In this project, we have investigated the use of advanced machine learning methods, specifically fine-tuned large language models, for pre-annotating data for a lexical extension task, namely adding descriptive words (verbs) to an existing (but incomplete, as of yet) ontology of event types. Several research questions have been focused on, from the investigation of a possible heuristics to provide at least hints to annotators which verbs to include and which are outside the current version of the ontology, to the possible use of the automatic scores to help the annotators to be more efficient in finding a threshold for identifying verbs that cannot be assigned to any existing class and therefore they are to be used as seeds for a new class. We have also carefully examined the correlation of the automatic scores with the human annotation. While the correlation turned out to be strong, its influence on the annotation proper is modest due to its near linearity, even though the mere fact of such pre-annotation leads to relatively short annotation times.

In the course of building a multilingual Event-type Ontology resource called SynSemClass, it was necessary to provide the maintainers and the annotators with a set of tools to facilitate their job, achieve data format consistency, and in general obtain high-quality data. We have adapted a previously existing tool (Urešová et al., 2018b), developed to assist the work in capturing bilingual synonymy. This tool needed to be both substantially expanded with some new features and fundamentally changed in the context of developing the resource for more languages, which necessarily is to be done in parallel. We are thus presenting here the tool, the new data structure design which had to change at the same time, and the associated workflow.

This paper presents ongoing work in the expansion of the multilingual semantic event-type ontology SynSemClass (Czech-English-German) to include Spanish. As in previous versions of the lexicon, Spanish verbal synonyms have been collected from a sentence-aligned parallel corpus and classified into classes based on their syntactic-semantic properties. Each class member is linked to a number of syntactic and/or semantic resources specific to each language, thus enriching the annotation and enabling interoperability. This paper describes the procedure for the data extraction and annotation of Spanish verbal synonyms in the lexicon.

This paper presents detailed mappings between the structures used in Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and those used in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR). These structures include general semantic roles, rolesets, and concepts that are largely shared between AMR and UMR, but with crucial differences. While UMR annotation of new low-resource languages is ongoing, AMR-annotated corpora already exist for many languages, and these AMR corpora are ripe for conversion to UMR format. Rather than focusing on semantic coverage that is new to UMR (which will likely need to be dealt with manually), this paper serves as a resource (with illustrated mappings) for users looking to understand the fine-grained adjustments that have been made to the representation techniques for semantic categoriespresent in both AMR and UMR.

Rooted in AMR, Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a graph-based formalism with nodes as concepts and edges as relations between them. When used to represent natural language semantics, UMR maps words in a sentence to concepts in the UMR graph. Multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a particular challenge to UMR annotation because they deviate from the default one-to-one mapping between words and concepts. There are different types of MWEs which require different kinds of annotation that must be specified in guidelines. This paper discusses the specific treatment for each type of MWE in UMR.

We present an extension of the SynSemClass Event-type Ontology, originally conceived as a bilingual Czech-English resource. We added German entries to the classes representing the concepts of the ontology. Having a different starting point than the original work (unannotated parallel corpus without links to a valency lexicon and, of course, different existing lexical resources), it was a challenge to adapt the annotation guidelines, the data model and the tools used for the original version. We describe the process and results of working in such a setup. We also show the next steps to adapt the annotation process, data structures and formats and tools necessary to make the addition of a new language in the future more smooth and efficient, and possibly to allow for various teams to work on SynSemClass extensions to many languages concurrently. We also present the latest release which contains the results of adding German, freely available for download as well as for online access.

This paper reports on an extended version of a synonym verb class lexicon, newly called SynSemClass (formerly CzEngClass). This lexicon stores cross-lingual semantically similar verb senses in synonym classes extracted from a richly annotated parallel corpus, the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. When building the lexicon, we make use of predicate-argument relations (valency) and link them to semantic roles; in addition, each entry is linked to several external lexicons of more or less “semantic” nature, namely FrameNet, WordNet, VerbNet, OntoNotes and PropBank, and Czech VALLEX. The aim is to provide a linguistic resource that can be used to compare semantic roles and their syntactic properties and features across languages within and across synonym groups (classes, or ’synsets’), as well as gold standard data for automatic NLP experiments with such synonyms, such as synonym discovery, feature mapping, etc. However, perhaps the most important goal is to eventually build an event type ontology that can be referenced and used as a human-readable and human-understandable “database” for all types of events, processes and states. While the current paper describes primarily the content of the lexicon, we are also presenting a preliminary design of a format compatible with Linked Data, on which we are hoping to get feedback during discussions at the workshop. Once the resource (in whichever form) is applied to corpus annotation, deep analysis will be possible using such combined resources as training data.

The 2019 Shared Task at the Conference for Computational Language Learning (CoNLL) was devoted to Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP) across frameworks. Five distinct approaches to the representation of sentence meaning in the form of directed graph were represented in the training and evaluation data for the task, packaged in a uniform abstract graph representation and serialization. The task received submissions from eighteen teams, of which five do not participate in the official ranking because they arrived after the closing deadline, made use of additional training data, or involved one of the task co-organizers. All technical information regarding the task, including system submissions, official results, and links to supporting resources and software are available from the task web site at: http://mrp.nlpl.eu

This paper describes CzEngClass, a bilingual lexical resource being built to investigate verbal synonymy in bilingual context and to relate semantic roles common to one synonym class to verb arguments (verb valency). In addition, the resource is linked to existing resources with the same of a similar aim: English and Czech WordNet, FrameNet, PropBank, VerbNet (SemLink), and valency lexicons for Czech and English (PDT-Vallex, Vallex, and EngVallex). There are several goals of this work and resource: (a) to provide gold standard data for automatic experiments in the future (such as automatic discovery of synonym classes, word sense disambiguation, assignment of classes to occurrences of verbs in text, coreferential linking of verb and event arguments in text, etc.), (b) to build a core (bilingual) lexicon linked to existing resources, for comparative studies and possibly for training automatic tools, and (c) to enrich the annotation of a parallel treebank, the Prague Czech English Dependency Treebank, which so far contained valency annotation but has not linked synonymous senses of verbs together. The method used for extracting the synonym classes is a semi-automatic process with a substantial amount of manual work during filtering, role assignment to classes and individual Class members’ arguments, and linking to the external lexical resources. We present the first version with 200 classes (about 1800 verbs) and evaluate interannotator agreement using several metrics.

