This paper describes efforts of NLP researchers to create a system to aid the relief efforts during the 2011 East Japan Earthquake. Specifically, we created a system to mine information regarding the safety of people in the disaster-stricken area from Twitter, a massive yet highly unorganized information source. We describe the large scale collaborative effort to rapidly create robust and effec...

The clinical documents stored in a textual and unstructured manner represent a precious source of information that can be gathered by exploiting Information Retrieval techniques. Classification algorithms can be used for organizing this huge amount of data, but are usually tested on standardized corpora, which significantly differ from actual clinical documents that can be found in a modern hos...

Verb aspect is a grammatical and lexical category that encodes temporal unfolding and duration of events described by verbs. It is a potentially interesting source of information for various computational tasks, but has so far not been studied in much depth from the perspective of automatic processing. Slavic languages are particularly interesting in this respect, as they encode aspect through ...

We study the problem of topic segmentation of manually transcribed speech in order to facilitate information extraction from dialogs. Our approach is based on a combination of multi-source knowledge modeled by hidden Markov models. We experiment with different combinations of linguistic-level cues on dialogs dealing with search and rescue missions. Results show the effectiveness of multi-source...

Current methods for word alignment require considerable amounts of parallel text to deliver accurate results, a requirement which is met only for a small minority of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. We show that by jointly performing word alignment and annotation transfer in a novel Bayesian model, alignment accuracy can be improved for language pairs where annotations are available f...

We are suggesting a framework for open access publishing of comprehensive, elaborately structured digital textbooks, potentially enriched by extensive non-textual data. The framework will comprise of a software toolbox containing a collaborative authoring platform, manuscript workflow system, tools for editorial work, presentation platform, updating workflow, interfaces for dissemination and lo...

... so I say to you ... search, and you will find ... In this paper and the associated system demo, we present an advanced search system that allows to perform a joint search over a (bilingual) valency lexicon and a correspondingly annotated linked parallel corpus. This search tool has been developed on the basis of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, but its ideas are applicable in p...

An increasing number of enterprises are beginning to include ontologies into Text Analytics (TA) applications. This can be challenging for a TA group wishing to avail of such technologies due to the manual effort needed to map language resources within a TA system for a new domain. Ontology lexicalization offers a solution to this problem by seeking to automatically generate lexical resources i...

Our paper deals with an on-going Project in the framework of which, by means of open-source and free tools, a family of web corpora is being created that would (to a large extend) deserve the designation of being “comparable”. A summary of results after the first stage of the Project is given, and experiences with the tools are commented.

The topic of this book is beauty and sublimity – or, rather, the subjective experience of beauty and sublimity. The opening chapter draws a fundamental distinction between what we judge to be “beautiful in itself” – what I call “public beauty” – and what we experience as beautiful, more or less what Palmer and colleagues refer to as “feelings that would elicit verbal expressions such as, ‘Oh wo...