background knowledge in language processing.

Program:
10:00 – 10:15 Introduction by Piek Vossen
10:20 – 10:50 Towards a Dutch FrameNet-style Semantic Role Labeler (Chantal van Son)
10:55 – 11:25 Named Entity Disambiguation with two-stage coherence optimization (Filip Ilievski)
11:30 – 12:00 Closing remarks and discussion lead by Frank van Harmelen

Towards a Dutch FrameNet-style Semantic Role Labeler (Chantal van Son)
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is one of the key tasks in Natural Language Processing for deep text understanding. Because of its rich and fine-grained categorization of different conceptual scenarios and their specific semantic roles, FrameNet is a popular resource to serve as a basis for SRL systems in English. For Dutch however there is currently no FrameNet-like resource available that can be used to train a SRL system, and creating such a resource usually takes a great deal of expensive manual effort. This study investigates how existing tools and resources, such as the SoNaR Semantic Role Labeler (SSRL) and the Predicate Matrix, can be exploited for FrameNet based SRL in Dutch. In this talk I will present this method while discussing some of its difficulties and possible solutions to solve them.

Named Entity Disambiguation with two-stage coherence optimization (Filip Ilievski)
Contemporary Natural Language Processing modules solve Entity Linking, Event Detection, and Semantic Role Labeling as separate problems. From the semantic point of view, each of these processes adds another brush-stroke onto the canvas of meaning: entities and events are components that occur in relations which correspond to roles. The approach presented here extends such NLP processes with a semantic process of coherence optimization. I use both binary logic and probabilistic models built through manual and automatic techniques. The binary filtering phase relies on restrictions from VerbNet and a domain-specific ontology. The optimization phase aims to maximize the coherence between the remaining candidates in a probabilistic manner based on available background knowledge about the entities.

Kind regards,
Filip Ilievski & Chantal van Son

Piek Vossen and his team organize a Summer School course “Perspectives on Subjectivity”, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands from July 06-17, 2015.

Who should join this course?

Advanced Bachelor/ Master students of Linguistics (theoretical, applied or computational), Artificial Intelligence and Journalism, and others interested in cultural perspectives in communication.

Course content

Welcome to Perpectives on Subjectivity: an excellent course in Amsterdam! That is a very subjective opening, as you will agree. Here the subjective perspective of the writer is obvious, but as a rule it is much more subtle. Subjectivity is one of the key elements of natural language. Every communicative act is subjective to some degree. Subjectivity starts with the intentions of the producer of the message and affects its associated functions and syntactic structures, not to mention the choice of vocabulary and associated connotations. All of this can be summarized as perspective.

This course combines theoretical linguistic notions about perspectives with hands-on work on real language data in the lab. Moving between theory, discussions, practical data annotation and data use (machine learning and quantative/ qualitative analysis), you explore a wide range of linguistic phenomena: reference, modality, attribution, registers, sentiment analysis, opinions, temporal processing and so on.

Perspectives on Subjectivity is provided by the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL), which models computer understanding of natural language with a central role for sources like lexicons, ontologies and terminology. The CLTL is part of the Department of Language and Communication in the Faculty of humanities at VU University Amsterdam.

Learning objectives

Impression of TiNT 2014, November 14, 2014 and link to programme

Op 14 november 2014 organiseert de vereniging NL-Term in samenwerking met het Steunpunt Nederlandstalige Terminologie voor de zesde maal de TiNT-dag. TiNT staat voor Terminologie in het Nederlandse Taalgebied. Dit jaarlijks terugkerende evenement is bedoeld om actueel onderzoek en de professionele praktijk op het gebied van Nederlandstalige terminologie voor te stellen voor een breed publiek. TiNT 2014 vindt plaats op het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken in Den Haag, van 9.30 tot 18.00 uur. Het thema is dit jaar Terminologie in de communicatie tussen overheid en burger. We hebben zeer interessante en voor het thema relevante sprekers vast kunnen leggen, waaronder Alex Brenninkmeijer van de Europese Rekenkamer, tot voor kort Nationale Ombudsman, Geert Joris, Algemeen Secretaris van de Nederlandse Taalunie en Jac Brouwer, Landelijk Huisstijlcoördinator van de Belastingdienst.

We hopen ook dit jaar weer op een volle zaal, interessante presentaties en levendige discussie.

Meer informatie, het voorlopige programma en het inschrijfformulier kunt u vinden op onze website: http://taalunieversum.org/inhoud/tint-2014.

Met vriendelijke groet,
namens het SNT en NL-Term
Anneleen Schoen
steunpunt@let.vu.nl