Papers by Barbara Gawronska
This paper refers to the forthcoming ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Worksh... more This paper refers to the forthcoming ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Workshop "Experimental Linguistics" in Athens, Greece, in 2006. The major objectives of the Workshop are (1) the development of experimental methodologies in linguistic research with new perspectives for the study of language, (2) the unification of linguistic knowledge in relation to linguistic theory based on experimental evidence, (3) the design of multifactor linguistic models and ( ) the integration of interdisciplinary expertise in linguistic applications. Key knowledge areas ranging from cognition and neurophysiology to perception and psychology are organised in invited lectures as well as in oral and poster presentations along with interdisciplinary panel discussions.
Languages – Cultures – Worldviews, 2019
Towards In-Depth Understanding of Biomedical Texts
An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validitating hypoth... more An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validitating hypotheses by analysing facts stored in databases and in published literature. This process can be enhanced by language technology methods, in particular by automatic in-depth text understanding.A high-quality system for extracting relevant information from biological texts must include an algorithm for distinguishing between the background and the foreground information in a text, in order not to confuse the previous research referred to and the current research reported in a particular paper.Furthermore, text understanding requires a strategy for anaphora recognition. The paper focuses on these two issues in automatic processing of abstracts in the domain of genetics
Arv och miljö grunden för språkutvecklingen
The semantics of verbs implies, as is known, a great number of difficulties, when it is to be rep... more The semantics of verbs implies, as is known, a great number of difficulties, when it is to be represented in a computational lexicon. The Slavic languages are especially challenging in respect of this task because of the huge complexity of verbs, where the stems are combined with prefixes indicating aspect and Aktionsart. The current paper describes an approach to build PolVerbNet, a database for Polish verbs, considering the internal structure of the aspect-Aktionsart system. PolVerbNet is thus implemented in a larger English- Polish MT-system, which incorporates WordNet. We report our translation procedure and the system's performance is evaluated and discussed.
Understanding politics by studying weather
The paper deals with the question whether representations of verb semantics formulated on the bas... more The paper deals with the question whether representations of verb semantics formulated on the basis of a lexically and syntactically restricted domain (weather forecasts) can apply to other, less restricted textual domains. An analysis of a group of Polish polysemous verbs of motion, existence and appearance inspired by cognitive semantics, especially the metaphor theory, is presented, and the usefulness of the conceptual representations of the Polish motion/appearance/existence verbs for automatic translation of texts belonging to less restricted domains is evaluated and discussed.
The dynamic development of information fusion research implies introduction of new terms and conc... more The dynamic development of information fusion research implies introduction of new terms and concepts, which in turn requires tools and methods for terminology organization and standardization, as well as tools for creating domain-specific ontology. In this paper, we show how natural language processing and corpus technology tools applied for term extraction from texts in biomedicine can successfully be used for the field of information fusion. We demonstrate term and information extraction from a corpus of research articles in information fusion, showing how a vision of a combined text retrieval and information extraction service can be made real.
An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validating hypothes... more An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validating hypotheses by analyzing facts stored in databases and in published literature. This process can be enhanced by automatic in-depth text understanding. A prerequisite for this is an adequate syntactic and semantic analysis. The paper presents the results of syntactic, semantic, and textual analysis of a corpus of biomedical abstracts. It focuses on the ways in which relevant molecular interactions are referred to in the abstracts, and proposes a strategy for linking natural language expressions to the standard notation used in Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes. The syntactic and semantic regularities observed in the language of biomedicine are also discussed from the cognitive point of view.
The paper presents an approach to automatic text understanding inspired by speech act theory and ... more The paper presents an approach to automatic text understanding inspired by speech act theory and cognitive semantics, especially by the notion of 'mental spaces' (Fauconnier 1985), and by Pustejovsky's (1991a, 1991b, 1995) notion of 'qualia' and his definition of formal and telic hyponymy. This approach is employed in an experimental system for understanding of news reports and multilingual generation of
Understanding Politics by Studying Weather: A Cognitive Approach to Representation of Polish Verbs of Motion, Appearance, and Existence
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000
ABSTRACT The paper deals with the question whether representations of verb semantics formulated o... more ABSTRACT The paper deals with the question whether representations of verb semantics formulated on the basis of a lexically and syntactically restricted domain (weather forecasts) can apply to other, less restricted textual domains. An analysis of a group of Polish polysemous verbs of motion, existence and appearance inspired by cognitive semantics, especially the metaphor theory, is presented, and the usefulness of the conceptual representations of the Polish motion/appearance/existence verbs for automatic translation of texts belonging to less restricted domains is evaluated and discussed.
Novelty Extraction from Special and Parallel Corpora
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
Three experiments of focus identification are reported one each for American English, Greek and S... more Three experiments of focus identification are reported one each for American English, Greek and Swedish. In the first experiment, listeners were presented with isolated sentences as well as sentences extracted from question-answer contexts and were asked to identify focus distribution. In the second experiment, questions were paired with prosodically variable answers and listeners were asked to identify the matching pairs.
