Trasformada de Welvert

Volume 34 Number 1 March 2010
Special Issue:
Computational Linguistics
and its Applications
Guest Editor:
Yulia Ledeneva
Grigori Sidorov
1977
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Huan Liu (USA)
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Shahram Rahimi (USA)
Dejan Rakovic (Serbia)
Jean Ramaekers (Belgium)
Wilhelm Rossak (Germany)
Ivan Rozman (Slovenia)
Sugata Sanyal (India)
Walter Schempp (Germany)
Johannes Schwinn (Germany)
Zhongzhi Shi (China)
Oliviero Stock (Italy)
Robert Trappl (Austria)
Terry Winograd (USA)
Stefan Wrobel (Germany)
Konrad Wrona (France)
Xindong Wu (USA)
Informatica 34 (2010) 1-1
Editorial
Computational Linguistics and its Applications
This special issue contains several interesting papers
related to computational linguistics and its applications.
The papers were carefully selected by the guest editors
on the basis of peer reviews. We are happy that authors
from various countries chose this forum for presenting
their work: USA, Spain, Mexico, China, Germany,
Hungary, India, Japan, Lithuania; submitting the high
quality research results.
The first paper Recent Advances in Computational
Linguistics by Yulia Ledeneva and Grigori Sidorov
(Mexico), presents the view of the authors concerning
some aspects of the current state of computational
linguistics and its applications.
The paraphrase ability can be considered one of the
important characteristics of the usage of natural language
that proves the correct understanding of phrases. This
interesting phenomenon is discussed in the paper
Paraphrase Identification using Weighted Dependencies
and Word Semantics by Mihai C. Lintean and Vasile
Rus (USA). The authors analyze the paraphrase using
syntactic and semantic (lexical) information. Evaluation
data is presented.
Some important issues of automatic summarization
are discussed in the paper Challenging Issues of
Automatic Summarization: Relevance Detection and
Quality-based Evaluation by Elena Lloret and Manuel
Palomar (Spain). Namely, two related ideas are
presented. First, it is shown that the code quantity
principle (most important information) is applicable to
automatic summarization. Second, an evaluation of
quality of summaries is discussed.
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo (Germany) presents in
his paper Low-Bias Extraction of Domain-Specific
Concepts a new approach for extraction of the domain
specific terms that tries to be independent from the
specific domain. The approach is based on graph
clustering.
In the work of Alberto Tllez-Valero, Manuel
Montes-y-Gmez, Luis Villaseor-Pineda and Anselmo
Peas-Padilla (Mexico, Spain) Towards Multi-Stream
Question Answering using Answer Validation a method
of determining the correctness of automatically generated
answers is discussed. The method uses the combination
of several answering systems.
The paper by Asif Ekbal and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay
(India) Named Entity Recognition using Appropriate
Unlabeled Data, Post-processing and Voting evaluates
the improvement of NER by using unlabeled data, post
processing and weighted voting of various models.
In the paper Assigning Library of Congress
Classification Codes to Books Based Only on their
Titles by Ricardo vila-Argelles, Hiram Calvo,
Alexander Gelbukh, and Salvador Godoy-Caldern
(Mexico and Japan), experiments are presented for book
classification using very small amount of information,
namely, the book title. Several measures of comparison

are explored and encouraging results are reported.
An important problem of what is collocation and
how it can be detected automatically using modern
machine learning techniques is discussed in the paper
Automatic Identification of Lexical Units by Vidas
Daudaravicius (Lithuania).
The paper Finding Maximal Sequential Patterns in
Text Document Collections and Single Documents
whose authors are Ren Garca, J. Fco. MartnezTrinidad, and J. Ariel Carrasco-Ochoa (Mexico), presents
two efficient algorithms that allow for detection of all
maximal sequential patterns in a text collection without
the necessity of recomputing if a new document is added.
Experiments that show that the algorithms are better than
the state of the art methods are presented.
The paper Grammar of ReALIS and the
Implementation of its Dynamic Interpretation written by
Gbor Alberti and Judit Kleiber (Hungary) presents a
grammar for formal discourse analysis and discusses its
implementation using Hungarian as an example
language.
The idea of using various classifiers simultaneously
is explored in Using Bagging and Boosting Techniques
for Improving Coreference Resolution by Smita
Vemulapalli, Xiaoqiang Luo, John F. Pitrelli, and Imed
Zitouni (USA). The area of application of these
classifiers is coreference resolution. It is shown that the
technique that uses a combination of classifiers
outperforms single classifiers.
An interesting topic of temporal multi-document
summarization, whose goal is to analyze the information
according to its temporal perspective in various
documents, is discussed in Cascaded Regression
Analysis
based
Temporal
Multi-document
Summarization by Ruifang He, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, and
Sheng Li (China). Macro and micro importance
discriminative models are combined to form a cascaded
regression analysis approach that is verified using several
available dataset.
Yulia Ledeneva
Autonomous University of the State of Mexico
Santiago Tianguistenco, Mexico
[email protected]
Grigori Sidorov
Center for Computing
Polytechnic Institute
Mexico City, Mexico
www.cic.ipn.mx/~sidorov
Research,
National
Informatica 34 (2010) 11
Y. Ledeneva et al.
Recent Advances in Computational Linguistics

Yulia Ledeneva
Santiago Tianguistenco, Mexico
E-mail: [email protected]
Grigori Sidorov
National Polytechnic Institute
D.F., Mexico
Keywords: computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, information retrieval, question
answering, text summarization
Received: February 23, 2009
In this paper, we present an overview of recent advances in selected areas of computational linguistics.
We discuss relation of traditional levels of language phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, pragmatics, and discourse to the areas of computational linguistics research. Then the
discussion about the development of the systems of automatic morphological analysis is given. We
present various morphological classifications of languages, discuss the models that are necessary for
this type of systems, and then argue that an approach based on analysis through generation gives
several advantages during development and the grammar models that are used. After this, we discuss
some popular application areas like information retrieval, question answering, text summarization and
text generation. Finally, usage of graph methods in computational linguistics is dealt with.
Povzetek: Podan je pregled raunalnikega jezikoslovja.
After this we present most popular CL application areas:
Introduction
In this paper, we present an overview of recent advances

in selected areas of computational linguistics (CL).
The objective of computational linguistics is to
develop models of language that can be implemented in
computers, i.e., the models with certain degree of
formalism, and to develop applications that deal with
computer tasks related to human language, like
development of software for grammar correction, word
sense disambiguation, compilation of dictionaries and
corpora, intelligent information retrieval, automatic
translation from one language to another, etc. Thus,
computational linguistics has two sides: on the one hand,
it is part of linguistics; on the other hand, it is part of
computer science.
In this paper, we first discuss the relation of
traditional levels of language phonetics/phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and
discourse to the areas of computational linguistics
research.
Then various issues related to automatic
morphological analysis are presented. We remind
morphological classification of languages and discuss the
models that are necessary for development of the system
of automatic morphological analysis. We argue that the
usage of approach known as analysis through
generation can significantly reduce the time and effort
during development and allows for usage of intuitively
clear grammar models.
Information Retrieval (IR) consists of finding

documents of an unstructured nature that satisfies
an information need from within large collections
of documents usually in local computer or in the
Internet. This area overtakes traditional database
searching, becoming the dominant form of
information access. Now hundreds of millions of
people use IR systems every day, when they use a
web search engine or search their emails.
Question Answering (QA) is a complex task that
combines techniques from NLP, IR and machine
learning. The main aim of QA is to localize the
correct answer to a question written in natural
language in a non-structured collection of
documents. Systems of QA look like a search
engine, where the input to the system is a question
in natural language and the output is the answer to
the question (not a list of entire documents like in
IR).
Text summarization is a popular application that
allows for reduction of text size without significant
loose of the content. Extractive and abstractive
methods are briefly compared; resulting summary
evaluation problem is addressed.
Text generation consists in generation of coherent
text from raw data, usually in a specific domain.
The paper finishes with discussion of application of
graph methods in computational linguistics. Graph
methods are widely used in modern research in CL. Text

representation as graphs and graph ranking algorithms
are discussed.
Levels of language and areas of

computational linguistic research
Computational linguistic research is correlated with

traditional levels of language that are commonly
accepted in general linguistics. These levels are:
Phonetics/phonology,
Morphology,
Syntax,
Semantics,
Pragmatics, and
Discourse.
At the phonetic level, we analyze the phones

(sounds), from two points of view: 1) as a physical
phenomenon; here we are interested in its spectrum and
other physical characteristics, 2) as an articulatory
phenomenon, i.e., the position of the pronunciation
organs that generate the specific sound (namely, the
sound with specific physical characteristics). At the
phonological level, we interpret these physical or
articulatory features as phonological characteristics and
their values. For example, the feature vibration of the
vocal cords with the values vibrating or not
vibrating; or the feature mode of the obstacle with the
values like explosive, sibilant, affricate, etc. By
phonological features we mean the features that depend
on the given phonetic system, for example, long vs. short
vowels are different phonemes in English, but they are
not in many other languages, for example, Spanish,
Russian, etc. So, the vowel duration is phonological
feature in English and it is not in the mentioned
languages.
The morphological level deals with word structure
and grammar categories that exist in languages (or in the
given language) and the expression of these grammar
categories within words.
The syntactic level studies relations between words
in sentences and functions of words in a sentence, like
subject, direct object, etc.
The semantic level is related to the concept of
meaning, its representation and description. Generally
speaking, the meaning can be found at any other level,
see below the discussion about the limits of the levels.
At the pragmatic level, the relationship between the
meaning of the text and the real world is considered. For
example, in indirect speech acts, when the phrase Can
you pass me the salt? in fact is a polite mode of asking
the salt, and it is not a question about a physical ability to
pick it up.
And finally, the discourse level is related to analysis
of the relationship between sentences in discourse. For
example, at this level we can find the phenomenon of
anaphora, when the task is to find out to which possible
antecedent (noun) a pronoun refers; or phenomenon of
Y. Ledeneva et al.
ellipsis, when some substructure is omitted but can be

restored by reader on the basis of the previous context.
Note that there are no strict criteria for level
distinction: these levels are more like focus of research.
That is why there are many intersections between levels,
for example, the meaning, being part of the semantic
level, can be observed at the syntactic or morphological
levels, but still, if we focus on morphemes or syntactic
constructions, though they have meaning, we will not
consider them as belonging to the semantic level. If we
consider the interpretation of syntactic relations or lexical
meaning, then we deal with semantics.
Now, let us have a look at the computer side of
computational linguistics. Among the most widely
represented modern directions of research in
computational linguistics we can mention:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Speech recognition and synthesis,

Morphological analysis of a variety of languages
(say, morphological analysis in English is rather
simple, but there are languages with much more
complex morphological structure),
Grammar
formalisms
that
allows
for
development of parsing programs,
Interpretation of syntactic relations as semantic
roles,
Development of specialized lexical resources
(say, WordNet or FrameNet),
Word sense disambiguation,
Automatic anaphora resolution, among others.
The correspondence between these directions of

research and traditional linguistic levels is pretty
obvious. For example, the research directions 4, 5, and 6
are attempts to invoke semantics in text analysis.
It should be mentioned that it is useful to distinguish
between methods and areas of research. The areas of
research are related to the mentioned language levels or
to specific applications, see below. The methods of
research are related to particular methods that are used.
The tendency in modern computational linguistics as far
as methods are concerned is to apply machine learning
techniques accompanied with processing of huge amount
of data, available usually in Internet. Note that each
research area can have additional standard resources
specific for this area.
Another important dichotomy is related to distinction
of procedural and declarative knowledge, which in case
of computational linguistics corresponds to the
distinction between development of algorithms (or
methods) and development of language resources (or
data).
From the list of the seven mentioned research
directions, number 5 (development of specialized lexical
resources) represents a direct development of resources.
The majority of other research directions are dedicated to
methods. In case when methods are based on linguistic
resources, we call these methods knowledge rich. If
developed algorithms do not use any linguistic resource
then we call them knowledge poor. Note that purely
statistic algorithms are knowledge poor when they use
raw data (raw corpora). If a statistic algorithm uses
RECENT ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL...
marked data, then it uses knowledge coded into a corpus,

and, thus, it becomes knowledge rich.
Note that all these distinctions are basically
tendencies, i.e., usually there is no clear representative of
each member of a given class.
Automatic morphological analysis
As an example of implementation of a linguistic

processing task let us discuss a problem of the automatic
morphological analysis.
There exist many different models of the automatic
morphological analysis for different languages. One of
the most famous models is the two-level model
(KIMMO) suggested by Kimmo Koskenniemi [Kos85];
there are other models that focus on different grammar
phenomena or processing scheme [Gel00, Gel03, Hau99,
Sid96, Sed01].
Morphological analysis is a procedure that has as an
input a word form, and gives as an output a set of
grammemes1 that corresponds to this input. Sometimes, it
is accompanied with normalization (lemmatization),
when we also obtain lemma (normalized word form), that
is usually presented as an entry in the dictionaries, for
example, take is lemma for took, taken, take, taking,
takes.
3.1
Morphological classification of
languages
First of all, let us discuss the differences related to

morphological structure of languages, because it is
directly related to the morphological processing
algorithms.
There are two well-known classifications of
languages based on their morphological characteristics.
The first one is centered on the predominant usage of
auxiliary words vs. usage of affixes (grammar
morphemes). According to this classification the
languages can be analytic, when auxiliary words are
predominant (say Chinese, English); or synthetic, when
affixes are used in the majority of cases in the language
(say Russian, Turk). Sometimes it is said that analytic
languages have poor morphology in a sense that words
do not have many affixes, while the synthetic languages
have rich morphology. Again, these are tendencies,
i.e., a language can have some deviations from the
predominant tendency.
Sometimes, this classification is enriched by adding
categories of isolating and polysynthetic languages. A
language is called isolating if practically no affixes are
used, like in Chinese. If we compare it with English, the
latter still keeps using some affixes, for example, for
plural in nouns, or for past indefinite tense in verbs.
Polysynthetic languages are languages where not only
affixes are added to a stem, but also other syntactically
depending word stems. Thus, several lexical stems are
1
Grammeme is a value of the grammar category, for example,

singular and plural are grammemes of the category number,
etc.
combined within one word. An example of these

languages is Chukchi or some North American Indian
languages.
Other morphological classification of languages is
applied to synthetic languages and it is based on the
predominant morphological technique: agglutination vs.
flexion. Here once again we are speaking about
tendencies: a language can have some features from one
class, and some features from the other class.
We say that the language is agglutinative if:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Each grammar morpheme expresses exactly one

grammeme (value of a grammar category).
There are no stem alternations or stem
alternations are subjected to very regular
changes that do not presume any knowledge of
specific stem type, for example, vowel harmony.
Morphemes are concatenated mechanically
(agglutinated).
The stem usually exists as a separate word
without any additional concatenation with
affixes.
Examples of the agglutinative languages are Turk

and the similar ones Kazakh, Kyrgyz, etc., Hungarian.
On the other hand, inflective languages have the
following features:
1. Each grammar morpheme can express various
grammemes (values of grammar categories), for
example, the flexion -mos in Spanish expresses
grammemes of person(first) and number(plural), among
others. Usually, only one grammar morpheme exists in a
word.
2. Stem alternations are not predictable. i.e., we
should know if this specific stem should be alternated or
not.
3. Morphemes can be concatenated with certain
irregular morphonological processes at the connection
point.
4. Stem usually does not exist without grammar
morphemes. Note that in inflective languages it is
common the usage of morpheme (empty morpheme),
that expresses some grammemes by default (usually,
most common grammemes like singular, third person,
etc).
Examples of the inflective languages are Slavic
languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.).
So, different languages have different morphological
tendencies. Computer methods of analysis that are
perfectly suitable for languages with poor morphology
(like English) or with agglutinative morphology (like
Turk) can be not the best methods for inflective
languages (like Russian).
Note that morphological system of inflective
languages is finite and it is not very vast, so any method
of analysis gives correct results, but not all methods are
equally convenient and easy to implement.
The morphology of agglutinative languages is also
finite, thought the number of possible word forms is
much greater than in an inflective language. Still, since
the agglutinative morphology is much more regular than

the inflective morphology, it is easier to develop
corresponding processing algorithms.
3.2
Models for automatic morphological

analysis
Our next step is to find out what models or what types of

models are necessary for morphological processing.
Speaking about automatic morphological analysis,
we should take into consideration three types of models:
Model of analysis (procedure of analysis).
Model of grammar (morphology) of a given
language. This model consists in assigning of
grammar classes to words that define the unique
word paradigm (=set of affixes and stem
alternations).
Computer implementation, i.e., the used formalism.
3.2.1
Model of analysis
As far as model of analysis is concerned, there are two

main possibilities: store all word forms in a database or
implement some processing algorithm.
One extreme point is storing all grammatical forms
in a dictionary (database). Such method of analysis is
known as bag of words. This method is useful for
inflective languages, but it is not recommended for
agglutinative or polysynthetic ones. Modern computers
have the possibility of storing large databases containing
all grammatical forms for inflective languages (a rough
approximation for Spanish and Russian is 20 to 50
megabytes). Note that we anyway need an algorithm for
generation of these word forms.
In our opinion, more sophisticated algorithms that
allow for reducing the dictionary size to, say, 1
megabyte, are preferable. Indeed, a morphological
analyzer is usually used together with a syntactic parser,
semantic analyzer and reasoning or retrieval engine, so
freeing physical memory for these modules is highly
desirable of course, the use of large virtual memory
makes simultaneous access to very large data structures
possible, but it does not make it faster.
Algorithmic (non-bag-of-words) solutions have a
number of additional advantages. For example, such
algorithms have the possibility to recognize unknown
(new) words. This is a crucial feature for a
morphological analyzer since new words constantly
appear in the languages, not speaking of possible
incompleteness of the dictionary.
Obviously, the algorithmic processing implies
separation of possible flexion and possible stem in the
input word form. Usually, we use programming cycle
and try all possible divisions of the input word. After
that, there are two possibilities for algorithmic
processing. These possibilities are:
Use straight forward processing, i.e., we use
traditional algorithmic scheme of conditions and
cycles, or
Y. Ledeneva et al.
Use a trick known as analysis through generation

