Language Corpora Annotation And Processing

This book addresses the research, analysis, and description of the methods and processes that are used in the annotation and processing of language corpora in advanced, semi-advanced, and non-advanced languages. It provides the background information and empirical data needed to understand the nature and depth of problems related to corpus annotation and text processing and shows readers how the linguistic elements found in texts are analyzed and applied to develop language technology systems and devices. As such, it offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and students of linguistics and language technology.

This is a text which surveys the growing field of research known as corpus annotation - an electronic collection of texts. Corpus annotation is a central resource in linguisticsi̧nformation technology and the processing of human language. The book seeks to show the nature of language and the most effective means of analysing it. A bibliography lists relevant e-mail addresses and Web sites.

This handbook offers a thorough treatment of the science of linguistic annotation. Leaders in the field guide the reader through the process of modeling, creating an annotation language, building a corpus and evaluating it for correctness. Essential reading for both computer scientists and linguistic researchers.Linguistic annotation is an increasingly important activity in the field of computational linguistics because of its critical role in the development of language models for natural language processing applications. Part one of this book covers all phases of the linguistic annotation process, from annotation scheme design and choice of representation format through both the manual and automatic annotation process, evaluation, and iterative improvement of annotation accuracy. The second part of the book includes case studies of annotation projects across the spectrum of linguistic annotation types, including morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic analyses, a range of semantic analyses (semantic roles, named entities, sentiment and opinion), time and event and spatial analyses, and discourse level analyses including discourse structure, co-reference, etc. Each case study addresses the various phases and processes discussed in the chapters of part one.

In the past few decades the use of increasingly large text corpora has grown rapidly in language and linguistics research. This was enabled by remarkable strides in natural language processing (NLP) technology, technology that enables computers to automatically and efficiently process, annotate and analyze large amounts of spoken and written text in linguistically and/or pragmatically meaningful ways. It has become more desirable than ever before for language and linguistics researchers who use corpora in their research to gain an adequate understanding of the relevant NLP technology to take full advantage of its capabilities. This volume provides language and linguistics researchers with an accessible introduction to the state-of-the-art NLP technology that facilitates automatic annotation and analysis of large text corpora at both shallow and deep linguistic levels. The book covers a wide range of computational tools for lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analysis, together with detailed instructions on how to obtain, install and use each tool in different operating systems and platforms. The book illustrates how NLP technology has been applied in recent corpus-based language studies and suggests effective ways to better integrate such technology in future corpus linguistics research. This book provides language and linguistics researchers with a valuable reference for corpus annotation and analysis.

Create your own natural language training corpus for machine learning. Whether you’re working with English, Chinese, or any other natural language, this hands-on book guides you through a proven annotation development cycle—the process of adding metadata to your training corpus to help ML algorithms work more efficiently. You don’t need any programming or linguistics experience to get started. Using detailed examples at every step, you’ll learn how the MATTER Annotation Development Process helps you Model, Annotate, Train, Test, Evaluate, and Revise your training corpus. You also get a complete walkthrough of a real-world annotation project. Define a clear annotation goal before collecting your dataset (corpus) Learn tools for analyzing the linguistic content of your corpus Build a model and specification for your annotation project Examine the different annotation formats, from basic XML to the Linguistic Annotation Framework Create a gold standard corpus that can be used to train and test ML algorithms Select the ML algorithms that will process your annotated data Evaluate the test results and revise your annotation task Learn how to use lightweight software for annotating texts and adjudicating the annotations This book is a perfect companion to O’Reilly’s Natural Language Processing with Python.

A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer. Today, corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study. In this volume, a selection of leading experts in various key areas of corpus construction offer advice in a readable and largely non-technical style to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well designed and fit for the intended purpose. This guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will find the guidelines here useful. It is also aimed at those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their studies.

This book highlights corpora use in teaching foreign languages in university education. It will appeal to both academics and practitioners interested in the process of teaching foreign languages at more advanced levels while applying corpus analysis and building tools for corpus annotation. It provides a detailed case study of analyzing the terminology of constitutional law in both English and Lithuanian as an example to illustrate the possibility of integrating corpus analysis tools into the process of teaching foreign languages in university education. The book reveals that initial linguistic knowledge is essential when teaching and learning foreign languages at more advanced levels while applying corpus annotation. In addition, it shows that, even though the use of new corpus software is perceived as a positive, there are still certain issues to be solved in this regard, such as the constant renewal of public computers in universities and the technical and methodological support for teachers while using corpora tools.

Abstract: Building on work showing the harmfulness of annotation errors for both the training and evaluation of natural language processing technologies, this thesis develops a method for detecting and correcting errors in corpora with linguistic annotation. The so-called variation n-gram method relies on the recurrence of identical strings with varying annotation to find erroneous mark-up. We show that the method is applicable for varying complexities of annotation. The method is most readily applied to positional annotation, such as part-of-speech annotation, but can be extended to structural annotation, both for tree structures---as with syntactic annotation---and for graph structures---as with syntactic annotation allowing discontinuous constituents, or crossing branches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the notion of variation for detecting errors is a powerful one, by searching for grammar rules in a treebank which have the same daughters but different mothers. We also show that such errors impact the effectiveness of a grammar induction algorithm and subsequent parsing. After detecting errors in the different corpora, we turn to correcting such errors, through the use of more general classification techniques. Our results indicate that the particular classification algorithm is less important than understanding the nature of the errors and altering the classifiers to deal with these errors. With such alterations, we can automatically correct errors with 85% accuracy. By sorting the errors, we can relegate over 20% of them into an automatically correctable class and speed up the re-annotation process by effectively categorizing the others.

Linguistically annotated corpora are becoming a central part of the corpus linguistics field. One of their main strengths is the level of searchability they offer, but with the annotation come problems of the initial complexity of queries and query tools. This book gives a full, pedagogic account of this burgeoning field. Beginning with an overview of corpus linguistics, its prerequisites and goals, the book then introduces linguistically annotated corpora. It explores the different levels of linguistic annotation, including morphological, parts of speech, syntactic, semantic and discourse-level, as well as advantages and challenges for such annotations. It covers the main annotated corpora for English, the Penn Treebank, the International Corpus of English, and OntoNotes, as well as a wide range of corpora for other languages. In its third part, search strategies required for different types of data are explored. All chapters are accompanied by exercises and by sections on further reading.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-315) and index.