This study concerns analysis and modeling of prosody in a computational context. It aims at an ex... more This study concerns analysis and modeling of prosody in a computational context. It aims at an exploration of the interaction between prosodic markers on the one hand, and the lexical, the syntactic and discourse level of the utterances on the other. The analysis is a step towards a computational discourse-grammar-prosody model. We concentrate on the pattern of distribution and duration of silent pauses in German and Swedish. The possibility of integrating the results in a multilingual text generation system is then discussed.
This study concerns tonal and temporal prosodic production in relation to thematic segmentation. ... more This study concerns tonal and temporal prosodic production in relation to thematic segmentation. A series of relatively short radio news broadcasts produced by female and male professional speakers with well-defined thematic alternations was analysed. The main results indicate: (1) thematic tonal onset and thematic initial stress are higher than thematic tonal offset and thematic final stress respectively (2) hypothematic tonal range is fairly embedded in hyperthematic tonal range and (3) hyperthematic silent pauses are significantly longer than hypothematic ones.
Entailment in logic and in the lexicon
North-Holland Linguistic Series: Linguistic Variations, 1994
Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics -, 1994
The paper presents a procedure for interpretation of English compounds and lkn" automatic transla... more The paper presents a procedure for interpretation of English compounds and lkn" automatic translation of such compounds into Slavic languages and French. In tile target languages, a compound nominal is as a role to be rendered by an NP with an adjective or genitive attribute, or with an attrilmtive participle construction. The model is based on Bierwisch's theory of word formation, which in turn is inspired by categorial grammar. The procedure is applied to a specific domain (asthma research). 0. INTItOI)UCTION The need of a component interpreting complex lexical items in an MT system translating fl'om Germanic languages into e.g. French or Slavic languages is obvious. Many rules (or patterns) of word fo,'mation are highly productive, which makes it impossible to store all complex lexical entries in a static lexicon. An effective MT system rnust also be able to match the interpretation of a complex entry with the correct morphosyntactic pattern in the target language. For example, a program translating from German into Polish must distinguish the relations between the parts of a compound like Universitiitslehrer (university teacher) ['rotll the relations holding between Musik and Lehrer in Musiklehrer (teacher el + music). The first mentioned compound is to be translated as a noun followed by an adjective (nattczyciel tmiwersytecki-'teacher university+adjective ending'), the later one its a noun and a genitive attribute (,zattczyciel mttzyki-'teacher music+gen'). Similar problems occur when translating into French or Czech: cf. Musikabend-Fr. soim;e mtt.s'icah' (n a), Cz. hudebn(ve&~r (a n), Mttsiklehrer-Fr. pro.fiesseur de musique (n prep n), Cz. tlEitel hudbv (n n+gen).
2006 9th International Conference on Information Fusion, 2006
The long-term goal of the research presented in this paper is to incorporate linguistic text anal... more The long-term goal of the research presented in this paper is to incorporate linguistic text analysis into a system for evaluation of biological pathways. In this system, relations extracted from biomedical texts will be compared with pathways encoded in existing specialized databases. In this way, the biologist's conclusions regarding the plausibility and/or novelty of a certain relation between genes, proteins, etc., can be supported by fused information from biological databases and biological literature. We aim at overcoming the shortcomings of existing systems for information retrieval by proposing a method based on thorough linguistic analysis of a large text corpus. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of two corpora: one consisting of biomedical texts from PubMed, the other one of general English prose. The results stress the importance of taking multiword entries into account when constructing a system for extracting biological relations from texts.
Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics -, 1994
Tim paper demonstrates tim problem of translating modal verbs and phrases and shows how some of t... more Tim paper demonstrates tim problem of translating modal verbs and phrases and shows how some of these problems can be overcome by choosing semantic representations which look like representations of passive verbs. These semantic representations suit alternative ways of expressing modality by e.g. passive constructions, adverbs and impersonal constructions in the target language. Various restructuring rules for English, Swe(lish and Russian am presented.
An information fusion approach to controlling complexity in bioinformatics research
Information Fusion (IF) is about combining, or fusing, information from different sources in orde... more Information Fusion (IF) is about combining, or fusing, information from different sources in order to facilitate our understanding of a complex system and thereby provide insights that could not be gained from any of the individual data sources in isolation. We argue in this paper that there is a need for applying an IF approach in bioinformatics research, since the
Towards an automated analysis of biomedical abstracts
ABSTRACT An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validating... more ABSTRACT An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validating hypotheses by analyzing facts stored in databases and in published literature. This process can be enhanced by language technology methods, in particular by automatic text understanding. Since it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the vast number of scientific articles being published, there is a need for more easily accessible representations of the current knowledge. The goal of the research described in this paper is to develop a system aimed to support the large-scale research on metabolic and regulatory pathways by extracting relations between biological objects from descriptions found in literature. We present and evaluate the procedures for semantico-syntactic tagging, dividing the text into parts concerning previous research and current research, syntactic parsing, and transformation of syntactic trees into logical representations similar to the pathway graphs utilized in the Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes.
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Papers by Barbara Gawronska