(see below), that saves a lot of work in code writing
and allows the usage of grammar models oriented
for generation. Note that all traditional grammar
models are oriented to generation.
Another dichotomy related to the models of analysis is:

store the stems with the corresponding grammar
information in the dictionary or our algorithm will guess
this grammar information. If we store the data then our
algorithm will be exact. If we try to infer the grammar
properties of a stem, then our algorithm will guess and it
will not be exact, i.e., sometimes it will guess incorrectly.
3.2.2
Model of grammar
If we prefer the algorithmic processing, then we should

have a model of grammar (morphology). It is necessary
for defining what paradigms (sets of flexions and regular
stem alternations) are associated with each word.
It is desirable to maintain an existing grammar
model for a given language, if there is any, of course. It
makes the algorithm development much easier and faster.
Note that traditional grammar models are oriented to
generation process. Usually, the speakers of a language
consider these models intuitively clear.
As an alternative solution, we can develop an
algorithm that will transform some traditional
morphological description into a description that we
would like to have for our algorithm. Note, that if we
have an exact algorithm of conversion, these two models
are equivalent in the sense that they represent the same
information. Still, the grammar information is presented
in different ways. Thus, from this point of view of a
human, the traditional model usually is much more
comprehensive. Let us remind that they are oriented to
generation, while the purpose of the morphological
analysis is analysis, i.e., it is a procedure with exactly
opposite direction. We will show later that we can avoid
developing a conversion algorithm using the approach of
analysis through generation. This approach substitutes
the process of analysis with the process of generation.
Generally speaking, generation is much simpler than
analysis because we do not have so many possible
combinations to process.
3.2.3
Computer implementation
In our opinion, any computer implementation is

acceptable. It can be direct programming, or finite state
automata, or transducers, etc. All of them give equivalent
results. Mainly, the choice of the implementation
depends on the resources available for the development
and the programming skills of the developers.
3.3
Method analysis through generation
In this section, we discuss how to develop an

automatic morphological analysis system for an
inflective language spending less effort and applying
more intuitive and flexible morphological models. We
show that the use of not so straightforward method
analysis through generation can greatly simplify the
analysis procedure and allows using morphological

models that are much more similar to the traditional
grammars.
Analysis through generation is an approach to
analysis when some modules formulate hypothesis of
analysis and other modules verify them using generation.
We first describe the suggested method (types of
information, types of morphological models, etc.) and
then briefly discuss its implementation with examples
from Russian language.
The main idea of analysis through generation applied
to morphological analysis is to avoid development of
stem transformation rules in analysis and to use instead
the generation module. Implementation of this idea
requires storing in the morphological dictionary of all
stems for each word with the corresponding information.
As we have mentioned, the main problem of
automatic morphological analysis of inflective languages
is usually stem alternations. The direct way to resolve
this problem is constructing the rules that take into
account all possible stem alternations during the analysis
process; for example, for Russian the number of such
rules is about a thousand [Mal85]. However, such rules
do not have any correspondence in traditional grammars;
in addition, they have no intuitive correspondence in
language knowledge; finally, they are too many.
Another possibility to handle alternations is to store
all stems in the dictionary, together with the information
on their possible grammatical categories; this method
was used for Russian [Gel92] and for Czech [Sed01]. We
also adopt this possibility, but propose a different
technique for treatment of grammatical information: our
technique is dynamic while the techniques described in
[Gel92, Sed01] are static. As we mentioned we use
analysis through generation technique. The model
based on this approach uses 50 grammar classes
presented in the corresponding traditional grammars,
while the systems that developed the algorithm for
grammar classes transformation ([Gel92], [Sed01]) had
about 1,000 classes that do not have any intuitive
correspondence in traditional grammars.
In the next subsections, we describe the types of
morphological information we use; then we discuss the
morphological models (and the corresponding
algorithms) we have used to implement the method; and
finally, we describe the functioning of our method:
analysis, generation, and treatment of unknown (new)
words.
3.3.1
Types of grammatical information
We use two types of grammatical information:

Stem dictionary and
List of grammatical categories and corresponding
grammemes.
The information about the stems is stored in the
morphological dictionary. This information is basically
the data needed for generation, such as:
Part of speech,
Presence of alternations,
Grammatical type (in Russian, there are three genders

and for each gender there are several word formation
types: say, for feminine there are 7 types, etc.),
Special marks: for example, in Russian some nouns
have two forms of the prepositional case (
versus (in) wardrobe versus (about)
wardrobe), which should be marked in the dictionary.
We explicitly store in the dictionary all variants of stems
as independent forms, together with the stem number
(first stem, second stem, etc.). In Russian, nouns and
adjectives with alternations have two possible stems,
while verbs can have up to four stems.
Another type of information is a list of grammatical
categories and corresponding grammemes. Thus, any
word form is characterized by a set of grammemes. For
example, for a Russian noun this set contains a value of
case and of number; for a Russian full adjective it is a
value of case, number, and gender, etc.
3.3.2
Types of morphological models
Three morphological models are used:

Correspondence between flexions and grammemes,
Correspondence between stems and grammemes,
Correspondence between alternating stems of the same
lexeme.
The first model establishes the correspondence
between flexions and sets of grammemes, taking into
account different grammatical types fixed in the
dictionary. In the process of analysis, we use the
correspondence flexions sets of grammemes, that is
used to formulate hypothesis; and in the process of
generation, the correspondence sets of grammemes
flexions, that is used to verify hypothesis.
A similar correspondence is established between the
sets of grammemes and the types of stems; however, this
correspondence is used only for generation. For example,
if a Russian masculine noun of a certain grammar type
has a stem alternation, then the first stem is used for all
forms except for genitive (case) plural, for which the
second stem is used. Note that corresponding model for
analysis is unnecessary, which makes our method
simpler than direct analysis.
To be able to generate all forms starting from a given
form, it is necessary to be able to obtain all variants of
stems from the given stem. There are two ways to do
this: static and dynamic, which have their own pros and
contras. The static method implies storing in the
dictionary together with the stems the correspondence
between them (e.g., each stem has a unique identifier by
which stems are linked within the dictionary). Storing the
explicit links increases the size of the dictionary.
We propose to do this dynamically. Namely, the
algorithm of constructing all stems from a given stem is
to be implemented. In fact, it must be implemented
anyway since it is used to compile the dictionary of
stems. It is sufficient to develop the algorithm for
constructing the first stem (that corresponds to the
normalized form, such as infinitive) from any other stem,
and any other stem from the first stem. In this way,
starting from any stem we can generate any other stem.
The difference between static and dynamic method is
that in the former case, the algorithm is applied during
the compile time (when the dictionary is built), while in
the latter case, during runtime.
Note that the rules of these algorithms are different
from the rules that have to be developed to implement
analysis directly. For Russian, we use about 50 rules,
intuitively so clear that in fact any person learning
Russian is aware of these rules of stem construction.
Here is an example of a stem transformation rule:
-VC, * -C
which means: if the stem ends in a vowel (V) following
by a consonant (C) and the stem type contains the
symbol * then remove this vowel. Being applied to the
first stem of the noun hammer, the rule gives
the stem -() of hammer.
This contrasts with about 1,000 rules necessary for
direct analysis, which in addition are very superficial and
anti-intuitive. For example, to analyze a non-first-stem
word, [Mal85] uses rules that try to invert the effect of
the mentioned rule: if the stem ends in a consonant, try to
insert a vowel before it and look up each resulting
hypothetical stem in the dictionary: for -(), try
-, -, etc. This also slows down the
system performance.
Two considerations are related to the simplicity of
our rules. First, we use the information about the type of
the stem stored in the dictionary. Second, often
generation of a non-first stem from the first one is
simpler than vice versa. More precisely, the stem that
appears in the dictionaries for a given language is the one
that allows simpler generation of other stems.
3.3.3
Y. Ledeneva et al.
Using the models we have constructed, the flexion is

chosen and the necessary stem is generated (if a non-first
stem was given, then we generate the first stem and from
it, the necessary stem). Finally, we concatenate the stem
and the flexion.
If necessary, this process is repeated several times
for adding more than one flexion to the stem. For
example, Russian participles (which are verbal forms)
have the same flexions as adjectives (which express the
number and gender) and also special suffixes (which
indicate that this is a participle), i.e., they are
concatenation of a stem and two affixes: a suffix and a
flexion (- -- writ-e writt-en).
In this case, we first generate the stem of participle by
adding the suffix (we use the information from the
dictionary on the properties of the corresponding verbal
stem) and then change the dictionary information to the
information for an adjective of the corresponding type. In
case of Russian, such recursion is limited to three levels
(one more level is added due to the reflexive verbs that
have a postfix morpheme -: --- is
written).
3.3.5
Given an input string (a word form), we analyze it in the

following way:
1.
2.
Data preparation
Our method needs some preliminary work of data

preparation, carrying out the following main steps:
3.
Describe and classify all words of the given language

into unique grammatical classes (fortunately, for many
languages this work is already done by traditional
grammar writers);
Convert the information about words into a stem
dictionary (generating only the first stem);
Apply the algorithms of stem generation (from the first
stem to other stems) to generate all stems;
Generate the special marks and the stem numbers for
each (non-first) stem.
4.
To perform the last two steps, the dictionary record

generated for the first stem is duplicated, the stem is
transformed into the required non-first stem, and the
mark with the stem number is added.
3.3.4
Analysis process
5.
The letters are separated one by one from right to

left to get the possible flexion (the zero flexion is
tried at first): given stopping, we try - (zero
flexion); at the next iterations -g, -ng, -ing, -ping,
etc. are tried.
If the flexion (here -ing) is found in the list of
possible flexions, we apply the algorithm flexions
sets of grammemes, which gives us a hypothesis
about the possible set of grammemes. Here it would
be verb, participle.
Then we obtain the information for the rest of the
form, i.e., the potential stem, here stopp- from the
stem dictionary.
Finally, we generate the corresponding grammatical
form according to our hypothesis and the obtained
dictionary information. Here, the generated past
participle of the verbal stem stopp- is stopping.
If the obtained result coincides with the input form,
then the hypothesis is accepted. Otherwise, the
process repeats from the step 1.
If a word form consists of several morphemes (a stem

and several affixes), then the analysis process is
recursive, precisely as generation. In case of Russian,
there are tree levels of recursion.
As one can see, our method of analysis is simple and
invokes generation. Additional modules are the model
flexions sets of grammemes and the module of
interaction between different models.
Generation process
The generation process is simple. Given the data from

the dictionary (including the stem and its number) and a
set of grammemes, it is required to build a word form of
the same lexeme that has the given set of grammemes.
3.3.6
Treatment of unknown words
The treatment of unknown words is also simple. We

apply the same procedure of analysis to single out the
hypothetical stem. If the stem is not found in the
dictionary, we use the longest match stem (matching the

strings from right to left) compatible with the given set of
affixes. The longest match stem is the stem present in the
dictionary that has as long as possible ending substring in
common with the given stem (and is compatible with
already separated affixes).
In this way, for example, an (unknown) input string
sortifies will be analyzed as classifies: verb, 3rd person,
present, singular, given that classifi- is its longest match
stem for sortifi- (matching by -ifi-) compatible with the
affix -es.
To facilitate this search, we have another instance of
the stem dictionary in inverse order, i.e., stems are
ordered lexicographically from right to left.
Note that the systems like [Gel00, Gel92] based on
the left-to-right order of analysis (first separating the
stem and only then analyzing the resting affixes) have to
imitate this process with a special dictionary of, say, a
list of 5-letter stem endings, since in such systems the
main stem dictionary is ordered by direct order (left to
right, by first letters).
Computational linguistic
applications
This section is divided into following subsections

that correspond to each application of CL: Information
Retrieval, Question Answering, Text Summarization, and
Text Generation.
4.1
Information retrieval
Information Retrieval (IR) according to [Man07,

Bae99] consists of finding documents of an unstructured
nature that satisfies an information need within large
collections of documents usually on a computer or on the
internet. This area overtakes traditional database
searching, becoming the dominant form of information
access. Now hundreds of millions of people use IR
systems every day when they use a web search engine or
search their emails.
The huge amount of available electronic documents
in Internet has motivated the development of very good
information retrieval systems, see NTCIR (NII Test
Collection for Information Retrieval) and CrossLanguage Evaluation Forum (CLEF) web pages.
Information Retrieval models represent documents
or collection of documents by weighting terms appearing
in each document. Then, two directions are traced for
further advances: new methods for weighting and new
methods for term selection.
First, we look through classical models briefly, and
then we describe recently proposed methods. IR classical
models are:
Vector Space Model [Sal88],
Model based on term frequency (tf) [Luh57].
Model based on inverse document frequency (idf)
[Sal88],
Model based tf-idf [Sal88],
Probabilistic Models [Fuhr92],
Transition Point [Pin06],
n-grams [Man99].
Recent improvements to the following models should
be mentioned. As far as term selection is concerned:
MFS [Gar04, Gar06], Collocations [Bol04a, Bol04b,
Bol05, Bol08], Passages [Yin07].
As far as weighting of terms is concerned: Entropy,
Transition Point enrichment approach.
Various tasks where IR methods can be used are:
Monolingual Document Retrieval,
Multilingual Document Retrieval,
Interactive Cross-Language Retrieval,
Cross-Language Image, Speech and Video
Retrieval,
Cross-Language
Geographical
Information
Retrieval,
Domain-Specific Data Retrieval (Web, Medical,
Scientific digital corpora) [Van08].
4.2
Question answering
Question Answering (QA) retrieves the correct

answer to a question written in natural language from
collection of documents. Systems of QA look like a
search engine where the input to the system is a question
in natural language and the output is the answer to the
question.
The main goals of the state-of-the-art systems are
targeted to improve QA systems performance, help
humans in the assessment of QA systems output,
improve systems self-score, develop better criteria for
collaborative systems, deal with different types of
questions.
There are several workshops and forums where main
tasks of QA are proposed and discussed. For example,
researchers compete to find the best solution for the
following tasks proposed in Cross-Language Evaluation
Forum (CLEF), NTCIR (NII Test Collection for
Information Retrieval) and Text REtrieval Conference
(TREC): Monolingual task, Multilingual task, CrossLanguage task, Robust task.
And more specific tasks:
Answer validation task,
QA over speech transcription of seminars,
meetings, telephone conversations, etc.
QA on speech transcript where the answers to
factual questions are extracted from spontaneous
speech transcriptions.
QA using machine translation systems,
QA for Other questions, i.e. retrieval of other
interesting facts about a topic,
Time-constrained task (realized in real time),
QA using Wikipedia,
Event-targeted task on a heterogeneous document
collection of news article and Wikipedia,
QA using document collections with already
disambiguated word senses in order to study their
contribution to QA performance,
QA using passage retrieval systems, etc.
10
Each task can propose different solutions depending on

the question category. Actually, the following categories
are considered: factoid, definition, closed list and topicrelated. Factoid questions are fact-based questions,
asking for the name of a person, location, organization,
time, measure, count, object, the extent of something, the
day on which something happened. Definition question
are questions such as What/Who is?, and are divided
into the following subtypes: person, organization, object,
and other questions. Closed list questions are questions
that require in one single answer the requested number of
items. Such questions may contain a temporal restriction.
Topic related questions group questions which are related
to the same topic and possibly contain co-references
between one question and the others. Topics can be
named entities, events, objects, natural phenomena, etc.
Answer validation task develops and evaluates a
special module which validates the correctness of the
answers given by a QA system. The basic idea is that
once a pair (answer and snippet) is returned by a QA
system, a hypothesis is built by turning the pair (question
and answer) into an affirmative form. If the related text
semantically entails this hypothesis, then the answer is
expected to be correct [Pe06, Pe07, Pe08, Tel08].
Machine Translation Systems are broadly
implemented for Cross-Language QA [Ace06]. In recent
studies, the negative effect of machine translation on the
accuracy of Cross-Language QA was demonstrated.
[Fer07]. As a result, Cross-Language QA Systems are
modified [Ace07, Ace09].
QA over speech transcription provides a framework
in which QA systems can be evaluated in a real scenario,
where the answers of oral and written questions (factual
and definitional) in different languages have to be
extracted from speech transcriptions (manual and
automatic transcriptions) in the respective language. The
particular scenario consists in answering oral and written
questions related to speech presentations. As an example,
QA system automatically answers in Chinese about
travel information. This system integrates a user
interface, speech synthesis and recognition, question
analysis, QA database retrieval, document processing
and preprocessing, and some databases [Hu06].
QA systems for Other questions generally use
question generation techniques, predetermine patterns,
interesting keywords, combination of methods based on
patterns and keywords, or exploring external knowledge
sources like nuggets [Voo04a, Voo04b, Voo04c,
Voo05a, Voo05b, TREC, Raz07].
4.3
Text summarization
Information retrieval systems (for example, Google)

show part of the text where the words of the query
appears. With the extracted part, the user has to decide if
a document is interesting even if this part does not have
useful information for the user, so it is necessary
download and read each retrieved document until the
user finds satisfactory information. A solution for such
problem is to extract the important parts of the document
which is the task of automatic text summarization.
Y. Ledeneva et al.
More applications of automatic text summarization

are, for example, summaries of news and scientific
articles, summaries of electronic mails, summaries of
different electronic information which later can be sent
as SMS, summaries of found documents and pages
returned by a retrieved system.
From one side, there is a single-document
summarization which implies to communicate the
principal information of one specific document, and from
another sidea multi-document summarization which
transmits the main ideas of a collection of documents.
There are two options to achieve a summarization by
computer: text abstraction and text extraction [Lin97].
Text abstraction examines a given text using linguistic
methods which interpret a text and find new concepts to
describe it. And then new text is generated which will be
shorter with the same content of information. Text
extraction means extract parts (words, sequences,
sentences, paragraphs, etc.) of a given text based on
statistic, linguistic or heuristic methods, and then join
them to new text which will be shorter with the same
content of information.
According to the classical point of view, there are
three stages in automated text summarization [Hov03].
The first stage is performed by topic identification where
almost all systems employ several independent modules.
Each module assigns a score to each unit of input (word,
sentence, or longer passage); then a combination module
combines the scores for each unit to assign a single
integrates score to it; finally, the system returns the n
highest-scoring units, according to the summary length
requested by the user. The performance of topic
identification modules is usually measured using Recall
and Precision scores.
The second stage denotes as the stage of
interpretation. This stage distinguishes extract-type
summarization systems from abstract-type systems.
During the interpretation the topics identified as
important are fused, represented in new terms, and
expressed using a new formulation, using concepts or
words not found in the original text. No system can
perform interpretation without prior knowledge about the
domain; by definition, it must interpret the input in term
of something extraneous to the text. But acquisition deep
enough prior domain knowledge is so difficult that
summarizers to date have only attempted it in a small
way. So, the disadvantage of this stage remains blocked
by the problem of domain knowledge acquisition.
Summary generation is the third stage of text
summarization. When the summary content has been
created in internal notation, and thus requires the
techniques of natural language generation, namely text
planning, sentence planning, and sentence realization.
In 2008, new scheme was proposed by Ledeneva
[Led08a] which include four steps for composing a text
summary:
Term selection: during this step one should decide
what units will count as terms are, for example, they
can be words, n-grams or phrases.