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2017, the task was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. In this paper, we define the task and evaluation methodology, describe how the data sets were prepared, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.

We introduce a new member of the family of Prague dependency treebanks. The Czech Legal Text Treebank 1.0 is a morphologically and syntactically annotated corpus of 1,128 sentences. The treebank contains texts from the legal domain, namely the documents from the Collection of Laws of the Czech Republic. Legal texts differ from other domains in several language phenomena influenced by rather high frequency of very long sentences. A manual annotation of such sentences presents a new challenge. We describe a strategy and tools for this task. The resulting treebank can be explored in various ways. It can be downloaded from the LINDAT/CLARIN repository and viewed locally using the TrEd editor or it can be accessed on-line using the KonText and TreeQuery tools.

We announce a new language resource for research on semantic parsing, a large, carefully curated collection of semantic dependency graphs representing multiple linguistic traditions. This resource is called SDP~2016 and provides an update and extension to previous versions used as Semantic Dependency Parsing target representations in the 2014 and 2015 Semantic Evaluation Exercises. For a common core of English text, this third edition comprises semantic dependency graphs from four distinct frameworks, packaged in a unified abstract format and aligned at the sentence and token levels. SDP 2016 is the first general release of this resource and available for licensing from the Linguistic Data Consortium in May 2016. The data is accompanied by an open-source SDP utility toolkit and system results from previous contrastive parsing evaluations against these target representations.

We present an attempt to automatically identify Czech deverbative nouns using several methods that use large corpora as well as existing lexical resources. The motivation for the task is to extend a verbal valency (i.e., predicate-argument) lexicon by adding nouns that share the valency properties with the base verb, assuming their properties can be derived (even if not trivially) from the underlying verb by deterministic grammatical rules. At the same time, even in inflective languages, not all deverbatives are simply created from their underlying base verb by regular lexical derivation processes. We have thus developed hybrid techniques that use both large parallel corpora and several standard lexical resources. Thanks to the use of parallel corpora, the resulting sets contain also synonyms, which the lexical derivation rules cannot get. For evaluation, we have manually created a small, 100-verb gold data since no such dataset was initially available for Czech.

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 principle to any bilingual parallel corpus that is annotated for dependencies and valency (i.e., predicate-argument structure), and where verbs are linked to appropriate entries in an associated valency lexicon. Our online search tool consolidates more search interfaces into one, providing expanded structured search capability and a more efficient advanced way to search, allowing users to search for verb pairs, verbal argument pairs, their surface realization as recorded in the lexicon, or for their surface form actually appearing in the linked parallel corpus. The search system is currently under development, and is replacing our current search tool available at http://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/CzEngVallex, which could search the lexicon but the queries cannot take advantage of the underlying corpus nor use the additional surface form information from the lexicon(s). The system is available as open source.

In this paper, we would like to exemplify how a syntactically annotated bilingual treebank can help us in exploring and revising a developed linguistic theory. On the material of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank we observe sentences in which an Addressee argument in one language is linked translationally to a Patient argument in the other one, and make generalizations about the theoretical grounds of the argument non-correspondences and its relations to the valency theory beyond the annotation practice. Exploring verbs of three semantic classes (Judgement verbs, Teaching verbs and Attempt Suasion verbs) we claim that the Functional Generative Description argument labelling is highly dependent on the morphosyntactic realization of the individual participants, which then results in valency frame differences. Nevertheless, most of the differences can be overcome without substantial changes to the linguistic theory itself.

Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) are rooted, directional and labeled graphs that abstract away from morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies such as word category (verbs and nouns), word order, and function words (determiners, some prepositions). Because these syntactic idiosyncrasies account for many of the cross-lingual differences, it would be interesting to see if this representation can serve, e.g., as a useful, minimally divergent transfer layer in machine translation. To answer this question, we have translated 100 English sentences that have existing AMRs into Chinese and Czech to create AMRs for them. A cross-linguistic comparison of English to Chinese and Czech AMRs reveals both cases where the AMRs for the language pairs align well structurally and cases of linguistic divergence. We found that the level of compatibility of AMR between English and Chinese is higher than between English and Czech. We believe this kind of comparison is beneficial to further refining the annotation standards for each of the three languages and will lead to more compatible annotation guidelines between the languages.

This paper presents development and test sets for machine translation of search queries in cross-lingual information retrieval in the medical domain. The data consists of the total of 1,508 real user queries in English translated to Czech, German, and French. We describe the translation and review process involving medical professionals and present a baseline experiment where our data sets are used for tuning and evaluation of a machine translation system.

We introduce a substantial update of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, a parallel corpus manually annotated at the deep syntactic layer of linguistic representation. The English part consists of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank. The Czech part was translated from the English source sentence by sentence. This paper gives a high level overview of the underlying linguistic theory (the so-called tectogrammatical annotation) with some details of the most important features like valency annotation, ellipsis reconstruction or coreference.