Application of Text Summarization techniques to the Geographical Information Retrieval task

Automatic Text Summarization has been shown to be useful for Natural Language Processing tasks such as Question Answering or Text Classification and other related fields of computer science such as Information Retrieval. Since Geographical Information Retrieval can be considered as an extension of the Information Retrieval field, the generation of summaries could be integrated into these systems by acting as an intermediate stage, with the purpose of reducing the document length. In this manner, the access time for information searching will be improved, while at the same time relevant documents will be also retrieved. Therefore, in this paper we propose the generation of two types of summaries (generic and geographical) applying several compression rates in order to evaluate their effectiveness in the Geographical Information Retrieval task. The evaluation has been carried out using GeoCLEF as evaluation framework and following an Information Retrieval perspective without considering the geo-reranking phase commonly used in these systems. Although single-document summarization has not performed well in general, the slight improvements obtained for some types of the proposed summaries, particularly for those based on geographical information, made us believe that the integration of Text Summarization with Geographical Information Retrieval may be beneficial, and consequently, the experimental set-up developed in this research work serves as a basis for further investigations in this field.

Detecting implicit expressions of affect in text using EmotiNet and its extensions

In the past years, an important volume of research in Natural Language Processing has concentrated on the development of automatic systems to deal with affect in text. The different approaches considered dealt mostly with explicit expressions of emotion, at word level. Nevertheless, expressions of emotion are often implicit, inferrable from situations that have an affective meaning. Dealing with this phenomenon requires automatic systems to have “knowledge” on the situation, and the concepts it describes and their interaction, to be able to “judge” it, in the same manner as a person would. This necessity motivated us to develop the EmotiNet knowledge base — a resource for the detection of emotion from text based on commonsense knowledge on concepts, their interaction and their affective consequence. In this article, we briefly present the process undergone to build EmotiNet and subsequently propose methods to extend the knowledge it contains. We further on analyse the performance of implicit affect detection using this resource. We compare the results obtained with EmotiNet to the use of alternative methods for affect detection. Following the evaluations, we conclude that the structure and content of EmotiNet are appropriate to address the automatic treatment of implicitly expressed affect, that the knowledge it contains can be easily extended and that overall, methods employing EmotiNet obtain better results than traditional emotion detection approaches.

A Theorical Point of View of Reality, Perception, and Language

It is possible to view the relations between mathematics and natural language from different aspects. This relation between mathematics and language is not based on just one aspect. In this article, the authors address the role of the Subject facing Reality through language. Perception is defined and a mathematical theory of the perceptual field is proposed. The distinction between purely expressive language and purely informative language is considered false, because the subject is expressed in the communication of a message, and conversely, in purely expressive language, as in an exclamation, there is some information. To study the relation between language and reality, the function of ostensibility is defined and propositions are divided into ostensives and estimatives.

Recognizing and tagging temporal expressions in Spanish

This paper shows a system about the recognition of temporal expressions in Spanish and the resolution of their temporal reference. For the identification and recognition of temporal expressions we have based on a temporal expression grammar and for the resolution on an inference engine, where we have the information necessary to do the date operation based on the recognized expressions. For further information treatment, the output is proposed by means of XML tags in order to add standard information of the resolution obtained. Different kinds of annotation of temporal expressions are explained in another articles [WILSON2001][KATZ2001]. In the evaluation of our proposal we have obtained successful results.

Prueba de concepto de expansión de consultas basada en ontologías de dominio financiero

Este trabajo presenta el uso de una ontología en el dominio financiero para la expansión de consultas con el fin de mejorar los resultados de un sistema de recuperación de información (RI) financiera. Este sistema está compuesto por una ontología y un índice de Lucene que permite recuperación de conceptos identificados mediante procesamiento de lenguaje natural. Se ha llevado a cabo una evaluación con un conjunto limitado de consultas y los resultados indican que la ambigüedad sigue siendo un problema al expandir la consulta. En ocasiones, la elección de las entidades adecuadas a la hora de expandir las consultas (filtrando por sector, empresa, etc.) permite resolver esa ambigüedad.

COMPENDIUM: a text summarisation tool for generating summaries of multiple purposes, domains, and genres

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.

An authoring tool for decision support systems in context questions of ecological knowledge

Decision support systems (DSS) support business or organizational decision-making activities, which require the access to information that is internally stored in databases or data warehouses, and externally in the Web accessed by Information Retrieval (IR) or Question Answering (QA) systems. Graphical interfaces to query these sources of information ease to constrain dynamically query formulation based on user selections, but they present a lack of flexibility in query formulation, since the expressivity power is reduced to the user interface design. Natural language interfaces (NLI) are expected as the optimal solution. However, especially for non-expert users, a real natural communication is the most difficult to realize effectively. In this paper, we propose an NLI that improves the interaction between the user and the DSS by means of referencing previous questions or their answers (i.e. anaphora such as the pronoun reference in “What traits are affected by them?”), or by eliding parts of the question (i.e. ellipsis such as “And to glume colour?” after the question “Tell me the QTLs related to awn colour in wheat”). Moreover, in order to overcome one of the main problems of NLIs about the difficulty to adapt an NLI to a new domain, our proposal is based on ontologies that are obtained semi-automatically from a framework that allows the integration of internal and external, structured and unstructured information. Therefore, our proposal can interface with databases, data warehouses, QA and IR systems. Because of the high NL ambiguity of the resolution process, our proposal is presented as an authoring tool that helps the user to query efficiently in natural language. Finally, our proposal is tested on a DSS case scenario about Biotechnology and Agriculture, whose knowledge base is the CEREALAB database as internal structured data, and the Web (e.g. PubMed) as external unstructured information.

A novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion summarization

The Web 2.0 has resulted in a shift as to how users consume and interact with the information, and has introduced a wide range of new textual genres, such as reviews or microblogs, through which users communicate, exchange, and share opinions. The exploitation of all this user-generated content is of great value both for users and companies, in order to assist them in their decision-making processes. Given this context, the analysis and development of automatic methods that can help manage online information in a quicker manner are needed. Therefore, this article proposes and evaluates a novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion abstractive summarization. Our approach is characterized by the integration of syntactic sentence simplification, sentence regeneration and internal concept representation into the summarization process, thus being able to generate abstractive summaries, which is one the most challenging issues for this task. In order to be able to analyze different settings for our approach, the use of the sentence regeneration module was made optional, leading to two different versions of the system (one with sentence regeneration and one without). For testing them, a corpus of 400 English texts, gathered from reviews and tweets belonging to two different domains, was used. Although both versions were shown to be reliable methods for generating this type of summaries, the results obtained indicate that the version without sentence regeneration yielded to better results, improving the results of a number of state-of-the-art systems by 9%, whereas the version with sentence regeneration proved to be more robust to noisy data.

Chebanov law and Vakar formula in mathematical models of complex systems

Ecological models written in a mathematical language L(M) or model language, with a given style or methodology can be considered as a text. It is possible to apply statistical linguistic laws and the experimental results demonstrate that the behaviour of a mathematical model is the same of any literary text of any natural language. A text has the following characteristics: (a) the variables, its transformed functions and parameters are the lexic units or LUN of ecological models; (b) the syllables are constituted by a LUN, or a chain of them, separated by operating or ordering LUNs; (c) the flow equations are words; and (d) the distribution of words (LUM and CLUN) according to their lengths is based on a Poisson distribution, the Chebanov's law. It is founded on Vakar's formula, that is calculated likewise the linguistic entropy for L(M). We will apply these ideas over practical examples using MARIOLA model. In this paper it will be studied the problem of the lengths of the simple lexic units composed lexic units and words of text models, expressing these lengths in number of the primitive symbols, and syllables. The use of these linguistic laws renders it possible to indicate the degree of information given by an ecological model.

Araknion: inducción de modelos lingüísticos a partir de corpora

El proyecto Araknion tiene como objetivo general dotar al español y al catalán de una infraestructura básica de recursos lingüísticos para el procesamiento semántico de corpus en el marco de la Web 2.0 sean de origen oral o escrito.

TextMess 2.0: las tecnologías del lenguaje humano ante los nuevos retos de la comunicación digital

El objetivo general de este proyecto se centra en el estudio, desarrollo y experimentación de diferentes técnicas y sistemas basados en Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano (TLH) para el desarrollo de la próxima generación de sistemas de procesamiento inteligente de la información digital (modelado, recuperación, tratamiento, comprensión y descubrimiento) afrontando los actuales retos de la comunicación digital. En este nuevo escenario, los sistemas deben incorporar capacidades de razonamiento que descubrirán la subjetividad de la información en todos sus contextos (espacial, temporal y emocional) analizando las diferentes dimensiones de uso (multilingualidad, multimodalidad y registro).

Diversity for Texts Builds in Language L(MT): Indexes Based in Theory of Information

If one has a distribution of words (SLUNs or CLUNS) in a text written in language L(MT), and is adjusted one of the mathematical expressions of distribution that exists in the mathematical literature, some parameter of the elected expression it can be considered as a measure of the diversity. But because the adjustment is not always perfect as usual measure; it is preferable to select an index that doesn't postulate a regularity of distribution expressible for a simple formula. The problem can be approachable statistically, without having special interest for the organization of the text. It can serve as index any monotonous function that has a minimum value when all their elements belong to the same class, that is to say, all the individuals belong to oneself symbol, and a maximum value when each element belongs to a different class, that is to say, each individual is of a different symbol. It should also gather certain conditions like they are: to be not very sensitive to the extension of the text and being invariant to certain number of operations of selection in the text. These operations can be theoretically random. The expressions that offer more advantages are those coming from the theory of the information of Shannon-Weaver. Based on them, the authors develop a theoretical study for indexes of diversity to be applied in texts built in modeling language L(MT), although anything impedes that they can be applied to texts written in natural languages.

Explotación y tratamiento de la información disponible en Internet para la anotación y generación de textos adaptados al usuario

La gran cantidad de información disponible en Internet está dificultando cada vez más que los usuarios puedan digerir toda esa información, siendo actualmente casi impensable sin la ayuda de herramientas basadas en las Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano (TLH), como pueden ser los recuperadores de información o resumidores automáticos. El interés de este proyecto emergente (y por tanto, su objetivo principal) viene motivado precisamente por la necesidad de definir y crear un marco tecnológico basado en TLH, capaz de procesar y anotar semánticamente la información, así como permitir la generación de información de forma automática, flexibilizando el tipo de información a presentar y adaptándola a las necesidades de los usuarios. En este artículo se proporciona una visión general de este proyecto, centrándonos en la arquitectura propuesta y el estado actual del mismo.

Exploring the use of cooperative activities in a language subject to develop students’ social competences at the University

Cooperative learning has been successfully implemented in the last 60 years for teaching at different educational levels including the Higher Studies due to its solid theoretical foundation, the principles it proposes and its practical applications. The purpose of this article is to offer a proposal for some cooperative activities that allow students to work in small groups in a language subject in order to learn not only contents but also putting into practice what they learn, i.e., they learn by being active. This article discusses how the said activities make it possible for students to work with the main principles of cooperative learning, i.e.: positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small-group skills and group processing. Moreover, this research will also point out that the proposed activities allow students to acquire some of the social competences required in the labour market such as leadership, conflict solving and cooperation.