Term weighting: this is a process of weighting (or
estimating) individual terms.
Sentence weighting: the process of assigning numerical
measure of usefulness to the sentence. For example,
one of the ways to estimate the usefulness of a
sentence is to sum up usefulness weights of individual
terms of which the sentence consists.
Sentence selection: selects sentences (or other units
selected as final parts of a summary). For example, one
of the ways to select the appropriate sentences is to
assign some numerical measure of usefulness of a
sentence for the summary and then select the best ones.
4.3.1
Extractive text summarization methods
Most works appeared in recent researches are based

on looking for appropriate terms. The most used option is
select words as terms; however is not the only possible
option. Liu et al. [Liu06] uses pairs of syntactically
connected words (basic elements) as atomic features
(terms). Such pairs (which can be thought of as arcs in
the syntactic dependency tree of the sentence) have been
shown to be more precise semantic units than words
[Kos04]. However, while we believe that trying text units
larger than a word is a good idea, extracting the basic
elements from the text requires dependency syntactic
parsing, which is language-dependent. Simpler statistical
methods (cf. the use of n-grams as terms in [Vil06]) may
prove to be more robust and language-independent.
Some approaches of text summaries match semantic
units such as elementary discourse units [Mar01, Sor03],
factoids [Teu04a, Teu04b], information nuggets
[Voo04], basic elements [Liu06], etc. A big disadvantage
of these semantic units is that the detection of these units
is realized manually. For example, information nuggets
are atomic pieces of interesting information about the
target identified by human annotators as vital (required)
or non-vital (acceptable but not required) for the
understanding of the content of a summary.
Factoids are semantic units which represent the
meaning of a sentence. For instance, the sentence The
police have arrested a white Dutch man by the union of
the following factoids: A suspect was arrested, The
police did the arresting, The suspect is white, The
suspect is Dutch, The suspect is male. Factoids are
defined empirically based on the data in the set of
summaries. Usually they are manually made summaries
taken from [Duc]. Factoid definition starts with the
comparison of the information contained in two
summaries, and factoids get added or split as
incrementally other summaries are considered. If two
pieces of information occur together in all summaries
and within the same sentence, they are treated as one
factoid, because differentiation into more than one
factoid would not help us in distinguishing the
summaries. Factoids are labeled with descriptions in
natural language; initially, these are close in wording to
the factoid's occurrence in the first summaries, though
the annotator tries to identify and treat equally
paraphrases of the factoid information when they occur
in other summaries. If (together with various statements
11
in other summaries) one summary contains was killed

and another was shot dead, we identify the factoids:
There was an attack, The victim died, A gun was
used. The first summary contains only the first two
factoids, whereas the second contains all three. That way,
the semantic similarity between related sentences can be
expressed. When factoids are identified in the collection
of summaries, most factoids turned out to be independent
of each other. But when dealing with naturally occurring
documents many difficult cases appear, e.g. ambiguous
expressions, slight differences in numbers and meaning,
and inference.
The text is segmented in Elementary Discourse Units
(EDUs) or non-overlapping segments, generally taken as
clauses or clauses like units of a rhetorical relation that
holds between two adjacent spans of text [Mar01,
Car03]. The boundaries of EDUs are determined using
grammatical, lexical, syntactic information of the whole
sentence.
Other possible option proposed by Nenkova in
[Nen06] is Semantic Content Units (SCUs). The
definition of the content unit is somewhat fluid, it can be
a single word but it is never bigger than a sentence
clause. The most important evidence of their presence in
a text is the information expressed in two or more
summaries, or in other words, is the frequency of the
content unit in a text. Other evidence is that these
frequent content units can have different wording (but
the same semantic meaning) what brings difficulties for
language-independent solution.
The concept of lexical chains was first introduced by
Morris and Hirst. Basically, lexical chains exploit the
cohesion among an arbitrary number of related words
[Mor91]. Then, lexical chains are computed in a source
document by grouping (chaining) sets of words that are
semantically related (i.e. have a sense flow) [Bar99,
Sil02]. Identities, synonyms, and hypernym/hyponyms
are the relations among words that might cause them to
be grouped into the same lexical chain. Specifically,
words may be grouped when:
Two noun instances are identical, and are used in the
same sense. (The house on the hill is large. The house is
made of wood.)
Two noun instances are used in the same sense (i.e.,
are synonyms). (The car is fast. My automobile is faster.)
The senses of two noun instances have a
hypernym/hyponym relation between them. (John owns a
car. It is a Toyota.)
The senses of two noun instances are siblings in the
hypernym/hyponym tree. (The truck is fast. The car is
faster.)
In computing lexical chains, the noun instances were
grouped according to the above relations, but each noun
instance must belong to exactly one lexical chain. There
are several difficulties in determining which lexical chain
a particular word instance should join. For instance, a
particular noun instance may correspond to several
different word senses and thus the system must
determine which sense to use (e.g. should a particular
instance of house be interpreted as sense 1: dwelling or
sense 2: legislature). In addition, even if the word sense
12
of an instance can be determined, it may be possible to

group that instance into several different lexical chains
because it may be related to words in different chains.
For example, the words sense may be identical to that of
a word instance in one grouping while having a
hypernym/hyponym relationship with that of a word
instance in another. What must happen is that the words
must be grouped in such a way that the overall grouping
is optimal in that it creates the longest/strongest lexical
chains. It was observed that contention that words are
grouped into a single chain when they are about the
same underlying concept. That fact confirms the usage of
lexical chains in text summarization [Bru01, Zho05,
Li07].
Keyphrases, also known as keywords, are linguistic
units, usually, longer than a words but shorter than a full
sentence. There are several kinds of keyphrases ranging
from statistical motivated keyphrases (sequences of
words) to more linguistically motivated ones (that are
defined in according to a grammar). In keyphrases
extraction task, keyphrases are selected from the body of
the input document, without a predefined list. Following
this approach, a document is treated as a set of candidate
phrases and the task is to classify each candidate phrase
as either a keyphrase or nonkeyphrase [Dav07]. When
authors assign keyphrases without a controlled
vocabulary (free text keywords or free index terms),
about 70% to 80% of their keyphrases typically appear
somewhere in the body of their documents [Dav07]. This
suggests the possibility of using author-assigned free-text
keyphrases to train a keyphrases extraction system.
DAvanzo [Dav07] extracts syntactic patterns using
two ways. The first way focuses on extracting uni-grams
and bi-grams (for instance, noun, and sequences of
adjective and noun, etc.) to describe a precise and well
defined entity. The second way considers longer
sequences of part of speech, often containing verbal
forms (for instance, noun plus verb plus adjective plus
noun) to describe concise events/situations. Once all the
uni-grams, bi-grams, tri-grams, and four-grams are
extracted from the linguistic pre-processor, they are
filtered with the patterns defined above. The result of this
process is a set of patterns that may represent the current
document.
For multi-document summarization, passages are
retrieved using a language model [Yin07]. The goal of
language modeling is to predict the probability of natural
word sequences; or in other words, to put high
probability on word sequences those actually occur and
low probability on word sequences that never occur. The
simplest and most successful basis for language
modeling is the n-gram model.
4.3.2
Abstractive text summarization methods
Abstractive
summarization
approaches
use
information
extraction,
ontological
information,
information fusion, and compression. Automatically
generated abstracts (abstractive summaries) moves the
summarization field from the use of purely extractive
methods to the generation of abstracts that contain
Y. Ledeneva et al.
sentences not found in any of the input documents and

can synthesize information across sources. An abstract
contains at least some sentences (or phrases) that do not
exist in the original document. Of course, true abstraction
involves taking the process one step further. Abstraction
involves recognizing that a set of extracted passages
together constitute something new, something that is not
explicitly mentioned in the source, and then replacing
them in the summary with the new concepts. The
requirement that the new material not be in the text
explicitly means that the system must have access to
external information of some kind, such as an ontology
or a knowledge base, and be able to perform combinatory
inference.
Recently, Ledeneva et al. [Led08a, Led08b, Led08c]
and Garcia et al. [Gar08a, Gar08b, Gar09] have
successfully employed the word sequences from the selftext for detecting the candidate text fragments for
composing the summary.
Ledeneva et al. [Led08a] suggest a typical automatic
extractive summarization approach composed by term
selection, term weighting, sentence weighting and
sentence selection steps. One of the ways to select the
appropriate sentences is to assign some numerical
measure of usefulness of a sentence for the summary and
then select the best ones; the process of assigning these
usefulness weights is called sentence weighting. One of
the ways to estimate the usefulness of a sentence is to
sum up usefulness weights of individual terms of which
the sentence consists; the process of estimating the
individual terms is called term weighting. For this, one
should decide what the terms are: for example, they can
be words; deciding what objects will count as terms is
the task of term selection. Different extractive
summarization methods can be characterized by how
they perform these tasks.
Ledeneva et al. [Led08a, Led08b, Led08c] has
proposed to extract all the frequent grams from the selftext, but she only considers those that are not contained
(as subsequence) in other frequent grams (maximal
frequent word sequences). In comparison with n-grams,
the Maximal Frequent Sequences (MFS) are attractive
for extractive text summarization since it is not necessary
to define the gram size (n), it means, the length of each
MFS is determined by the self-text. Moreover, the set of
all extracted MFSs is a compact representation all
frequent word sequences, reducing in this way the
dimensionality in a vector space model.
Garcia et al. [Gar08b, Gar09] have extracted all the
sequences of n words (n-grams) from the self-text as
features of its model. In this work, we evaluate the ngrams and maximal frequent sequences as domain- and
language- independent models for automatic text
summarization. In this work, sentences were extracted
using unsupervised learning approach.
Some other methods are also developed for
abstractive summarization. For example, techniques of
sentence fusion [Dau04, Bar03, Bar05], information
fusion [Bar99], sentence compression [Van04, Mad07],
headline summarization [Sar05], etc.
4.3.3
Recent applications of text

summarization
We should mention some systems

summarization for the following applications:
base
Legal texts [Far04, Har04],

Emails [Cor04, Shr04, Wan04],
Web pages [Dia06],
Web documents using mobile devices [Ott06],
Figures and graphics [Fut04, Car04, Car06],
News [Eva05, Mck03, Nen05a].
4.3.4
Methods for evaluation of summaries
on
Up to date, the most recent evaluation system is

ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting
Evaluation). ROUGE [Lin03a] was proposed by Lin and
Hovy [Lin04a, Lin04b, Lin04c]. This system calculates
the quality of a summary generated automatically by
comparing to the summary (or several summaries)
created by humans. Specifically, it counts the number of
overlapping different units such as word sequences, word
pairs and n-grams between the computer-generated
summary to be evaluated and the ideal summaries
created by humans. ROUGE includes several automatic
evaluation measures, such as ROUGE-N (n-grams cooccurrence); ROUGE-L (longest subsequence); ROUGEW (weighted longest subsequence); ROUGE-S (skipbigram co-occurrence). For each of the measures
(ROUGE-N, ROUGE-L, etc.), ROUGE returns Recall,
Precision and F-measure scores.
Another evaluation schemes was proposed by
Nenkova et al. [Nen04, Pas05, Nen06]. In this scheme,
special terms are annotated using the pyramid schemea
procedure specifically designed for comparative analysis
of the content of several texts. The idea of this scheme is
to evaluate presence of each term in all documents of the
collection. The more documents contain the term, the
more important is this term, and consequently it will
have higher score.
4.4
Text generation
Text Generation (TG) automatically produces

linguistically correct texts from a rough data that
represent information in a specific domain, and that are
organized in conventional databases, knowledge bases,
or even being produced as result of some application
processing.
Text generation process is traditionally seen as a
goal-driven communication process. As a consequence,
the final text, being written or spoken, just a singleclause or a multi-paragraph document, is always an
attempt to address some communicative goal. Starting
from a communicative goal, the generator decides which
information from the original data source should be
conveyed in the generated text. During the generation
process, the communicative goal is refined in more
specific sub-goals and some kind of planning takes place
to progressively convert them together with the original
data to a well-formed and linguistically correct final text.
13
The whole generation process is traditionally

organized in three specific tasks:
Content determination is the task of deciding
which chunks of content, collected from the input
data source, will make up the final text. Each
chunk of content represents an indivisible
information unit. These content units are usually
grouped in a semantic unit of higher complexity
for a given application domain. A semantic unit is
called message. Considering for instance a system
that generates soccer reports, the sentences
Brazilian soccer team has beaten the Argentines
last Sunday and Sunday soccer report: Victory
of Brazil over Argentine represent different
linguistic constructions for the same kind of
message: Victory.
Content organization groups the generated
messages appropriately as units for each level of
linguistic hierarchy: the paragraph, the sentence
and the phrase. In addition, it defines element
ordering within a group for each respective level.
Finally, it is in charge of specifying coordination
and subordination dependencies between these
groupings.
Surface realization is the task of choosing the
appropriated term and the syntactic construction
for each content unit. This choice is constrained
by lexical and grammatical rules of the language.
Punctuation symbols are defined at this stage as
well.
The applications of this area are usually built using
ad-hoc software engineering practices, lacking a welldefined development process, standard software
architecture, and the use of worldwide programming
languages. A lot of researches have clarified many
fundamentals issues and conceived solutions that are
robust and scalable enough for practical use [Fon08].
Furthermore, opportunities for practical applications
have multiplied with the information inundation from
relevant Web content sources. Unfortunately, TG
techniques remain virtually unknown and unused by
mainstream and professional computing. This situation is
probably due mainly to the fact that until recently, TG
was built using ad-hoc software engineering practices
with no explicit development process and no standard
software architecture. Reliance on special-purpose
esoteric modeling and implementation languages and
tools is another TG issue. Every system is designed and
implemented following specific domain complexities and
needs and little has been done to change the portrayed
situation. Many realization components have been built
based on different grammatical formalisms and theories
used to describe TG [Elh92].
Recent work [Fon08] describes a new development
approach that leverages the most recent programming
languages and standards of modern software engineering
to enhance the practical use of TG applications. This
work proposes an innovative approach to the
development of TG systems, in which the pipeline of text
generation tasks work as a set of consecutive rule base
14
Y. Ledeneva et al.
Sort vertices based on their final score. Use the

values
attached
to
each
vertex
for
ranking/selection decisions.
for model transformation. Such methodology for building

applications by applying transformations on models in
different levels of abstraction was recently popularized as
a new software engineering paradigm [Omg01].
5.2
Graph methods
Graph methods are particularly relevant in the area

of CL. Many language processing applications can be
modeled by means of a graph. These data structures have
the ability to encode in a natural way the meaning and
structure of a cohesive text, and follow closely the
associative or semantic memory representations.
One of the most important methods is TextRank
[Mih04, Mih06]. TextRank has been successfully applied
to three natural language processing tasks: keyword
extraction [Mih04], document summarization [Mih06],
word sense disambiguation [Mih06], and text
classification [Has07] with results competitive with those
of state-of-the-art systems. The strength of the model lies
in the global representation of the context and its ability
to model how the co-occurrence between features might
propagate across the context and affect other distant
features.
5.1
Graph representation of text
To enable the application of graph-based ranking

algorithms to natural language texts, a graph that
represents the text is built, and interconnects words or
other text entities with meaningful relations. The graphs
constructed in this way are centered around the target
text, but can be extended with external graphs, such as
off-the-shelf semantic or associative networks, or other
similar structures automatically derived from large
corpora.
Graph Nodes: Depending on the application at hand,
text units of various sizes and characteristics can be
added as vertices in the graph, e.g. words, collocations,
word senses, entire sentences, entire documents, or
others. Note that the graph-nodes do not have to belong
to the same category.
Graph Edges: Similarly, it is the application that
dictates the type of relations that are used to draw
connections between any two such vertices, e.g. lexical
or semantic relations, measures of text cohesiveness,
contextual overlap, membership of a word in a sentence,
and others.
Algorithm: Regardless of the type and characteristics
of the elements added to the graph, the application of the
ranking algorithms to natural language texts consists of
the following main steps:
Identify text units that best define the task at hand,
and add them as vertices in the graph.
Identify relations that connect such text units, and
use these relations to draw edges between vertices
in the graph. Edges can be directed or undirected,
weighted or unweighted.
Apply a graph-based ranking algorithm to find a
ranking over the nodes in the graph. Iterate the
graph-based ranking algorithm until convergence.
Graph ranking algorithms
The basic idea implemented by a random-walk

algorithm is that of voting or recommendation.
When one vertex links to another one, it is basically
casting a vote for that other vertex. The higher the
number of votes that are cast for a vertex, the higher the
importance of the vertex.
Moreover, the importance of the vertex casting a
vote determines how important the vote itself is, and this
information is also taken into account by the ranking
algorithm. While there are several random-walk
algorithms that have been proposed in the past, we focus
on only one such algorithm, namely PageRank [Bri98],
as it was previously found successful in a number of
applications, including Web link analysis, social
networks, citation analysis, and more recently in several
text processing applications.
Given a graph G = (V, E), let In(Vi) be the set of
vertices that point to vertex Vi (predecessors), and
Out(Vi) be the set of vertices that vertex Vi points to
(successors). The PageRank score associated with the
vertex Vi is defined using a recursive function that
integrates the scores of its predecessors:
S (Vi ) (1 d ) d *
V j In (Vi )
S (V j )
Out (V j )
(1)
where d is a parameter that is set between 0 and 1.
The score of each vertex is recalculated upon each
iteration based on the new weights that the neighboring
vertices have accumulated. The algorithm terminates
when the convergence point is reached for all the
vertices, meaning that the error rate for each vertex falls
below a pre-defined threshold.
This vertex scoring scheme is based on a randomwalk model, where a walker takes random steps on the
graph, with the walk being modeled as a Markov process.
Under certain conditions (when the graph is acyclic and
irreducible) the model is guaranteed to converge to a
stationary distribution of probabilities associated with the
vertices in the graph. Intuitively, the stationary
probability associated with a vertex represents the
probability of finding the walker at that vertex during the
random-walk, and thus it represents the importance of the
vertex within the graph.
Two of the most used algorithms are PageRank
[Bri98] and HITS (Hyperlinked Induced Topic Search)
[Kle99].
Undirected Graphs: Although traditionally applied
on directed graphs, algorithms for node activation or
ranking can be also applied to undirected graphs. In such
graphs, convergence is usually achieved after a larger
number of iterations, and the final ranking can differ
significantly compared to the ranking obtained on
directed graphs.
Weighted Graphs: When the graphs are built from
natural language texts, they may include multiple or
partial links between the units (vertices) that are

extracted from text. It may be therefore useful to indicate
and incorporate into the model the strength of the
connection between two vertices Vi and Vj as a weight
wij added to the corresponding edge that connects the two
vertices. Consequently, we introduce new formulae for
graph-based ranking that take into account edge weights
when computing the score associated with a vertex in the
graph.
5.3
Graph clustering algorithms
The main purpose of graph clustering algorithms is

calculates clusters for large graphs and to extract
concepts from similar graphs. These algorithms can be
applied in various computational linguistics applications.
For example, word sense disambiguation [Sch98], lexical
acquisition [Ngo08], language separation [Bie06],
taxonomy [Ngo09] and ontology extraction [Ngo09], etc.
The idea of graph clustering algorithm [Ngo09] is to
maximize the flow from the border of each cluster to the
nodes within the cluster while minimizing the flow from
the cluster to the nodes outside of the cluster. The
algorithm uses local information for clustering and
archives a soft clustering of the input graph. The first
advantage of this algorithm consists in efficiently
handling large graphs which permits to obtain promising
results for computational linguistics applications. The
second advantage is that it can be used to extract domainspecific concepts from different corpora and show that it
computes concepts of high purity.
Conclusions
In this paper, we presented an overview of recent

advances in selected areas of computational linguistics.
We discussed relation of traditional levels of language
phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and discourse to the areas of computational
linguistics research.
The discussion about the development of the systems
of automatic morphological analysis was given. We
presented various morphological classifications of
languages, discussed the models that are necessary for
this type of systems, and then showed that an approach
based on analysis through generation gives several
advantages during development and the grammar models
that are used.
After this, we discussed some popular application
areas like information retrieval, question answering, text
summarization and text generation.
Finally, he paper dealt with the usage of graph
methods in computational linguistics.
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19
Paraphrase Identification Using Weighted Dependencies and Word Semantics

Mihai C. Lintean and Vasile Rus
Department of Computer Science
The University of Memphis
Memphis, TN, 38120, USA
E-mail: {mclinten,vrus}@memphis.edu
Keywords: paraphrasing, syntactic dependencies, word semantics
Received: March 24, 2009
We present in this article a novel approach to the task of paraphrase identification. The proposed approach
quantifies both the similarity and dissimilarity between two sentences. The similarity and dissimilarity
is assessed based on lexico-semantic information, i.e., word semantics, and syntactic information in the
form of dependencies, which are explicit syntactic relations between words in a sentence. Word semantics
requires mapping words onto concepts in a taxonomy and then using word-to-word similarity metrics to
compute their semantic relatedness. Dependencies are obtained using state-of-the-art dependency parsers.
One important aspect of our approach is the weighting of missing dependencies, i.e., dependencies present
in one sentence but not the other. We report experimental results on the Microsoft Paraphrase Corpus, a
standard data set for evaluating approaches to paraphrase identification. The experiments showed that the
proposed approach offers state-of-the-art results. In particular, our approach offers better precision when
compared to other approaches.
Povzetek: Prispevek se ukvarja z vsebinsko primerjavo dveh stavkov, tj. parafrazami.
1 Introduction
We present in this paper a novel approach to the task of
paraphrase identification. Paraphrase is a text-to-text relation between two non-identical text fragments that express
the same idea in different ways. As an example of a paraphrase we show below a pair of sentences from the Microsoft Research (MSR) Paraphrase Corpus [5] in which
Text A is a paraphrase of Text B and vice versa.
Text A: York had no problem with MTAs insisting the
decision to shift funds had been within its legal rights.
Text B: York had no problem with MTAs saying the decision to shift funds was within its powers.
Paraphrase identification is the task of deciding whether
two given text fragments have the same meaning. We focus
in this article on identifying paraphrase relations between
sentences such as the ones shown above. It should be noted
that paraphrase identification is different from paraphrase
extraction. Paraphrase extraction [1, 2] is the task of extracting fragments of texts that are in a paraphrase relation
from various sources. Paraphrase could be extracted, for
instance, from texts that contain redundant semantic content such as news articles from different media sources that
cover the same topic, or multiple English translations, by
different translators, of same source texts in a foreign language. Recognizing textual entailment [4, 20] is another
task related to paraphrase identification. Entailment is a
text-to-text relation between two texts in which one text
entails, or logically infers, the other. Entailment defines an
asymmetric relation between two texts, meaning that one
text is entailed by the other text, while paraphrase requires

a symmetric relation between the two texts, i.e. one text
can be entailed from the other and viceversa. Rus and colleagues [20] showed that approaches to textual entailment
can be extended to handle paraphrase identification.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of paraphrase
identification. Paraphrase identification is an important
task in a number of applications including Question Answering [9], Natural Language Generation [10], and Intelligent Tutoring Systems [6, 15]. In Natural Language
Generation, paraphrases are a method to increase diversity
of generated text [10]. In Question Answering, multiple
answers that are paraphrases of each other could be considered as evidence for the correctness of the answer [9].
For Intelligent Tutoring Systems with natural language input [6, 15] paraphrases are useful to assess whether students articulated answers to deep questions (e.g. conceptual physics questions) are similar-to/paraphrases-of ideal
answers.
We propose in this article a fully automated approach to
the task of paraphrase identification. The basic idea is that
two sentences are in a paraphrase relation if they have many
similarities (at lexico-semantic and syntactic levels) and
few or no dissimilarities. For instance, the two sentences
shown earlier from the MSR paraphrase corpus have many
similarities, e.g., common words such as York and common
syntactic relations such as the subject relationship between
York and have, and only a few dissimilarities, e.g., Text A
contains the word saying while Text B contains the word insisting. Thus, we can confidently deem the two sentences
20
as being paraphrases of each other. Following this basic

idea, to identify paraphrases we first compute two scores:
one reflecting the similarity and the other the dissimilarity
between the two sentences. A paraphrase score is generated by taking the ratio of the similarity and dissimilarity
scores. If the ratio is above a certain threshold, the two sentences are judged as being paraphrases of each other. The
threshold is obtained by optimizing the performance of the
proposed approach on training data.
There are several key features of our approach that distinguish it from other approaches to paraphrase identification. First, it considers both similarities and dissimilarities between sentences. This is an advantage over approaches that only consider the degree of similarity [19]
because the dissimilarity of two sentences can be very important to identifying paraphrasing, as shown by [18] and
later in this article. Second, the similarity between sentences is computed using word-to-word similarity metrics
instead of simple word matching or synonymy information
in a thesaurus as in [19, 18]. The word-to-word similarity
metrics can identify semantically related words even if the
words are not identical or synonyms. We use the similarity
metrics from the WordNet similarity package [17]. These
metrics rely on statistical information derived from corpora and lexico-semantic information from WordNet [16],
a lexical database of English. The basic idea behind the
WordNet similarity metrics is that the closer the distance
in WordNet between words/concepts is, the more similar
they are. For instance, in the earlier example the semantic relationship between the words insist and say cannot
be established using simple direct matching or synonymy.
On the other hand, there is a relatively short path of three
nodes in WordNet from say to insist via assert, indicating
say and insist are semantically close. Third, we weight dependencies to compute dissimilarities between sentences as
opposed to simple dependency overlap methods that do no
weighting (see [13, 20]). The weighting allows us to make
fine distinctions between sentences with a high similarity
score that are paraphrases and those that are not due to the
strength of the few dissimilarities. For instance, two sentences that are almost identical except their subject relations are likely to be non-paraphrases as opposed to two
highly similar sentences that differ in terms of, say, determiner relations. We weight dependencies using two features: (1) the type/label of the dependency, and (2) the
depth of a dependency in the dependency tree. To extract
dependency information we used two parsers, Minipar [11]
and the Stanford parser [14]. We report results with each
of the parsers.
We used the MSR Paraphase Corpus [5], an industry
standard for paraphrase identification, to evaluate our approach. The corpus is divided into two subsets: training
and test data. The training subset was used to obtain the
optimal threshold above which a similarity/dissimilarity ratio would indicate a paraphrase or a non-paraphrase, otherwise. We report state-of-the-art results on the testing
data (72.06% accuracy, with Minipar), which are signif-
M. C. Lintean et al.
icantly better (Fishers exact test yields a p = 0.00005)

than the baseline approach of always predicting the most
frequent class in the training data (66.49% accuracy) and
than a simple dependency overlap method (p<0.001; with
Minipar). Compared to results obtained using the Stanford
parser (71.01% accuracy), Minipar led to statistically significant better results (p = 0.004).
Following this introductory part, in the next section,
What is a paraphrase?, we offer a broader view of the concept of paraphrase. The article continues with a section
on Related Work. The Approach section describes in detail
how our similarity-dissimilarity method works. The following Summary of Results section provides details of the
experimental setup, results, and a comparison with results
obtained by other research groups. The Discussion section offers further insights into our approach and the MSR
Paraphrase Corpus. The Summary and Conclusions section
ends the article.
2 What is a paraphrase?
A quick search with the query What is a paraphrase? on a
major search engine reveals many definitions for the concept of paraphrase. Table 1 presents a small sample of such
definitions. From the table, we notice that the most common feature in all these definitions is different/own words.
That is, a sentence is a paraphrase of another sentence if
it conveys the same meaning using different words. While
these definitions seem to be quite clear, one particular type
of paraphrases, sentence-level paraphrases (among texts
the size of a sentence), do not seem to follow the above
definitions as evidenced by existing data sets of such paraphrases.
For sentential paraphrases, the feature of different
words" seems to be too restrictive, although not impossible.
As we will show later in the article, the MSR Paraphrase
corpus supports this claim as the paraphrases in the corpus
tend to have many words in common as opposed to using
different words to express the same meaning. While the
high lexical overlap of the paraphrases in the MSR corpus
can be explained by the protocol used to create the corpus - same keywords were used to retrieve same stories
from different sources on the web, in general, we could
argue that avoiding the high word overlap issue in sentential paraphrasing would be hard. Given an isolated sentence it would be quite challenging to omit/replace some
core concepts when trying to paraphrase. Here is an example of a sentence (instance 735 in MSR corpus), Counties with population declines will be Vermillion, Posey and
Madison., which would be hard to paraphrase using many
other/different words. The difficulty is due to the large
number of named entities in the sentence. Actually, its
paraphrase in the corpus is Vermillion, Posey and Madison County populations will decline., which retains all the
named entities from the original corpus as it is close to impossible to replace them with other words. It is beyond the
PARAPHRASE IDENTIFICATION USING DEPENDENCIES . . .
21
Table 1: Definitions of paraphrases from various sources.

Source
Definition. A paraphrase (is)...
Wikipedia
Wordnet
a restatement of a text or passage using different words.

express the same message in different words; rewording for the purpose
of clarification.
your own rendition of essential information and ideas expressed by
someone else, presented in a new form.
a prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem, in your own language.
to record someone elses words in the writers own words.
restating the meaning in own words, retaining all of the ideas without
making an interpretation or evaluation.
Purdues OWL
Bedford/St.Martins
Pearsons Glossary
LupinWorks
scope of this article to provide a final answer with respect

to whether high lexical overlap should be acceptable or not
in sentential paraphrases.
Another interesting aspect of sentential paraphasing is
the fact that there seem to be two different ways to judge
them. On one hand, two sentences are considered paraphrases of each other if and only if they are semantically
equivalent, i.e. they both convey the same message with no
additional information present in one sentence but not the
other. An example of two sentences in a semantic equivalence was given in the previous section. Thus, in order to
detect whether two sentences are not paraphrases of each
other, we only need to find one concept that is present in
one sentence but not in the other. On the other hand, two
sentences can be judged as forming a paraphrase if they
convey roughly the same message (minor details being different is acceptable). In this case, the paraphrase relation
can be looked at as a bidirectional entailment relation [19].
To exemplify such loose paraphrases, we show below a pair
of sentences that has been tagged as paraphrase in the MSR
Paraphrase Corpus:
Text A: Ricky Clemons brief, troubled Missouri basketball career is over.
Text B: Missouri kicked Ricky Clemons off its team, ending his troubled career there.
In this example, the first sentence specifies that the career
of Mr. Clemons was brief, while the second sentence specifies the reason why Mr. Clemons career is over. The MSR
Paraphrase corpus, our experimental data set, contains both
types of sentential paraphrases, i.e. precise and loose paraphrases. This characteristic of the MSR corpus impacts
the performance of general approaches, such as ours, to
paraphrase identification that are not biased towards judging styles. A general approach to paraphrase identification
assumes that two sentences are paraphrases of each other if
they have exactly the same meaning.
3 Related work
Paraphrase identification has been explored in the past by
many researchers, especially after the release of the MSR
Paraphrase Corpus [5]. We describe in this section four

previous studies that are most related to our approach and
leave others out, e.g., [8, 21] due to space reasons.
Rus and colleagues [19] addressed the task of paraphrase
identification by computing the degree of subsumption at
lexical and syntactic level between two sentences in a bidirectional manner: from Text A to Text B and from Text B to
Text A. The approach relied on a unidirectional approach
that was initially developed to recognize the sentence-tosentence relation of entailment [20]. Rus and colleagues
approach only used similarity to decide paraphrasing, ignoring dissimilarities which could be important to the final
decision. The similarity was computed as a weighted sum
of lexical matching, i.e. direct matching of words enhanced
with synonymy information from WordNet, and syntactic
matching, i.e., dependency overlap. Dependencies were
derived from a phrase-based parser which outputs the major phrases in a sentence and organizes them hierarchically
into a parse tree. Our approach has a better lexical component based on word semantics and a finer syntactic analysis
component based on weighted dependencies. Furthermore,
the use of phrase-based parsing in [19] limits the applicability of the approach to free-order languages for which dependency parsing is more suitable.
Corley and Mihalcea [3] proposed an algorithm that extends word-to-word similarity metrics into a text-to-text
semantic similarity metric based on which they decide
whether two sentences are paraphrases or not. To obtain the
semantic similarity between individual words, they used
the same WordNet similarity package as we do. Our approach has the advantage that it considers syntactic information, in addition to word semantics, to identify paraphrases.
Qiu and colleagues [18] proposed a two-phase architecture for paraphrase identification. In the first phase, they
identified similarities between two sentences, while in the
second phase the dissimilarities were classified with respect to their relevance in deciding the presence of paraphrase. Their approach uses predicate argument tuples
that capture both lexical and syntactic dependencies among
words to find similarities between sentences. The first
22
The decision had been within its legal rights.
The decision was within its powers.
be
nsubj
decision
det
the
aux
have
be
prep-within
nsubj
right
decision
amod
poss
its
legal
Paired Dependencies:
det(decision, the) = det(decision, the)
nsubj(be, decision) = nsubj(be, decision)
poss(power, its) = poss(right, its)
prep_within(be, power) = prep_within(be, right)
det
the
prep-within
power
poss
its
Unpaired Dependencies/Sentence 1:
aux(be, had)
amod(right-n, legal-a)
Unpaired Dependencies/Sentence 2:
EMPTY
Figure 1: Example of dependency trees and sets of paired and non-paired dependencies.
phase is similar to our approach for detecting common
dependencies. In the second phase, they used a supervised classifier to detect whether the dissimilarities are important. There are two advantages of our approach compared to Qiu and colleagues approach (1) we use word semantics to compute similarities, (2) we take advantage of
the dependency types and position in the dependency tree
to weight dependencies as opposed to simply using nonweighted/unlabeled predicate-argument relations.
Zhang and Patrick [22] offer another ingenious solution
to identify sentence-level paraphrase pairs by transforming
source sentences into canonicalized text forms at the lexical and syntactic level, i.e. generic and simpler forms than
the original text. One of the surprising findings is that a
baseline system based on a supervised decision tree classifier with simple lexical matching features leads to best results compared to more sophisticated approaches that were
experimented by them or others. They also revealed limitations of the MSR Paraphrase Corpus. The fact that their
text canonicalization features did not lead to better than the
baseline approach supports their findings that the sentential
paraphrases, at least in the MSR corpus, share more words
in common than one might expect given the standard definition of a paraphrase. The standard definition implies to
use different words when paraphrasing. Zhang and Patrick
used decision trees to classify the sentence pairs making
their approach a supervised one as opposed to our approach
which is minimally supervised - we only need to derive
the value of the threshold from training data for which it is
only necessary to know the distribution of true-false paraphrases in the training corpus and not the individual judgment for every instance in the corpus. They rely only on
lexical and syntactic features while we also use semantic
similarity factors.
We will compare the results of our approach on the MSR
corpus with these related approaches. But first, we must
detail the innerworkings of our approach.
4 Approach
As mentioned earlier, our approach is based on the observation that two sentences express the same meaning, i.e.,
are paraphrases, if they have all or many words and syntactic relations in common. Furthermore, the two sentences
should have few or no dissimilar words or syntactic relations. In the example below, we show two sentences
with high lexical and syntactic overlap. The different information, legal rights in the first sentence and powers in
the second sentence, does not have a significant impact on
the overall decision that the two sentences are paraphrases,
which can be drawn based on the high degree of lexical and
syntactic overlap.
Text A: The decision was within its legal rights.
Text B: The decision was within its powers.
On the other hand, there are sentences that are almost
identical, lexically and syntactically, and yet they are not
paraphrases because the few dissimilarities make a big difference. In the example below, there is a relatively small"
difference between the two sentences. Only the subject of
the sentences is different. However, due to the importance
of the subject relation to the meaning of any sentence the
high similarity between the sentences is sufficiently dominated by the small" dissimilarity to make the two sentences non-paraphrases.
Text A: CBS is the leader in the 18 to 46 age group.
Text B: NBC is the leader in the 18 to 46 age group.
Thus, it is important to assess both similarities and
dissimilarities between two sentences S1 and S2 before making a decision with respect to them being paraphrases or not. In our approach, we capture the two
aspects, similarity or dissimilarity, and then find the
dominant aspect by computing a final paraphrase score
as the ratio of the similarity and dissimilarity scores:
Paraphrase(S1 , S2 )=Sim(S1 , S2 )/Diss(S1 , S2 ). If the paraphrase score is above a learned threshold T the sentences are deemed paraphrases. Otherwise, they are nonparaphrases.
The similarity and dissimilarity scores are computed
based on dependency relations [7], which are asymmetric

relationships between two words in a sentence, a head or
modifee, and a modifier. A sentence can be represented by
a set of dependency relations (see the bottom half of Figure 1). An example of dependency is the subject relation
between John and drives in the sentence John drives a car.
Such a dependency can be viewed as the triple subj(John,
drive). In the triplets the words are lemmatized, i.e., all
morphological variations of a word are mapped onto its
base form. For instance, go, went, gone, going are all
mapped onto go.
The Sim(S1 , S2 ) and Diss(S1 ,S2 ) scores are computed
in three phases: (1) map the input sentences into sets of
dependencies, (2) detect common and non-common dependencies between the sentences, and (3) compute the
Sim(S1 , S2 ) and Diss(S1 ,S2 ) scores. Figure 2 depicts the
general architecture of the system in which the three processing phases are shown as the three major modules.
In the first phase, the set of dependencies for the two sentences is extracted using a dependency parser. We use both
Minipar [11] and the Stanford parser [14] to parse the sentences. Because these parsers do not produce perfect output the reader should regard our results as a lower bound,
i.e. results in the presence of parsing errors. Should the
parsing been perfect, we expect our results to look better.
The parser takes as input the raw sentence and returns as
output a dependency tree (Minipar) or a list of dependencies (Stanford). In a dependency tree, every word in the
sentence is a modifier of exactly one word, its head, except the head word of the sentence, which does not have a
head. The head word of the sentence is the root node in the
dependency tree. Given a dependency tree, the list of dependencies can be easily derived by traversing the tree and
for each internal node, which is head of at least one dependency, we retrieve triplets of the form rel(head, modifier)
where rel represents the type of dependency that links the
node, i.e., the head, to one of its children, the modifier. Figure 1 shows the set of dependencies in the form of triplets
for the dependency trees in the top half of the figure.
In this phase, we also gather positional information
about each dependency in the dependency tree as we will
need this information later when weighting dependencies
in Phase 3. The position/depth of a dependency within the
dependency tree is calculated as the distance from the root
of the node corresponding to the head word of the dependency. Because the Stanford parser does not provide the
position of the dependencies within the tree, we had to
recursively reconstruct the tree based on the given set of
dependency relations and calculate the relative position of
each relation from the root.
The second phase in our approach identifies the common
and non-common dependencies of the sentences, based
on word semantics and syntactic information. Three sets
of dependencies are generated in this phase: one set of
paired/common dependencies and two sets of unpaired dependencies, one corresponding to each of the two sentences. To generate the paired and unpaired sets a two-
23
step procedure is used. In the first step, we take one dependency from the shorter sentence in terms of number of
dependencies (a computational efficiency trick) and identify dependencies of the same type in the other sentence.
In the second step, we compute a dependency similarity
score (d2dSim) using the word-to-word similarity metrics
applied to the two heads and two modifiers of the matched
dependencies. Heads and modifiers are mapped onto all
the corresponding concepts in WordNet, one concept for
each sense of the heads and modifiers. The similarity is
computed among all senses/concepts of the two heads and
modifiers, respectively, and then the maximum similarity is
retained. If a word is not present in WordNet exact matching is used. The word-to-word similarity scores are combined into one final dependency-to-dependency similarity
score by taking the weighted average of the similarities of
the heads and modifiers. Intuitively, more weight should
be given to the similarity score of heads and less to the
similarity score of modifiers because heads are the more
important words. Surprisingly, while trying to learn a good
weighting scheme from the training data we found that the
opposite should be applied: more weight should be given
to modifiers (0.55) and less to heads (0.45). We believe
this is true only for the MSR Paraphrase Corpus and this
weighting scheme should not be generalized to other paraphrase corpora. The MSR corpus was built in such a way
that favored highly similar sentences in terms of major content words (common or proper nouns) because the extraction of the sentences was based on keyword searching of
major events from the web. With the major content words
similar, the modifiers are the heavy lifters when it comes
to distinguishing between paraphrase and non-paraphrase
cases. Another possible approach to calculate the similarity score between dependencies is to rely only on the similarity of the most disimilar items, either heads or modifiers.
We also tried this alternative approach, but it gave slightly
poorer results (around 2% decrease in performance), and
therefore, using a weighted scheme to calculate the similarity score for dependencies proved to be a better choice.
The dependency-to-dependency similarity score needs to
exceed a certain threshold for two matched dependencies to
be deemed similar. Empirically, we found out from training data that a good value for this threshold would be 0.5.
Once a pair of dependencies is deemed similar, we place
it into the paired dependencies set, along with the calculated dependency-to-dependency similarity value. All the
dependencies that could not be paired are moved into the
unpaired dependencies sets.
sim(S1 , S2 ) =
maxd2 S2 [d2dSim(d1 , d2 )]
d1 S1
diss(S1 , S2 ) =
weight(d)
d{unpairedS1 ,unpairedS2 }
In the third and final phase of our approach, two scores

are calculated from the three dependency sets obtained
24
Phase 1: Extract dependencies
Sentence
1
Sentence
2
Phase 3: Calculate the scores
Phase 2: Pair dependencies
Set of
dependencies
from sentence 1
Set of
dependencies
from sentence 2
Set of unpaired
dependencies from
sentence 1
Similarity Score (S)
Set of
paired/common
dependencies
S / D > Threshold
Dissimilarity Score (D)
Set of unpaired
dependencies from
sentence 2
Figure 2: Architecture of the system.

Table 2: Performance and comparison of different approaches on the MS Paraphrase Corpus.
System
Accuracy
Precision
Recall
F-measure
Uniform baseline
Random baseline [3]
Lexical baseline (from Zhang et. al.)[22]
Corley and Mihalcea [3]
Qiu [18]
Rus - average [19]
Simple dependency overlap (Minipar) [13]
Simple dependency overlap (Stanford) [13]
0.6649
0.5130
0.7230
0.7150
0.7200
0.7061
0.6939
0.6823
0.6649
0.6830
0.7880
0.7230
0.7250
0.7207
0.7109
0.7064
1.0000
0.5000
0.7980
0.9250
0.9340
0.9111
0.9093
0.8936
0.7987
0.5780
0.7930
0.8120
0.8160
0.8048
0.7979
0.7890
Optimum results (Minipar)

Optimum results (Stanford)
No word semantics (Minipar)
No word semantics (Stanford)
No dependency weighting (Minipar)
No dependency weighting (Stanford)
No penalty for extra info (Minipar)
No penalty for extra info (Stanford)
0.7206
0.7101
0.7038
0.7032
0.7177
0.7067
0.7067
0.7032
0.7404
0.7270
0.7184
0.7237
0.7378
0.7265
0.7275
0.7138
0.8928
0.9032
0.9119
0.8954
0.8928
0.8963
0.8936
0.9241
0.8095
0.8056
0.8037
0.8005
0.8079
0.8025
0.8020
0.8055
in Phase 2: a cumulative similarity score and a cumulative dissimilarity score. The cumulative similarity score
Sim(S1 , S2 ) is computed from the set of paired dependencies by summing up the dependency-to-dependency
similarity scores (S2 in the equation for similarity score
represents the set of remaining unpaired dependencies in
the second sentence). Similarly, the dissimilarity score
Diss(S1 , S2 ) is calculated from the two sets of unpaired dependencies. Each unpaired dependency is weighted based
on two features: the depth of the dependency within the dependency tree and type of dependency. The depth is important because an unpaired dependency that is closer to the
root of the dependency tree, e.g., the main verb/predicate
of sentence, is more important to indicate a big difference
between two sentences. In our approach, each unpaired dependency is initially given a perfect weight of 1.00, which
is then gradually penalized with a constant value (0.20 for
the Minipar output and 0.18 for the Stanford output), the
farther away it is from the root node. The penalty values
were derived empirically from training data. Our tests show

that this particular feature works well only when applied to
the sets of unpaired dependencies. The second feature that
we use to weight dependencies is the type of dependency.
For example a subj dependency, which is the relation between the verb and its subject, is more important to decide
paraphrasing than a det dependency, which is the relation
between a noun and its determiner. Each dependency type
is assigned an importance level between 0 (no importance)
and 1 (maximum importance). The importance level for
each dependency type has been established by the authors
based on their linguistic knowledge and an analysis of the
role of various dependency types in a subset of sentences
from the training data.
Before comparing the similarity and dissimilarity scores,
we consider one more feature that will affect the disimilarity score. This improvement, of a more statistical nature,
is based on the idea that if one sentence contains a significant amount of extra information compared to the other
sentence although they do refer to the same action or event,

then the relation between the two sentences is not a bidirectional relation of paraphrase, but rather a unidirectional
relation of entailnment, so they should be evaluated as nonparaphrases. This extra information is recorded in our dependency sets by the fact that the set of unpaired dependencies from the longer, more detailed sentence is larger
than the set of unpaired dependencies from the shorter sentence. To account for this statistical feature, we add an
absolute value to the dissimilarity score, which was empirically chosen to be 14, for every case when the set of
unpaired dependencies from the longer sentence has more
than 6 extra dependencies compared to the set of unpaired
dependencies from the shorter sentence. We chose these
optimal constants values to tweak this feature, based on a
series of tests made on the MSR Paraphrase Corpus, and
because of that, by including it into the system, the performance was improved significantly.
Once the Sim(S1 , S2 ) and Diss(S1 , S2 ) scores are available, the paraphrase score is calculated by taking the ratio
between the similarity score, S, and the disimilarity score,
D, and compare it to the optimum threshold T learned from
training data. Formally, if S/D > T then the instance is
classified as paraphrase, otherwise is a non-paraphrase. To
avoid division by zero for cases in which the two sentences
are identical (D = 0) the actual implementation tests for
S > T D. To find the optimum threshold, we did an
exhaustive search on the training data set, looking for the
value which led to optimum accuracy. This is similar to the
sigmoid function of the simple voted perceptron learning
algorithm used in [3].
5 Summary of results
We experimented with our approach on the MSR Paraphrase Corpus [5]. The MSR Paraphrase Corpus is
the largest publicly available annotated paraphrase corpus which has been used in most of the recent studies
that addressed the problem of paraphrase identification.
The corpus consists of 5801 sentence pairs collected from
newswire articles, 3900 of which were labeled as paraphrases by human annotators. The whole set is divided
into a training subset (4076 sentences of which 2753 are
true paraphrases) which we have used to determine the optimum threshold T , and a test subset (1725 pairs of which
1147 are true paraphrases) that is used to report the performance results. We report results using four performance
metrics: accuracy (percentage of instances correctly predicted out of all instances), precision (percentage of predicted paraphrases that are indeed paraphrases), recall (percentage of true paraphrases that were predicted as such),
and f-measure (harmonic mean of precision and recall).
In Table 1 three baselines are reported: a uniform baseline in which the majority class (paraphrase) in the training data is always chosen, a random baseline taken from
[3], and a lexical baseline taken from [22] which uses
25
a supervised learning decision tree classifier with various

lexical-matching features. We next show the results of others including results obtained using the simple dependency
overlap method in [13]. The simple dependency overlap
method computes the number of common dependency relations between the two sentences divided by the average
number of relations in the two sentences. Our results are
then presented in the following order: our best/state-ofthe-art system, that uses all three features described in the
previous section: word semantics, weighted dependencies
and penalties for extra information, then a version of the
proposed approach without word semantics (similarity in
this case is 1 if words are identical, case insensitive, or 0
otherwise), then one without weighted dependencies, and
finaly, one version where the instances with extra information found in one of their sentences are not penalized. The
conclusion based on our best approach is that a mix of word
semantics and weighted dependencies leads to better accuracy and in particular better precision. The best approach
leads to significantly better results than the naive baselines
and the simple dependency overlap (p<0.001 for the version with Minipar). The comparison between our best results and the results reported by [3] and [13] is of particular importance. These comparisons indicate that weighted
dependencies and word semantics leads to better accuracy
and precision than using only word semantics [3] or only
simple dependency overlap [13].
All results in Table 1 were obtained with the lin measure
from the WordNet similarity package, except the case that
did not use WordNet similarity measures at all the No
word semantics row. This lin measure consistently led to
the best performance in our experiments when compared
to all the other measures offered by the WordNet similarity
package.
For reference, we report in Table 3 results obtained when
various word-to-word similarity metrics are used with an
optimum threshold calculated from the test data set. For
lin measure we report results with optimum test thresholds
when using both parsers, Minipar and Stanford, while for
the rest of the measures we only report results when using
Minipar. We deem these results as one type of benchmark
results for approaches that rely on WordNet similarity measures and dependencies as they were obtained by optimizing the approach on the testing data. As we can see from
the table, the results are not much higher than the results in
Table 1 where the threshold was derived from training data.
One important advantage that our system has over other
approaches ([18], [22]) is that it does not rely too much
on the training. The training data is used merely to tune
the parameters, rather than for training a whole classifier.
Since the only parameter whose value fully depends on the
training data is the final threshold value, weve made another set of experiments where the threshold value depends
only on one piece of information about the caracteristic of
the test data set: the percentage of paraphrase instances
within the data set. In other words, when calculating the
threshold value, the system needs to know only what is the
26
Table 3: Accuracy results for different WordNet metrics with optimum test threshold values
Metric
Acc.
Prec.
Rec.
LinM inipar
LinStanf ord
Path
L&C
W&P
J&C
Lesk
Vector
Vector pairs
.7241
.7130
.7183
.7165
.7188
.7217
.7148
.7200
.7188
.7395
.7387
.7332
.7253
.7270
.7425
.7446
.7330
.7519
.9032
.8797
.9058
.9233
.9241
.8901
.8692
.9093
.8614
.8132
.8030
.8105
.8124
.8138
.8097
.8021
.8117
.8029
probability of finding a paraphrase within the given data

set. The system then tries to find a threshold value that
splits the instances into two sets with the same distribution
of instances as the given data set. For the testing part of
the MSR Paraphrase data corpus the distribution value is
0.6649. We used this information to decide on a threshold and the results were no more than 2.09 percent below
the optimum performance scores (for example on Minipar
output and when excluding the WordNet similarity feature,
the accuracy performance was only 0.06 percent less than
when the threshold is calculated from the training data).
6 Discussion
One item worth discussing is the annotation of the MSR
Paraphrase Corpus. Some sentences are intentionally labeled as paraphrases in the corpus even when the small
dissimilarities are extremely important, e.g. different numbers. Below is a pair of sentences from the corpus in
which the small" difference in both the numbers and the
anonymous stocks in Text A are not considered important
enough for the annotators to judge the two sentences as
non-paraphrases.
Text A: The stock rose $2.11, or about 11 percent, to
close on Friday at $21.51 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Text B: PG&E Corp. shares jumped $1.63 or 8 percent
to $21.03 on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday.
This makes the corpus more challenging and the fullyautomated solutions look less powerful than they would on
a paraphrase corpus that followed the standard interpretation of what a paraphrase is, i.e. the two texts have exactly
the same meaning.
Another item worth discussing is the comparison of the
dependency parsers. Our experimental results show that
Minipar consistently outperforms Stanford, in terms of accuracy of our paraphrase identification approach. Minipar is also faster than Stanford, which first generates the
phrase-based syntactic tree for a sentence and then extracts
the corresponding sets of dependencies from the phrasebased syntactic tree. For instance, Minipar can parse 1725
pairs of sentences, i.e. 3450 sentences, in 48 seconds while
Stanford parser takes 1926 seconds, i.e. 32 minutes and 6

seconds. A faster parser means it could be used in interactive environments, such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems,
where a fast response is needed.
Finally, we would like to discuss the impact of word
weighting on our method. We weighted words by their importance as derived from Wikipedia. The reason we did
not mention the IDF feature in previous sections of this article is because the results are less accurate, at least on the
MSR corpus. However, we think it is informative to discuss
these results as they provide more insights on the problem
of paraphrase identification. In particular it highlights the
difficulty of the problem and the challenging nature of sentential paraphases in general.
Corley and Mihalcea [3] suggested that word weighting
could improve methods to paraphrase identification. Translated into our approach, the idea is to weight words according to their importance (or specificity) when calculating the
similarity and dissimilarity scores. In general, a word is
more important if it is more specific. The specificity of a
word can be approximated by its IDF (Inverted Document
Frequency) value calculated from a large collection of documents. The theoretical assumption for using IDF on the
problem of paraphrase identification is that when a word is
considered highly specific (e.g. an unusual name or a very
uncommon noun), this word should play an important role
when deciding paraphrasing. To further motivate this assumtion, we show below a pair of sentences extracted from
the MSR test data (instance #89), where by using IDF, our
method succesfully classifies an otherwise failed instance:
Text A: Emily Church is London bureau chief of
CBS.MarketWatch.com.
Text B: Russ Britt is the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for
CBS.MarketWatch.com.
Notice that even though the predicates are the same and
there is a rather long common noun phrase, which results
in a significant number of identical dependencies between
the two sentences, the subjects and the locations are completely different. Because there are two different pairs of
named entities, which have high IDF values, this will put a
significant weight on the dissimilarity score, which in the
end will lead to the decision that the two sentences are in
fact not paraphrases.

We used Wikipedia, one of the largest and most diverse
collection of documents freely available on the Internet,
as the source for IDF values. IDF values are calculated
from the DF (document frequency) of words which was
extracted from over 2.2 million Wikipedia documents. To
account for the data sparseness factor raised by the very
high number of documents available, we calculated the IDF
values from a maximum of 1 million (106 ) documents in
the original collection. All DF values that exceeded the
maximum number of documents were reduced to the maximum accepted value of 106 . This means that the very few
words that appeared in more than 1 million documents in
Wikipedia will have the same minimal IDF value of 0. This
means that the maximum absolute IDF value, for words
that appeared in only one document is log(106 ) = 6. In the
equations below, these values are normalized.
We experimented with two aproaches with IDF weights:
1) apply IDF weights to both paired and unpaired dependencies 2) apply IDF weights only to unpaired dependencies. We adjusted our previously presented scores such that
they consider the IDF values of words. We added IDFbased weights on the paired dependencies in the similarity
score and IDF-based weights on the unpaired dependencies
in the dissimilarity score. The weights for paired and unpaired dependencies, respectively, are calculated according
to the following formulae:
Widf (d(w1 ,w2 ) , d(w3 ,w4 ) ) = [
4
X
idf (wi )]/(4 6)
i=1
Widf (d(head,mod) ) = [idf (head) + idf (mod)]/(2 6)

Table 4 shows results with these two IDF-based methods when used with both dependency parsers (Minipar and
Stanford). We present the same performance scores as
in the previous section using optimum thresholds derived
from both the training and the testing data sets. An interesting observation drawn from these results is that the
first IDF method works better when used on the Minipar
parser, while the second method works better on the Stanford parser. Another interesting effect of IDF values can
be noted by comparing the IDF-based results with results
in Table 1. It seems that when only unpaired dependencies
are IDF-weighted the precision increases, at the expense of
lower recall.
7 Summary and conclusions

In this article, we presented a novel approach to solve the
problem of paraphrase identification. The approach uses
word semantics and weighted dependencies to compute degrees of similarity at word/concept level and at syntactic
level between two sentences. Based on the degree of similarity, sentences are being judged as paraphrases or not.
27
The proposed approach offers state of the art performance.

In particular, the approach offers high precision due to the
use of syntactic information.
References
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[2] Brockett, C., and Dolan, W. B. 2005. Support Vector Machines for Paraphrase Identification and Corpus Construction. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Paraphrasing.
[3] Corley, C., and Mihalcea, R. 2005. Measuring the
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ACL Workshop on Empirical Modeling of Semantic
Equivalence and Entailment. Ann Arbor, MI.
[4] Dagan, I., Glickman, O., and Magnini B. 2006.
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Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. Lexical selection and paraphrase in a meaning-text generation
model, Kluwer Academic.
28
Table 4: Performance scores when using IDF values from Wikipedia.

Method
Parser
Sim & Diss
Minipar
Stanford
Minipar
Stanford
Diss only
Optimum training threshold

Acc
Prec Recall F-score
0.6922 0.7133 0.8980 0.7951
0.7049 0.7228 0.9024 0.8026
0.7049 0.7450 0.8457 0.7922
0.7043 0.7323 0.8753 0.7975
[11] Lin, D. 1993. Principle-Based Parsing Without Overgeneration. In Proceedings of ACL, 112120, Columbus, OH.
[12] Lin, D. 1995. A Dependency-based Method for
Evaluating Broad-coverage Parsers. In Proceedings
of IJCAI-95.
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Proceedings of the Society for Text and Discourse
Conference 2008.
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D. 2006. Generating Typed Dependency Parsers
from Phrase Structure Parses. In Proceeding of LREC
2006.
[15] McNamara, D.S.; Boonthum, C.; Levinstein, I. B.;
and Millis, K. 2007. Handbook of Latent Semantic
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and LSA algorithms, 227241.
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Using Measures of Semantic Relatedness for Word
Sense Disambiguation. in Proceeding of the Fourth
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February.
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Recognition via Dissimilarity Significance Classification. In Proceeding of EMNLP, Sydney 2006.
[19] Rus, V.; McCarthy, P. M.; Lintean, M.; McNamara,
D. S.; and Graesser, A. C. 2008. Paraphrase Identification with Lexico-Syntactic Graph Subsumption.
In Proceedings of the Florida Artificial Intelligence
Research Society International Conference (FLAIRS2008).
[20] Rus, V.; McCarthy, P. M.; McNamara, D. S.; and
Graesser, A. C. 2008. A Study of Textual Entailment. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Tools, August 2008.
Optimum testing threshold

Acc
Prec Recall F-score
0.6957 0.7418 0.8317 0.7842
0.7101 0.7289 0.8980 0.8047
0.7113 0.7246 0.9128 0.8079
0.7072 0.7242 0.9041 0.8042
[21] Wu, D. 2005. Recognizing Paraphrases and Textual Entailnment using Inversion Transduction Grammars. in Proceeding of the ACL Workshop on Empirical Modeling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailnment, Ann Arbor, MI.
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Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005,
160166.
29
Challenging Issues of Automatic Summarization: Relevance Detection and

Quality-based Evaluation
Elena Lloret and Manuel Palomar
Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante, Spain
E-mail:{elloret, mpalomar}@dlsi.ua.es
Keywords: natural language processing, automatic summarization, relevance detection, quality-based evaluation
Received: April 12, 2009
This paper is about the Automatic Summarization task within two different points of view, focusing on
two main goals. On the one hand, a study of the suitability for The Code Quantity Principle in the Text
Summarization task is described. This linguistic principle is implemented to select those sentences from a
text, which carry the most important information. Moreover, this method has been run over the DUC 2002
data, obtaining encouraging results in the automatic evaluation with the ROUGE tool. On the other hand,
the second topic discussed in this paper deals with the evaluation of summaries, suggesting new challenges
for this task. The main methods to perform the evaluation of summaries automatically have been described,
as well as the current problems existing with regard to this difficult task. With the aim of solving some of
these problems, a novel type of evaluation is outlined to be developed in the future, taking into account a
number of quality criteria in order to evaluate the summary in a qualitative way.
Povzetek: Razvita je metoda za zbirni opis besedila, ki temelji na iskanju najpomembnejih stavkov.
1 Introduction
The high amount of electronic information available on the
Internet increases the difficulty of dealing with it in recent
years. Automatic Summarization (AS) task helps users
condense all this information and present it in a brief way,
in order to make it easier to process the vast amount of
documents related to the same topic that exist these days.
Moreover, AS can be very useful for neighbouring Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Information
Retrieval, Question Answering or Text Comprehension, because these tasks can take advantadge of the summaries to
save time and resources [1].
A summary can be defined as a reductive transformation
of source text through content condensation by selection
and/or generalisation of what is important in the source [2].
According to [3], this process involves three stages: topic
identification, interpretation and summary generation. To
identify the topic in a document what systems usually do is
to assign a score to each unit of input (word, sentence, passage) by means of statistical or machine learning methods.
The stage of interpretation is what distinguishes extracttype summarization systems from abstract-type systems.
During interpretation, the topics identified as important are
fused, represented in new terms, and expressed using a
new formulation, using concepts or words not found in the
original text. Finally, when the summary content has been
created through abstracting and/or information extraction,
it requires techniques of Natural Language Generation to
build the summary sentences. When an extractive approach
is taken, there is no generation stage involved.
Another essential part of the Text Summarization (TS)

task is how to perform the evaluation of a summary. Methods for evaluating TS can be classified into two categories
[4]. The first, intrinsic evaluations, test the summary on
itself. The second, extrinsic evaluations, test how the summary is good enough to accomplish some other task, for
example, an Information Retrieval task. However, to determine whether an automatic, or even a human-made summary, is appropriate or not, is a subjective task which depends greatly on a lot of factors, for instance, what the summary is intended for, or to whom the summary is addessed
[2].
In this paper, we focus on single-document1 Text Summarization from an extractive point of view, and we set out
two goals for this research. On the one hand, the first goal
is to present a method to detect relevant sentences within a
document, and therefore, select them to make up the final
summary. On the other hand, the second aim of this piece
of work is to discuss the current problems the automatic
evaluation of summaries in a quantitative way have, so that
we can outline a novel approach to measure the quality of
a summary to be developed in further research.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an
overview of the Text Summarization task, describing the
main criteria that have been used to determine the relevance of a sentence within a document. In Section 2.1, a
new mechanism for detecting important sentences in a text,
based on The Code Quantity Principle [5], is explained.
1 Single-document
differs from multi-document summarization in the

number of input documents a system has, just one document or more than
one, respectively.
30
Then, in Section 3 we analise the experiments performed

and the results obtained for the approach we have proposed
(Section 3.1). We also discuss current problems for evaluating summaries (Section 3.2), proposing a new qualitative model for the evaluation, by means of several quality
criteria (Section 3.3). Finally, Section 4 draws the main
conclusions and explains the work in progess.
2 Determining sentences relevance

in text summarization
Although there has been increased attention to different criteria such as well-formedness, cohesion or coherence when
dealing with summarization [6], [7], most work in this NLP
task is still concerned with detecting relevant elements of
text and presenting them together to produce a final summary. As it has been previously mentioned, the first step
in the process of summarization consists of identifying the
topic of a document. To achieve this, the most common
things systems do is to split the text into input units, usually sentences, and give them a relevance score to decide
on which ones are the most important. Criteria such as sentence position within texts and cue phrase indicators [8],
word and phrase frequency [9], [10], query and title overlap [11], cohesive or lexical connectedness [12], [13] or
discourse structure [14] are examples of how to account
for the relevance of a sentence. Furthermore, the use of a
graph to obtain a representation of the text has proven effective, especially in multi-document summarization [15],
[16], [17].
In contrast to all this work, this paper suggests a novel
approach for determining the relevance of a sentence based
on The Code Quantity Principle [5]. This principle tries
to explain the relationship between syntax and information
within a text. The first goal of this paper is to study whether
this principle can be suitable or not as a criterion to select
relevant sentences to produce a summary. This idea will be
explained in detail in the next Section.
E. Lloret et al.
retrieve this kind of information more efficiently. There

exists, then, a proportional relation between the relevance
of information and the amount of quantity through it is
coded. On the basis of this, a coding element can range
from characters to phrases. A noun-phrase is the syntactic structure which allows more flexibility in the number
of elements it can contain (pronouns, adjectives, or even
relative clauses), and is able to carry more or less information (words) according to the users needs. Furthermore,
the longer a noun-phrase is, the more information it carries
for its nucleus. For example, if a text contained two distinct
noun-phrases referring to the same entity (the Academy of
Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Academy),
the second one would lead to ambiguities. Therefore, if a
summary selected this noun-phrase without having previously given more specific information about the concept,
the real meaning could be misunderstood.
Starting from these principles, the approach we suggest
here is to study how The Code Quantity Principle can
be applied in the summarization task, to decide on which
sentences of a document may contain more relevant information through its coding, and select these sentences
to make up a summary. In this particular case, the lexical units considered as encoding elements are words inside a noun-phrase, without taking into account stopwords.
The hypothesis is that sentences containing longer nounphrases will be given a higher score so, at the end, the
highest ranked sentences will be chosen to appear in the
final summary. To identify noun-phrases within a sentence
the BaseNP Chunker2 , which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania, was used. One important thing
to take into consideration is that the use of a chunker (as
well as any other NLP tool) can introduce some error rate.
This tool achieves recall and precision rates of roughly 93%
for base noun-phrase chunks, and 88% for more complex
chunks [20]. For the experiments performed, the score for
a sentence was increased by one unit, each time a word belonged to a sentences noun-phrase. The way we compute
the score of a sentence according to the length of the nounphrase is shown in Formula 1.
2.1 The code quantity principle within the

text summarization task
The Code Quantity Principle [5] is a linguistic theory
which states that: (1) a larger chunk of information will
be given a larger chunk of code; (2) less predictable information will be given more coding material; and (3) more
important information will be given more coding material. In other words, the most important information within
a text will contain more lexical elements, and therefore
it will be expressed by a high number of units (for instance, syllables, words or phrases). In [18], this principle
have been proven to be fulfilled in written texts. Moreover, The Code Quantity, Attention and Memory Principle [19] states that the more salient and different coding
information used within a text, the more readers attention
will be caught. As a result, readers will retain, keep and
Scsi =
X
1
|w| .
#N Pi
(1)
wN P
where:
#NPi = number of noun-phrases contained in sentence i,
|w |= 1, when a word belongs to a noun-phrase.
In Figure 1, an example of how we compute the score
of a pair of sentences is showed. Firstly, two sentences
that belong to the original document can be seen. Then,
chunks of these sentences are identified and stopwords are
removed from them. Lastly, scores are calculated according to Formula 1. These sentences have been extracted
from the DUC 2002 test data3 . Once we have the score for
2 This
resource is free available in ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/chunker/

Understanding Conference: http://duc.nist.gov/
3 Document
CHALLENGING ISSUES OF AUTOMATIC SUMMARIZATION. . .
31
Figure 2: Automatic summary for document AP8802170100

Figure 1: Example of sentences scoring for document
AP880217-0100
each sentence of the entire document, the sentences with
the highest scores will be selected to form part of the final
summary, presenting them in the same order as they were
in the original text, to keep the order of the text. Figure
2 shows an example of 100-word summary using the proposed scoring method aforementioned. One particular remark of the approach suggested is how pronouns are dealt
with. The use of pronouns is very common in written texts,
and they substitute somebody/something that has been previously mentioned. Although they can sometimes carry important information, depending on what they are referring
to, we decided not to consider them, and consequently they
were treated as stopwords. The reason for taking such decision was mainly because they refer to entities previously
mentioned in a document, so we strengthened the importance of those mentioned entities instead of noun-phrases
containing pronouns.
3 Evaluating automatic
summarization
Evaluating summaries, either manually or automatically, is
a hard task. The main difficulty in evaluation comes from
the impossibility of building a fair gold-standard against
which the results of the systems can be compared [13].
Furthermore, it is also very hard to determine what a correct summary is, because there is always the possibility of
a system to generate a good summary that is quite different from any human summary used as an approximation to
the correct output [4]. In Section 1, we mentioned the two
approaches that can be adopted to evaluate an automatic
summary: instrinsic or extrinsic evaluation. Instrinsic evaluation assesses mainly coherence and summarys information content, whereas extrinsic methods focus on determining the effect of summarization on some other task, for instance Question Answering.
Next, in Section 3.1, we show how we evaluated the
novel source of knowledge and the results obtained. Afterwards, in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, we present the problems
of the evaluation and the automatic methods developed so
far, and we propose a novel idea for evaluating automatic
summaries based on quality criteria, respectively.
3.1 The code quantity principle evaluation

environment
For the approach we have suggested taking into consideration The Code Quantity Principle, we have chosen an
intrinsic evaluation because we are interested in measuring the performance of the automatic summary by itself.
To do this, we used the state-of-the-art measure to evaluate
summarization systems automatically, ROUGE [21]. This
metric measures content overlap between two summaries
(normally between a gold-standard and an automatic summary), which means that the distance between two summaries can be established as a function of their vocabulary
(unigrams) and how this vocabulary is used (n-grams).
In order to assess the performance of our novel approach
based on The Code Quantity Principle and show that it
is suitable for Text Summarization, we evaluated the summaries generated from the DUC 2002 data, consisting of
567 newswire documents. As a preprocessing step, we converted the HTML files into plain text, and we kept only the
body of the news. In the DUC 2002 workshop4 , there was
a task whose aim was to generate 100-word length sum4 http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/guidelines/2002.html
32
maries. A set of human-made summaries written by experts

was also provided. We evaluated our summaries against the
reference ones, and we compared our results with the ones
obtained by the systems in the real competition. Moreover,
the organisation developed a simple baseline which consisted of taking the first 100 words of a document. In [22],
the participating systems in DUC 2002 were evaluated automatically with the ROUGE tool, and we set up the same
settings5 for it, so that we could make a proper comparison
among all the systems.
In Table 1 we can see the results of the top 3 performing
DUC 2002 systems (S28, S21, S19), the baseline proposed
in that workshop, and the approach we have suggested in
this paper (CQPSum), only for the ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2,
ROUGE-SU4 and ROUGE-L recall values. As it is shown
in Table 1, the system 28 performed the best at DUC 2002,
according to the ROUGE evaluation. From the 13 participating systems, there were only two systems (S28 and S21)
that obtained better results than the baseline. The CQPSum approach performed slightly worse than the best system, but it performed, however, better than the rest of the
participating systems in DUC 2002, including the baseline,
except for the ROUGE-2 value. In S28 [23] two different algorithms, a Logistic Regression Model and a Hidden
Markov Model were merged together to develop a singledocument summarization system. The features this system
used were: position of the sentence in the document, number of tokens in the sentence (stopwords discarded), and
number of terms which were more likely to occur in the
document (called pseudo-terms). They used a machine
learning approach to train the data and afterwards, generate the final summary. In contrast, our proposal do not use
any machine learning approach, and it is based on a linguistic principle using just one feature (the number of coding
words that takes part in a noun-phrase) to discriminate the
relevance among sentences. We have shown that this simple idea on its own performs well in the state-of-the-art of
single-document summarization task. If more sources of
knowledge were combined together, it could be expected
that our approach would obtain better results.
3.2 Current difficulties in evaluating

summaries automatically
The most common way to evaluate the informativeness
of automatic summaries is to compare them with humanmade model summaries. However, as content selection is
not a deterministic problem, different people would chose
different sentences, and even, the same person may chose
different sentences at different times, showing evidence of
low agreement among humans as to which sentences are
good summary sentences [24]. Besides the human variability, the semantic equivalence is another problem, because
two distinct sentences can express the same meaning but
5 ROUGE
version (1.5.5) run with the same parameters as in [22]:

ROUGE-1.5.5.pl -n 2 -m -2 4 -u -c 95 -r 1000 -f A -p 0.5 -t 0 -l 100
-d
E. Lloret et al.
not using the same words. This phenomenon is known as

paraphrase. In [25], we can find an approach to automatically evaluating summaries using paraphrases (ParaEval).
Moreover, most summarization systems perform an extractive approach, selecting and copying important sentences
from the source documents. Although humans can also cut
and paste relevant information of a text, most of the times
they rephrase sentences when necessary, or they join different related information into one sentence [26].
For years, the summarization community research has
been actively seeking an automatic evaluation methodology. Several methods have been proposed, and thanks to
the conferences carried out annually until 2007 within the
DUC context6 , some of these methodologies, for instance,
ROUGE [21] or the Pyramid Method [27] have been well
adopted by the researchers to evaluate summaries automatically. Although ROUGE is a recall-oriented metric, the latest version (ROUGE-1.5.5) can compute precision and Fmeasure, too. It is based on content overlap and the idea behind it is to assess the number of common n-grams between
two texts, with respect to different kinds of n-grams, like
unigrams, bigrams or the longest common subsequence. In
order to address some of the shortcomings of the comparison of fixed words n-grams, an evaluation framework in
which very small units of content were used, called Basic
Elements (BE) was developed [28].
The idea underlying the Pryamid method is to identify information with the same meaning across different
human-authored summaries, which are tagged as Summary
Content Units (SCU) in order to derive a gold-standard for
the evaluation. Each SCU will have a weight depending on
the number of summarizers who expressed the same information, and these weights will follow a specific distribution, allowing important content to be differentiated from
less important one. The main disadvantages of this method
are (1) the need to have several human-made summaries,
and (2) the labourious task to annotate all the SCU. An attempt to automate the annotation of the SCUs in the pyramids can be found in [29].
More methods that perform the evaluation of automatic
summaries can be found in [30] and [31]. In the former,
Relative Utility (RU) is proposed as a metric to evaluate
summaries, where multiple judges rank each sentence in
the input with a score, giving them a value which ranged
from 0 to 10, with respect to its suitability for inclusion in a
summary. Highly ranked sentences would be very suitable
for a summary, whereas low ranked ones should not be incuded. Like the commonly used information retrieval metric of precision and recall, it compares sentence selection
between automatic and reference summaries. The latter
have developed an evaluation framework, called QARLA,
which provides three types of measures for the evaluation
under the assumption that the best similarity metric should
6 The summarization workshop will no longer be referred as DUC.
From 2008, the new workshop is called Text Analysis Conference (TAC) and includes other NLP tasks apart from summarization
(http://www.nist.gov/tac/).
33
Table 1: Results for the CQPSum approach

SYSTEM
S28
CQPSum
S21
DUC baseline
S19
ROUGE-1
0.42776
0.42241
0.41488
0.41132
0.40823
ROUGE-2
0.21769
0.17177
0.21038
0.21075
0.20878
ROUGE-SU4
0.17315
0.19320
0.16546
0.16604
0.16377
ROUGE-L
0.38645
0.38133
0.37543
0.37535
0.37351
be the one that best discriminates between manual and automatically generated summaries. These measures are: (1)
a measure to evaluate the quality of any set of similarity
metrics, (2) a measure to evaluate the quality of a summary
using an optimal set of similarity metrics, and (3) a measure to evaluate whether the set of baseline summaries is
reliable or may produce biased results.
Despite the fact that many approaches have been developed, some important aspects of summaries, such as legibility, grammaticality, responsiveness or well-formedness
are still evaluated manually by experts. For instance, DUC
assessors had a list of linguistic qualitity questions7 , and
they manually assigned a mark to automatic summaries depending on what extent they accomplished each of these
criteria.
3.3 Evaluating summaries qualitatively

The main drawback of the evaluation systems existing so
far is that we need at least one reference summary, and
for some methods more than one, to be able to compare
automatic summaries with models. This is a hard and expensive task. Much effort has to be done in order to have
corpus of texts and their corresponding summaries. Furthermore, for some methods presented in the previous Section, not only do we need to have human-made summaries
available for comparison, but also manual annotation has
to be performed in some of them (e.g. SCU in the Pyramid
Method). In any case, what the evaluation methods need as
an input, is a set of summaries to serve as gold-standards
and a set of automatic summaries. Moreover, they all perform a quantitative evaluation with regard to different similarity metrics. To overcome these problems, we think that
the quantitative evaluation might not be the only way to
evaluate summaries, and a qualitative automatic evaluation
would be also important. Therefore, the second aim of this
paper is to suggest a novel proposal for evaluating automatically the quality of a summary in a qualitative manner
rather than in a quantitative one. Our evaluation approach
is a preliminary approach which has to be studied more
deeply, and developed in the future. Its main underlying
idea is to define several quality criteria and check how a
generated summary tackles each of these, in such a way
that a reference model would not be necessary anymore,
taking only into consideration the automatic summary and
7 http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/duc2007/quality-questions.txt
Figure 3: Quality criteria for evaluating summaries in a

qualitative way
the original source. Once performed, it could be used together with any other automatic methodology to measure
summarys informativeness.
Attempts to measure the quality of a summary have been
previosuly described. In [32] indicativeness (by means of
document topics) and sentence acceptability were evaluated by comparing automatic summaries with model ones.
More recent approaches have suggested automatic methods
to determine the coherence of a summary [33], or even an
analisys of several factors regarding readability, which can
be used for predicting the quality of texts [34].
As can be seen in Figure 3, the quality criteria aforementioned for the proposed methodoloy will include, among
others, coherence within the summary, how anaphoric expressions have been dealt with, whether the topic has been
identified correctly or not, or how language generation has
been used. The final goal is to set up an independent
summarization evaluation environment suitable for generic
summaries, which tests a summarys quality, and decides
on whether the summary is correct or not, with respect
to its original document. Having available a methodology
like the one proposed here, would allow automatic summaries to be evaluated automatically in an objective way on
their own, without comparing them to any gold-standard in
terms of more linguistic and readability aspects.
34
4 Conclusions and future work

In this paper we presented two main contributions. First of
all, we studied The Code Quantity Principle, which is
a linguistic theory about how humans codify the information in a text, depending on what they want a reader to pay
more attention to. We presented an approach in which this
principle was developed, and we ran it within a newswire
domain document set, taking profit of the data provided by
DUC 2002 workshop. The evaluation of this method was
performed with the ROUGE tool, which made possible the
comparison between automatic summaries and reference
ones. The results obtained showed that our approach can be
suitable for selecting important sentences of a document,
and therefore can be a good idea to take this feature into
account when building a summarization system. Secondly,
owing to all the difficulties the summarization evaluation
have, a novel manner of performing the evaluation of an
automatic summary was also outlined. What we suggested
was to define some quality indicators in order to assess an
automatic summary in a qualitative way, rather than in a
quantitative one, and therefore, determine if the generated
summary can be suitable or not, with regard to its original
source.
In future work, we plan to combine, on the one hand,
the approach developed to select sentences according to
their relevance with other sources of knowledge, such as
the word-frequency, and extend this approach to multidocument summarization. Moreover, we are interested in
exploring discourse structures in summarization and also,
how other human languages technologies can affect the
summarization process. Another research line to bear in
mind for the future is to provide approaches to be developed with a Natural Language Generation module, in order to try to generate a real summary (that is an abstract,
how humans would do summarization) and not only an extract. On the other hand, our second goal for the immediate
future is to develop the idea outlined in this paper about
evaluating automatic summaries qualitatively, with regard
to specific quality criteria, starting from defining such criteria and studying how they can contribute to the evaluation
of a summary.
Acknowledgement
This research has been supported by the FPI grant (BES2007-16268) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation, under the project TEXT-MESS (TIN200615265-C06-01).
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37
Low-Bias Extraction of Domain-Specific Concepts

Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
University of Leipzig, Johannisgasse 26, Leipzig D-04103, Germany
E-mail: [email protected],
WWW home page: http://bis.uni-leipzig.de/AxelNgonga
Keywords: natural language processing, local graph clustering, knowledge-free concept extraction
The availability of domain-specific knowledge models in various forms has led to the development of several tools and applications specialized on complex domains such as bio-medecine, tourism and chemistry.
Yet, most of the current approaches to the extraction of domain-specific knowledge from text are limited
in their portability to other domains and languages. In this paper, we present and evaluate an approach to
the low-bias extraction of domain-specific concepts. Our approach is based on graph clustering and makes
no use of a-priori knowledge about the language or the domain to process. Therefore, it can be used on
virtually any language. The evaluation is carried out on two data sets of different cleanness and size.
Povzetek: Od jezika neodvisna metoda iz besedila izluci termine in nato domensko odvisne koncepte.
1 Introduction
The recent availability of domain-specific knowledge models in various forms has led to the development of information systems specialized on complex domains such as biomedecine, tourism and chemistry. Domain-specific information systems rely on domain knowledge in forms such
as terminologies, taxonomies and ontologies to represent,
analyze, structure and retrieve information. While this integrated knowledge boosts the accuracy of domain-specific
information systems, modeling domain-specific knowledge
manually remains a challenging task. Therefore, considerable effort is being invested in developing techniques for
the extraction of domain-specific knowledge from various
resources in a semi-automatic fashion. Domain-specific
text corpora are widely used for this purpose. Yet, most of
the current approaches to the extraction of domain-specific
knowledge in the form of terminologies or ontologies are
limited in their portability to other domains and languages.
The limitations result from the knowledge-rich paradigm
followed by these approaches, i.e., from them demanding
hand-crafted domain-specific and language-specific knowledge as input. Due to these constraints, domain-specific information systems exist currently for a limited number of
domains and languages for which domain-specific knowledge models are available. An approach to remedy the high
human costs linked with the modeling of domain-specific
knowledge is the use of low-bias, i.e., knowledge-poor and
unsupervised approaches. They require little human effort
but more computational power to achieve the same goals as
their hand-crafted counterparts.
In this work, we propose the use of low-bias approaches
for the extraction of domain-specific terminology and concepts from text. Especially, we study the low-bias extraction of concepts out of text using a combination of
metrics for domain-specific multi-word units and graph

clustering techniques. The input for this approach consists exclusively of a domain-specific text corpus. We use
the Smoothed Relative Expectation [9] to extract domainspecific multi-word units from the input data set. Subsequently we use SIGNUM [10] to compute a domainspecific lexicon. Finally, we use BorderFlow, a novel
general-purpose graph clustering algorithm, to cluster the
domain-specific terminologies to concepts. Our approach
is unsupervised and makes no use of a-priori knowledge
about language-specific patterns. Therefore, it can be applied to virtually all domains and languages. We evaluate our approach on two domain-specific data sets from the
bio-medical domain. To achieve this goal, we present both
a quantitative evaluation against kNN [19] and a qualitative
evaluation against the MEdical Subject Headings(MESH)1 .
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: first,
we present related work on concept extraction. Then, we
present our approach to the low-bias extraction of concepts
using graph clustering, focusing especially on our clustering technique. Subsequently, we evaluate our concept extraction approach quantitatively and qualitatively. We conclude this paper by discussing our results and presenting
some future work.
2 Related work
Approaches to concept extraction can be categorized by
a variety of dimensions including units processed, data
sources and knowledge support [20]. The overview of
techniques for concept extraction presented in this section focuses on the knowledge support dimension. Accordingly, we differentiate between two main categories of
1 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh
38
approaches to concept extraction, namely knowledge-rich

and low-bias approaches. Knowledge-rich approaches use
knowledge about the structure of the data sources to process. Especially, text-based approaches include knowledge
such as phrase structure, lemmas and part-of-speech to extract nouns or noun phrases as units to process [3]. The
category of knowledge-rich approaches also includes supervised machine learning techniques and clustering techniques based on knowledge-rich features [11]. Knowledgerich approaches are subject to limitations regarding their
portability to other languages and domains because of
the background knowledge they necessitate. Low-bias
(also called knowledge-lean [20]) approaches try to remedy
these problems by not using a-priori knowledge on the language to process. Rather, they make use of statistical features to extract the features of the terms which compose a
concept. Clustering techniques based on low-bias features
are the main constituent of this category of approaches.
An early work on low-bias concept extraction considered the use of collocation for measuring the degree of association of words [4]. A similar approach based on head
modifiers and modifiers was implemented in [15]. For each
term, the number of occurrences as head modifier/modifier
of other terms is computed. The resulting vectorial descriptions are compared using the cosine metric. In [17],
word vectors are used to describe terms in a corpus. The
word vector to each term consist of all its close neighbors,
i.e., of all the words which appear in the same sentence
or within a larger context (e.g., a document [12]). Since
the vectors generated are high-dimensional, salient features
are extracted by using the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).
Then, the cosine metric is applied to the transformed vectors to measure the correlation between the term descriptions. In [16], collocations are use to derive a concept hierarchy from a set of documents. They define a subsumption
relation by stating that a term t subsumes a term t0 , when t
appear in every document in which t0 appears. Using this
subsumption relation, a term hierarchy is computed automatically. A technique that generates concept hierarchies
out of document hierarchies is proposed in [8]. The first
step of this technique consists of selecting documents from
the same domain. Then, a hierarchy of document clusters
is generated by using the SOTA-Algorithm [5]. A keyword
matching a Wordnet-concept is then assigned bottom-up to
each cluster of the hierarchy in two steps: first, a concept
representing the typical content of the documents of each
leaf node is assigned to the node. In the second step, the labels of the interior nodes are assigned by using hypernyms
of their children.
In all the approaches to low-bias concept extraction presented above, the terminology used for extracting concepts
is commonly detected using either domain-specific knowledge such as reference vocabularies or language-specific
techniques such as deep parsing. In this paper, we present
a low-bias approach to concept extraction that makes no
use of such a-priori knowledge.
A.-C.N. Ngomo
3 An approach to low-bias concept

extraction
Our approach is subdivided into two main steps. First, we
extract the domain-specific terminology using no a-priori
knowledge. Subsequently, we cluster to this terminology
to domain-specific concepts.
3.1 Terminology extraction

The extraction of domain-specific terminology is carried
out by using a combination of the SRE metric and the
SIGNUM algorithm. We use the SRE metric [9] to extract domain-specific multi-word units (MWUs). This metric can efficiently detect domain-specific MWUs by using
a combination of the relative expectation of co-occurrences
and their distribution over the corpus. The general formula
of SRE is given by
(d(w))2
nf (w)p(w)e 22
SRE(w) =
, (1)
Pn
2 2 i=1 f (c1 . . . ci ci+2 . . . cn )
where
d(w) is the number of documents in which w occurs,
and 2 are the mean and the variance of the distribution of n-grams in documents respectively,
p(w) is the probability of occurrence of w in the whole
corpus,
f (w) is the frequency of occurrence of w in the whole
corpus and
c1 ...ci ci+2 ...cn are patterns
ham(w, c1 ...ci ci+2 ...cn ) = 1.
such
that
The results of SRE can be interpreted as a weighted

graph. On this graph, we use SIGNUM [10], a local graph
clustering algorithm for terminology extraction. The basic
idea behind SIGNUM originates from the spreading activation principle, which has been used in several areas such
as neural networks and information retrieval [2]: the simultaneous propagation of information across edges. In
the case of SIGNUM, this information consists of the classification of the predecessors of each node in one of the
two classes dubbed + and . Each propagation step consists of simultaneously assigning the predominant class of
its predecessors to each node. The processing of a graph
using SIGNUM thus consists of three phases: the initialization phase, during which each node is assigned an initial
class; the propagation phase, during which the classes are
propagated along the edges until a termination condition is
satisfied, leading to the termination phase. The resulting
categorization is then given out.
LOW-BIAS EXTRACTION OF DOMAIN-SPECIFIC CONCEPTS
39
3.2 Concept extraction

For the extraction of concepts, we represent each of the
domain-specific terms included in the terminology extracted priorly by its most significant co-occurrences [7]
and compare these representations using the cosine metric.
The resulting similarity values are used to compute a term
similarity graph, which is used as input for the graph clustering algorithm BorderFlow.
4 BorderFlow
BorderFlow is a general-purpose graph clustering algorithm. It uses solely local information for clustering and
achieves a soft clustering of the input graph. The definition of cluster underlying BorderFlow was proposed by [6].
They state that a cluster is a collection of nodes that have
more links between them than links to the outside. When
considering a graph as the description of a flow system,
Flake et al.s definition of a cluster implies that a cluster
X can be understood as a set of nodes such that the flow
within X is maximal while the flow from X to the outside is minimal. The idea behind BorderFlow is to maximize the flow from the border of each cluster to its inner
nodes (i.e., the nodes within the cluster) while minimizing
the flow from the cluster to the nodes outside of the cluster.
In the following, we will specify BorderFlow for weighted
directed graphs, as they encompass all other forms of noncomplex graphs.
4.1 Formal specification

Let G = (V, E, ) be a weighted directed graph with a set
of vertices V, a set of edges E and a weighing function ,
which assigns a positive weight to each edge e E. In
the following, we will assume that non-existing edges are
edges e such that (e) = 0. Before we describe BorderFlow, we need to define functions on sets of nodes. Let
X V be a set of nodes. We define the set i(X) of inner
nodes of X as:
i(X) = {x X|y V : (xy) > 0 y X}.
Figure 1: An exemplary cluster. The nodes with relief are

inner nodes, the grey nodes are border nodes and the white
are outer nodes. The graph is undirected.
We define the border flow ratio F (X) of X V as
follows:
b(X), X
b(X), X
=
. (6)
F (X) =
b(X), V \X
b(X), n(X)
Based on the definition of a cluster by [6], we define a
cluster X as a node-maximal subset of V that maximizes
the ratio F (X)2 , i.e.:
X 0 V, v
/ X : X 0 = X + v F (X 0 ) < F (X).
(7)
The idea behind BorderFlow is to select elements from
the border n(X) of a cluster X iteratively and insert them
in X until the border flow ratio F (X) is maximized, i.e.,
until Equation (7) is satisfied. The selection of the nodes
to insert in each iteration is carried out in two steps. In
a first step, the set C(X) of candidates u V \X which
maximize F (X + u) is computed is as follows:
(2)
C(X) := arg max F (X + u).
(8)
un(X)
The set b(X) of border nodes of X is then

b(X) = {x X|y V \X : (xy) > 0}.
(3)
The set n(X) of direct neighbors of X is defined as

n(X) = {y V \X |x X : (xy) > 0}.
(4)
In the example of a cluster depicted in Figure 1, X =

{3, 4, 5, 6}, the set of border nodes of X is {3, 5} , {6, 4}
its set of inner nodes and {1, 2} its set of direct neighbors.
Let be the function that assigns the total weight of the
edges from a subset of V to a subset of V (i.e., the flow
between the first and the second subset). Formally:
: 2VP 2V R
(X, Y ) = xX,yY (xy).
By carrying out this first selection step, we ensure that

each candidate node u which produces a maximal flow to
the inside of the cluster X and a minimal flow to the outside
of X is selected. The flow from a node u C(X) can be
divided into three distinct flows:
the flow (u, X) to the inside of the cluster,
the flow (u, n(X)) to the neighbors of the cluster
and
the flow (u, V \(X n(X))) to the rest of the graph.
2 For
(5)
the sake of brevity, we shall utilize the notation X + c to denote

the addition of a single element c to a set X. Furthermore singletons will
be denoted by the element they contain, i.e., {v} v.
40
A.-C.N. Ngomo
Prospective cluster members are elements of n(X). To ensure that the inner flow within the cluster is maximized in
the future, a second selection step is necessary. During
this second selection step, BorderFlow picks the candidates
u C(X) which maximize the flow (u, n(X)). The final set of candidates Cf (X) is then
Cf (X) := arg max (u, n(X)).
(9)
uC(X)
All elements of Cf (X) are then inserted in X if the condition

F (X Cf (X)) F (X)
(10)
is satisfied.
4.2 Heuristics
One drawback of the method proposed above is that it demands the simulation of the inclusion of each node in n(X)
in the cluster X before choosing the best ones. Such an
implementation can be time-consuming as nodes in terminology graphs can have a high number of neighbors. The
need is for a computationally less expensive criterion for
selecting a nearly optimal node to optimize F (X). Let us
assume that X is large enough. This assumption implies
that the flow from the cluster boundary to the rest of the
graph is altered insignificantly when adding a node to the
cluster. Under this condition, the following two approximations hold:
(b(X), n(X)) (b(X + v), n(X + v)),
(11)
(b(X), v) (d(X, v), X + v) (b(X), v).
(12)
5.1 Experimental setup

The data sets underlying the results presented in this chapter are the TREC corpus for filtering [13] and a subset of
the articles published by BioMed Central (BMC3 ). Henceforth, we will call the second corpus BMC. The TREC corpus is a test collection composed of 233,445 abstracts of
publications from the bio-medical domain. It contained
38,790,593 running word forms. The BMC corpus consists
of full text publications extracted from the BMC Open Access library. The original documents were in XML. We
extracted the text entries from the XML data using a SAX4
Parser. Therefore, it contained a large amount of impurities that were not captured by the XML-parser. The main
idea behind the use of this corpus was to test our method
on real life data. The 13,943 full text documents contained
70,464,269 running word forms.
The most significant co-occurrences of the terms were
computed in two steps. In a first step, we extracted function
words by retrieving the f terms with the lowest information
content according to Shannons law [18]. Function words
were not considered as being significant co-occurrences.
Then, the s best scoring co-occurrences of each term that
were not function words were extracted and stored as binary feature vectors.
5.2 Quantitative evaluation

In this section of the evaluation, we compared the average
silhouettes [14] of the clusters computed by BorderFlow
with those computed by kNN on the same graphs. The
silhouette (X) of a cluster X is given by:
Consequently, the following approximation holds:

(b(X), v)
F (X, v)
.
(b(X + v), n(X + v))
(13)
Under this assumption, one can show that the nodes that
maximize F (X) maximize the following:
(b(X), v)
f (X, v) =
for symmetrical graphs.
(v, V \X)
(X) =
(14)
Now, BorderFlow can be implemented in a two-step

greedy fashion by ordering all nodes v n(X) according to 1/f (X, v) (to avoid dividing by 0) and choosing
the node v that minimizes 1/f (X, v). Using this heuristic, BorderFlow is easy to implement and fast to run.
5 Experiments and results

We evaluated our approach to concept extraction on two
data sets of different cleanness and size. In the quantative
evaluation, we compared the clustering generated by BorderFlow with that computed using kNN, which is the local
algorithm commonly used for clustering tasks. The goal of
the qualitative evaluation was to compute the quality of the
clusters extracted by using BorderFlow by comparing them
with the controlled MESH vocabulary.
1 X
a(v, X) b(v, V \X)
,
|X|
max{a(v, X), b(v, V \X)}
(15)
vX
where
P
a(v, X) =
v 0 n(v)X
(v, v 0 )
|n(v) X|
(16)
and
b(v, V \X) = 0max (v, v 0 ).
v V \X
(17)
To ensure that all clusters had the same maximal size k,

we use the following greedy approach for each seed: first,
we initiated the cluster X with the seed. Then, we sorted
all v n(X) according to their flow to the inside of the
cluster (v, X) in the descending order. Thereafter, we
sequentially added all v until the size of the cluster reached
k. If it did not reached k after adding all neighbors, the
procedure was iterated with X = X n(X) until the size
k was reached or no more neighbors were found.
One of the drawbacks of kNN lies in the need for specifying the right value for k. In our experiments, we used the
average size of the clusters computed using BorderFlow as
value for k. This value was 7 when clustering the TREC
3 http://www.biomedcentral.com
4 SAX stands for Simple Application Programming Interface for XML.
data. On the BMC corpus, the experiments with f = 100

led to k = 7, whilst the experiments with f = 250 led
to k = 9. We used exactly the same set of seeds for both
algorithms.
The results of the evaluation are shown in Table 1.
On both data sets, BorderFlow significantly outperformed
kNN in all settings. On the TREC corpus, both algorithms
generated clusters with high silhouette values. BorderFlow
outperformed kNN by 0.23 in the best case (f = 100,
s = 100). The greatest difference between the standard deviations, 0.11, was observed when f = 100 and s = 200.
On average, BorderFlow outperformed kNN by 0.17 with
respect to the mean silhouette value and by 0.08 with respect to the standard deviation. In the worst case, kNN
generated 73 erroneous clusters, while BorderFlow generated 10. The distribution of the silhouette values across the
clusters on the TREC corpus for f = 100 and s = 100 are
shown in Figure 2(a) for BorderFlow and Figure 2(b) for
kNN.
The superiority of BorderFlow over kNN was better
demonstrated on the noisy BMC corpus. Both algorithms
generate a clustering with lower silhouette values than on
TREC. In the best case, BorderFlow outperformed kNN by
0.57 with respect to the mean silhouette value (f = 250,
s = 200 and s = 400). The greatest difference between
the standard deviations, 0.18, was observed when f = 250
and s = 400. In average, BorderFlow outperformed kNN
by 0.5 with respect to the mean silhouette value and by
0.16 with respect to the standard deviation. Whilst BorderFlow was able to compute a correct clustering of the data
set, generating maximally 1 erroneous cluster, using kNN
led to large sets of up to 583 erroneous clusters (f = 100,
s = 400). Figures 2(c) and 2(d) show the distribution of the
silhouette values across the clusters on the BMC corpus for
f = 100 and s = 100.
5.3 Qualitative evaluation

The goal of the qualitative evaluation was to determine the
quality of the content of our clusters. We focused on elucidating whether the elements of the clusters were labels of
semantically related categories. To achieve this goal, we
compared the content of the clusters computed by BorderFlow with the MESH taxonomy [1]. It possesses manually
designed levels of granularity. Therefore, it allows to evaluate cluster purity at different levels. The purity (X) of a
cluster X was computed as follows:
|X M |
,
(18)
(X) = max
C
|X C |
where M is the set of all mesh category labels, C is a
MESH category and C is the set of labels of C and all
its sub-categories. For our evaluation, we considered only
clusters that contained at least one term that could be found
in MESH.
The results of the qualitative evaluation are shown in Table 2. The best cluster purity, 89.23%, was obtained when
41
clustering the vocabulary extracted from the TREC data

with f = 250 and s = 100. In average, we obtained a
lower cluster purity when clustering the BMC data. The
best cluster purity using BMC was 78.88% (f = 100,
s = 200). On both data sets, the difference in cluster quality at the different levels was low, showing that BorderFlow was able to detect fine-grained cluster with respect to
the MESH taxonomy. Example of clusters computed with
f = 250 and s = 400 using the TREC corpus are shown in
Table 3.
6 Discussion
From a quantitative point of view, the average silhouette
values on TREC were higher with lower standard deviations . The difference in silhouette can be conceivably
explained by the higher amount of noise contained in the
BMC corpus. On the TREC corpus, a higher size of the
feature vectors led to a higher value of the average silhouette of the clusters. The same relation could be observed between the number f of function words omitted
and the value of . The standard deviation was inversely
proportional to the size of the feature vectors and the number of function words. The number of erroneous clusters
(i.e., clusters with average silhouette value less than 0) was
inversely proportional to the size of the feature vectors.
This can be explained by the higher amount of information available, which led to a better approximation of the
semantic similarity of the terms and, thus, to less clustering mistakes. In the worst case (f =100, s=100), 99.85%
of the clusters had positive silhouettes. From a qualitative
point of view, BorderFlow computed clusters with a high
purity based on low-level features extracted on a terminology extracted using low-bias techniques. As expected, the
average cluster purity was higher for clusters computed using the TREC data set. The results of the qualitative evaluation support the basic assumption underlying this work,
i.e., it is indeed possible to extract high-quality concepts
from text automatically without a-priori knowledge.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by a grant of the German Ministry
for Education and Research.
References
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42
A.-C.N. Ngomo
(a) BorderFlow on TREC
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(c) BorderFlow on BMC
(d) kNN on BMC
Figure 2: Distribution of the average silhouette values obtained by using BorderFlow and kNN on the TREC and BMC
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f
100
100
100
250
250
250
s
100
200
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Erroneous clusters
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BMC
TREC
BMC
kNN
BF
kNN
BF
kNN
BF
kNN
BF
0.680.22
0.690.22
0.700.20
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2
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214
184
142
553
575
583
1
1
1
0
0
0
Table 1: Comparison of the distribution of the silhouette index over clusters extracted from the TREC and BMC corpora.
BF stands for BorderFlow. the mean of silhouette values over the clusters and the standard deviation of the distribution
of silhouette values. Erroneous clusters are cluster with negative silhouette silhouettes. Bold fonts mark the best results
in each experimental setting.
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f=100
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86.81
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75.46
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81.84
79.88
78.55
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76.13
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81.45
79.66
78.29
78.40
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89.23
87.67
86.72
72.44
71.91
69.84
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s=200
87.62
85.82
84.81
73.85
73.27
71.58
43
f=250
s=400
87.13
86.83
84.63
73.03
72.39
70.41
Table 2: Cluster purity obtained using BorderFlow on TREC and BMC data. The upper section of the table displays the
results obtained using the TREC corpus. The lower section of the table displays the same results on the BMC corpus. All
results are in %.
Cluster members
b_fragilis, c_albicans, candida_albicans, l_pneumophila
acyclovir, methotrexate_mtx, mtx, methotrexate
embryo, embryos, mouse_embryos, oocytes
leukocytes, macrophages, neutrophils, platelets, pmns
flap, flaps, free_flap, muscle_flap, musculocutaneous_flap
leukocyte, monocyte, neutrophil, polymorphonuclear_leukocyte
Seeds
c_albicans
methotrexate
embryo, embryos, mouse
_embryos, oocytes
platelets
flap, free_flap
polymorphonuclear_leukocyte
Hypernym
Etiologic agents
Drugs
Egg cells
Blood cells
Flaps
White blood cells
Table 3: Examples of clusters extracted from the TREC corpus. The relation between the elements of the clusters is
displayed in the rightmost column. Cluster members in italics are erroneous.
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44
A.-C.N. Ngomo
45
Towards Multi-Stream Question Answering Using Answer Validation

Alberto Tllez-Valero, Manuel Montes-y-Gmez, Luis Villaseor-Pineda
Laboratorio de Tecnologas del Lenguaje
Instituto Nacional de Astrofsica, ptica y Electrnica
Luis Enrrique Erro no. 1, Sta. Mara Tonantzintla, Pue.; 72840; Mexico
E-mail: {albertotellezv,mmontesg,villasen}@inaoep.mx
Anselmo Peas-Padilla
Depto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informticos
Universidad Nacional de Educacin a Distancia
Juan del Rosal, 16; 28040 Madrid; Spain
Keywords: question answering, information fusion, answer validation, textual entailment
Received: January 29, 2009
Motivated by the continuous growth of the Web in the number of sites and users, several search engines attempt to extend their traditional functionality by incorporating question answering (QA) facilities. This extension seems natural but it is not straightforward since current QA systems still achieve poor performance
rates for languages other than English. Based on the fact that retrieval effectiveness has been previously
improved by combining evidence from multiple search engines, in this paper we propose a method that allows taking advantage of the outputs of several QA systems. This method is based on an answer validation
approach that decides about the correctness of answers based on their entailment with a support text, and
therefore, that reduces the influence of the answer redundancies and the system confidences. Experimental
results on Spanish are encouraging; evaluated over a set of 190 questions from the CLEF 2006 collection,
our method responded correctly 63% of the questions, outperforming the best QA participating system
(53%) by a relative increase of 19%. In addition, when they were considered five answers per question, our
method could obtain the correct answer for 73% of the questions. In this case, it outperformed traditional
multi-stream techniques by generating a better ranking of the set of answers presented to the users.
Povzetek: Metoda temelji na kombiniranju odgovorov vec sistemov za QA.
1 Introduction
In the last two decades the discipline of Automatic Text
Processing has showed an impressive progress. It has found
itself at the center of the information revolution triggered
by the emergence of Internet. In particular, the research in
information retrieval (IR) has led to a new generation of
tools and products for searching and navigating the Web.
The major examples of these tools are search engines such
as Google1 and Yahoo2 . This kind of tools allows users to
specify their information needs by short queries (expressed
by a set of keywords), and responds to them with a ranked
list of documents.
At present, fostered by diverse evaluation forums
(TREC3 , CLEF4 , and NTCIIR5 ), there are important efforts to extend the functionality of existing search engines.
1 http://www.google.com
Some of these efforts are directed towards the development of question answering (QA) systems, which are a new
kind of retrieval tools capable of answering concrete questions. Examples of pioneering Web-based QA systems are
START6 and DFKI7 .
Regardless of all these efforts, the presence of QA systems in the Web is still too small compared with traditional
search engines. One of the reasons of this situation is that
QA technology, in contrast to traditional IR methods, is not
equally mature for all languages. For instance, in the TREC
2004, the best QA system for English achieved an accuracy
of 77% for factoid questions8 (Voorhees, 2004), whereas,
two years later in the CLEF 2006, the best QA system for
Spanish could only obtain an accuracy of 55% for the same
kind of questions (Magnini et al, 2006). Taking into account that Spanish is the third language with more presence in the Web9 , and that it is the second language used
2 http://www.yahoo.com
6 http://start.csail.mit.edu
3 The
7 http://experimental-quetal.dfki.de
Text REtrieval Conference. http://trec.nist.gov/

4 The Cross Language Evaluation Forum.
http://www.clefcampaign.org/
5 The NTCIR Project. http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/
8 Questions that asks for short, fact-based answers such as the name of
a person or location, the date of an event, the value of something, etc.
9 Internet
World
Stats
(November
2007).
46
for searching it (de Sousa, 2007), these results clearly show

the necessity of improving current accuracy of Spanish QA
systems.
Recently, an alternative approach known as a multistream QA has emerged. In this approach the idea is to
combine the output of different QA systems (streams) in
order to obtain a better answer accuracy. This is an ideal solution due to the evidence that a perfect combination of the
correct answers from several Spanish QA systems could
improve by 31.5% the best individual result (Vallin et al,
2005).
In line with these efforts, in this paper we propose a new
multi-stream approach for QA. Different to most previous
methods, the proposed approach is specially suited to work
with poor performance QA systems, representing the real
situation in most non-English languages. In particular, it is
based on an answer validation method that decides about
the correctness of answers based on their entailment with a
given support text. In this way the method does not rely on
the streams confidences, nor depend on the redundancy of
the answers across the systems.
Our experimental results in a set of 190 questions from
the CLEF 2006 collection demonstrate the appropriateness
of the proposed method for combining the output of several (including poor performance) QA systems. It could
correctly respond 63% of the questions, outperforming the
best QA participating system (53%) by a relative increase
of 19%. In addition, when we considered a set of five answers per question, our method could obtain the correct answer for 73% of the questions. In this case, it outperformed
other multi-stream techniques by generating a better ranking of the set of answers presented to the users. This last
characteristic is of great relevance for Web applications,
where users hope to get the requested information as direct
as possible.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
organizes the previous work in multi-stream QA. Section 3
and 4 describe our proposal for a multi-stream QA method
based on an answer validation approach. Then, Section 5
presents the evaluation results of the proposed method in a
set of 190 questions in Spanish language. Finally, Section
6 exposes our conclusions and outlines some future work
directions.
2 Related work
Typically, QA systems consist of a single processing stream
that performs three components in a sequential fashion:
question analysis, document/passage retrieval, and answer
selection (see e.g., (Hovy et al, 2000)). In this singlestream approach a kind of information combination is often performed within its last component. The goal of the
answer selection component is to evaluate multiple candidate answers in order to choose from them the most likely
answer for the question. There are several approaches for
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
A. Tllez-Valero et al.
answer selection, ranging from those based on lexical overlaps and answer redundancies (see e.g., (Xu et al, 2002))
to those based on knowledge intensive methods (see e.g.,
(Moldovan et al, 2007)).
Recently, an alternative approach known as a multistream QA has emerged. In this approach the idea is to
combine different QA strategies in order to increase the
number of correctly answered questions. Mainly, multistream QA systems are of two types: internal and external.
Internal multi-stream systems use more than one stream
(in this case, more than one strategy) at each particular
component. For instance, Pizzato and Moll-Aliod (2005)
describes a QA architecture that uses several document retrieval methods, and Chu-Carroll et al (2003) presents a QA
system that applies two different methods at each system
component.
On the other hand, external multi-stream systems directly combine the output of different QA systems. They
employ different strategies to take advantage of the information coming from several streams. Following we describe the main strategies used in external multi-stream QA
systems. It is important to mention that most of these
strategies are adaptations of well-known information fusion techniques from IR. Based on this fact, we propose organizing them into five general categories taking into consideration some ideas proposed elsewhere (Diamond, 1996;
Vogt and Cottrell, 1999).
Skimming Approach. The answers retrieved by different
streams are interleaved according to their original ranks.
In other words, this method takes one answer in turn from
each individual QA system and alternates them in order to
construct the final combined answer list. This approach has
two main variants. In the first one, that we called Nave
Skimming Approach, the streams are selected randomly.
Whereas, in the second variant, which we called Ordered
Skimming Approach, streams are ordered by their general
confidence. In other words, QA systems are ordered by
their global answer accuracy estimated from a reference
question set. Some examples of QA systems that use this
approach are described in (Clarke et al, 2002) and (Jijkoun
and de Rijke, 2004).
Chorus Approach. This approach relies on the answer
redundancies. Basically, it ranks the answers in accordance
to their repetition across different streams. Some systems
based on this approach are described in (de Chalendar et al,
2002), (Burger et al, 2002), (Jijkoun and de Rijke, 2004),
(Roussinov et al, 2005), and (Rotaru and Litman, 2005).
Dark Horse Approach. This approach can be considered
as an extension of the Ordered Skimming Approach. It also
considers the confidence of streams, however, in this case,
these confidences are computed separately for each different answer type. That is, using this approach, a QA system
will have different confidence values associated to factoid,
definition and list questions. A QA system based on this
strategy is described in (Jijkoun and de Rijke, 2004).
Web Chorus Approach. This approach uses the Web information to evaluate the relevance of answers. It basically
TOWARDS MULTI-STREAM QUESTION ANSWERING. . .
ranks the answers based on the number of Web pages containing the answer terms along with the question terms. It
was proposed by Magnini et al (2001), and subsequently it
was also evaluated in (Jijkoun and de Rijke, 2004).
Answer Validation Approach. In this approach the decision about the correctness of an answer is based on its
entailment with a given support text. This way of answer
selection not only allows assuring the rightness of answers
but also their consistency with the snippets that will be
showed to the users. This approach was suggested by Peas
et al (2007), and has been implemented by Glckner et al
(2007)10 .
In addition, it has also been used a combination of different approaches. For instance, Jijkoun and de Rijke (2004)
describes a QA architecture that combines a chorus-based
method with the dark horse approach. Its evaluation results
indicate that this hybrid approach outperformed the results
obtained by systems based on one single multi-stream strategy11 .
In this paper we propose a new multi-stream QA method
based on the answer validation approach. We decide using
this approach because it does not consider any confidence
about the input streams as well as it does not exclusively
depend on the answer redundancies. These characteristics
make this approach very appropriate for working with poor
performance QA systems such as those currently available
for most languages except for English.
Our method distinguishes from existing answervalidation multi-stream methods (Glckner, 2006; Tatu
et al, 2006) in the following two concerns. First, it is the
only one specially suited for Spanish, and second, whereas
the other two methods are based on a deep semantic analysis of texts, ours is only based on a lexical-syntactic analysis of documents. We consider this last difference very
important for constructing Web applications since it makes
our method more easily portable across languages.
In particular, the proposed answer validation method is
based on a supervised learning approach that considers a
combination of two kinds of attributes. On the one hand,
some attributes that indicate the compatibility between the
question and the answer, and on the other hand, some attributes that allow evaluating the textual entailment between the question-answer pair and the given support text.
The first kind of attributes has been previously used in traditional single-stream QA systems (e.g., (Vicedo, 2001)),
whereas the second group of attributes is commonly used
by answer validation (AV) and textual entailment recognition (RTE) systems (e.g., (Kozareva et al, 2006; Jijkoun
and de Rijke, 2005)). In this case, our method not only
considers attributes that indicate the overlap between the
question-answer pair and the support text, but also includes
some attributes that evaluates the non-overlapped information. In some sense, these new attributes allow analyzing
10 (Harabagiu and Hickl, 2006) also describes an answer validation approach for multi-stream QA; nevertheless, it is an internal approach.
11 They compared their hybrid method against all other approaches except the answer validation.
47
the situations where exists a high overlap but not necessarily an entailment relation between these two elements.
The following section describes in detail the proposed
method.
3 A multi-stream QA system based

on answer validation
Figure 1 shows the general scheme of the proposed external multi-stream QA System. It uses an answer validation
module to superficially combine the outputs (answers) from
several streams (QA systems).
Figure 1: Multi-stream QA System based on Answer Validation

Mainly, the proposed multi-stream QA system consists
of two main stages. In the first stage (called QA stage),
several different QA systems extract in parallel a candidate answer and its corresponding support text for a given
question. Then, in the second stage (called ranking stage),
an answer validation module evaluates one by one
the candidate answers and assigns them a confidence value
from 0 to 1. A confidence value equal to 0 indicates that
the answer is totally rejected, whereas a confidence equal
to 1 indicates that the answer is completely accepted. At
the end, answers are ranked in line with their confidence
values.
The following section describes in detail the answer validation method. This method is an extension of our previous
work described in Tllez-Valero et al (2007). In particular,
it includes a novel set of attributes for answer validation
which allow to increase our previous results by 14% as well
as to outperform all results reported in the 2006 Spanish
Answer Validation Exercise (Peas et al, 2006).
4 The answer validation module

Given a question (Q), a candidate answer (A) and a support
text (S), the answer validation module returns a confidence
value () that allows deciding whether to accept or reject
48
the candidate answer. In other words, it helps to determine

if the specified answer is correct and if it can be deduced
from the given support text.
Our answer validation module is mainly based on the
idea of recognizing the textual entailment (RTE) between
the support text (T) and an affirmative sentence (H) called
hypothesis, created from the combination of the question
and the answer. The entailment between the pair (T, H)
occurs when the meaning of H can be inferred from the
meaning of T (Dagan et al, 2005).
The returned confidence value is generated by means
a supervised learning approach that considers three main
processes: preprocessing, attribute extraction and answer
classification. The following sections describe each one of
these processes.
Question
Candidate answer
Support text
4.1 Preprocessing
The objective of this process is to extract the main content
elements from the question, answer and support text, which
will be subsequently used for deciding about the correctness of the answer. This process considers two basic tasks:
on the one hand, the identification of the main constituents
from the question-answer pair, and on the other hand, the
detection of the core fragment of the support text as well as
the consequent elimination of the unnecessary information.
Relevant support text
Which country did Iraq

invade in 1990?
Kuwait
Kuwait was a close
ally of Iraq during
the Iraq-Iran war
and functioned as the
countrys major port
once Basra was shut
down by the fighting.
However, after the war
ended, the friendly
relations between the
two neighboring Arab
countries turned sour
due to several economic
and diplomatic reasons
which finally culminated
in an Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait.
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
Table 1: Example of excessive text to accept or reject an

answer
4.1.1 Constituent identification

We detect three basic constituents from the questions: its
main action, the action actors, and if exist, the action restriction. As an example, consider the question in Table 1.
In this case, the action is represented by the verb invade,
its actors are the syntagms Which country and Iraq,
and the action restriction is described by the propositional
syntagma in 1990.
In order to detect the question constituents we firstly apply a shallow parsing to the given question. Then, from the
resulting syntactic tree (Qparsed), we construct a new representation of the question (called Q) by detecting and tagging the following elements:
1. The action constituent. It corresponds to the syntagm
in Qparsed that includes the main verb.
2. The restriction constituent. It is represented by the
prepositional syntagm in Qparsed having at least one explicit time expression (e.g., in 1990), or including
a preposition such as after or before.
3. The actors constituents. These constituents are
formed by the rest of the elements in Qparsed. It is
commonly divided in two parts. The first one, henceforth called hidden actor constituent, corresponds to
the syntagm that includes the interrogative word and it
is generally located at the left of the action constituent.
The second part, which we call the visible actor constituent, is formed by the rest of the syntagms, generally located at the right of the action constituent.
Finally, we also consider an answer constituent, which is

simply the lemmatized candidate answer (denoted by A).
4.1.2
Support texts core fragment detection
Commonly, the support text is a short paragraph of maximum 700 bytes according to CLEF evaluations which
provides the context necessary to support the correctness of
a given answer. However, in many cases, it contains more
information than required, damaging the performance of
RTE methods based on lexical-syntactic overlaps. For instance, the example of Table 1 shows that only the last sentence (a smaller text fragment) is useful for validating the
given answer, whereas the rest of the text only contribute
to produce an irrelevant overlap.
In order to reduce the support text to the minimum useful
text fragment we proceed as follows:
First, we apply a shallow parsing to the support text,
obtaining the syntactic tree (Sparsed).
Second, we match the content terms (nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs) from question constituents
against the terms from Sparsed. In order to capture the
morphological inflections of words we compare them
using the Levenshtein edition distance 12 . Mainly, we
12 The
Levenshtein edition distance has been previously used in other

works related to answer validation in Spanish language, see for instance
(Rodrigo et al, 2006).
consider that two different words are equal if its distance value is greater than 0.6.
Third, based on the number of matched terms, we
align the question constituents with the syntagms from
the support text.
Forth, we match the answer constituent against the
syntactic tree (Sparsed). The idea is to find all occurrences of the answer in the given support text.
Fifth, we determine the minimum context of the answer in the support text that contains all matched syntagms. This minimum context (represented by a sequence of words around the answer) is what we call
the core fragment. In the case that the support text
includes several occurrences of the answer, we select
the one with the smallest context.
Applying the procedure described above we determine
that the core fragment of the support text showed at Table 1
is in an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
4.2 Attribute extraction

This stage gathers a set of processes that allow extracting
several attributes from the question, the answer and the support text. These attributes can be categorized in two different groups: the attributes that indicate the relation between
the question and the answer, and the attributes that measure the entailment relation between the question-answer
pair and the support text.
The following sections describe both kinds of attributes
and explain the way they are calculated from Q, A and T.
4.2.1 Attributes about the question-answer relation
Question characteristics
We consider three different attributes from the question:
the question category (factoid or definition), the expected
answer type (date, quantity, name or other), and the type of
question restriction (date, period, event, or none).
The question category and the expected answer type are
determined using a set of simple lexical patterns. Some of
these patterns are showed below. It can be observed that
each of them includes information about the question category and the expected answer type.
What is [whatever] DEFINITION-OTHER
Who is [whatever] DEFINITION-PERSON
How many [whatever] FACTOID-QUANTITY
When [whatever] FACTOID-DATE
On the other hand, the value of the question restriction
(date, period, event or none) depends on the form of the
restriction constituent. If this constituent contains only one
time expression, then this value is set to date. In the case
the restriction constituent includes two time expressions, it
is set to period. If the restriction constituent does not
49
include any time expression, then the question restriction

is defined as event. Finally, when the question does not
have any restriction constituent, the value of the question
restriction is set to none.
Question-answer compatibility
This attribute indicates if the question and answer types
are compatible. The idea of this attribute is to capture the situation where the semantic class of the evaluated answer does not correspond to the expected answer
type. For instance, having the answer yesterday for the
question How many inhabitants are there in
Longyearbyen?.
This is a binary attribute: it is equal to 1 when the answer
corresponds to the expected answer type, and it is equal to
0 if this correspondence does not exist.
Answer redundancy
Taking into account the idea of considering candidates as
allies rather than competitors (Dalmas and Webber, 2007),
we decided to include an attribute related to the occurrence
of the answers across streams.
Different from the Chorus Method (refer to Section 2)
that directly uses the frequency of occurrence of the answers across streams, the proposed attribute indicates the
average similarity of the candidate answer with the rest of
stream answers (it takes values from 0 to 1).
In order to deal with the great language variability and
also with the presence of some typing errors, we decide
using the Levenshtein edition distance to measure the similarity between answers. Using this strategy, the answer X
contributes to the redundancy rate of the answer Y and vice
versa.
4.2.2
Attributes related to the textual entailment

recognition
The attributes of this category are of two main types: (i) attributes that measure the overlap between the support text
and the hypothesis (an affirmative sentence formed by combining the question and the answer); and (ii) attributes that
denote the differences between these two components.
It is important to explain that, different from other RTE
methods, we do not use the complete support text, instead
we only use its core fragment T. On the other hand, we
neither need to construct an hypothesis text, instead we use
as hypothesis the set of question-answer constituents (the
union of Q and A, which we call H).
Overlap characteristics
These attributes express the degree of overlap in number
of words between T and H. In particular, we compute
the overlap for each type of content term (nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs) as well as for each type of named
entity (names of persons, places, organizations, and other
50
things, as well as dates and quantities). In total we generate

10 different overlap attributes.
Non-overlap characteristics
These attributes indicate the number of non-overlapped
terms from the core fragment of the support text, that is,
the number of terms from T that are not present in H.
Similar to the previous kind of attributes, for this case
we also compute the non-overlap for each type of content
term (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) as well as for
each type of named entity (names of persons, places, organizations, and other things, as well as dates and quantities).
In total we generate 10 different non-overlap attributes.
The used test set gathers the outputs from all QA systems
participating at the QA track of CLEF 2006 (Magnini et al,
2006), and it was employed at the first Spanish Answer
Validation Exercise (Peas et al, 2006).
5.1.2
The evaluation measure most commonly used in QA is the

accuracy, i.e., the percentage of correctly answered questions. Following the CLEF evaluation criteria, this measure
is calculated as the fraction of correct answers and correct
nil-answers14 with respect to the total number of questions
(see formula 1).
Accuracy =
4.2.3 Answer classification

This final process generates the answer validation decision
by means of a supervised learning approach. In particular,
it applies a boosting ensemble formed by ten decision tree
classifiers13 .
The constructed classifier decides whether to accept or
reject the candidate answer based on the twenty-five attributes described in the previous section. In addition, it
also generates a validation confidence () that indicates
how reliable is the given answer in accordance to the support text.
5 Experimental results
5.1 Experimental setup
Evaluation measure
|right_answers| + |right_nils|
|questions|
(1)
In particular, in our experiments we used an evaluation

measure called accuracy@N, which basically indicates the
accuracy of a QA system when considering N candidate
answers for each question. In this case, an answer is evaluated as correct if it occurs in the list of N candidate answers,
independently of its position.
5.1.3
Results from the input streams
Table 2 shows some data from the input streams. It mainly

presents their number of right and wrong answers as well as
their accuracy for each different type of question. From this
table, it is noticeable that most QA systems (streams) have
a very poor performance level, having an average accuracy
of 26%.
5.1.1 Training and test data

As we describe in section 3, the core component of the
proposed multi-stream QA method is the answer validation
module, which relies on a supervised learning approach.
In order to train this module we used the SPARTE corpus. This corpus was build from the Spanish corpora used
at CLEF for evaluating QA systems from 2003 to 2005. It
contains 2962 training instances represented by the tuple
(hquestioni, hansweri, hsupport-texti, hentailment-valuei),
where hentailment-valuei is a binary variable indicating
whether the support text entails or not the question-answer
pair.
One important fact about this corpus is that it is very unbalanced: 77% of the training instances are negative (their
entailment value is FALSE), whereas just 695 instances
(the rest 23%) correspond to positive entailment examples.
On the other hand, for evaluating the proposed method,
we used a set of 190 questions and the answers from 17 different QA systems (i.e., 17 different streams). In total, we
considered 2286 candidate answers with their corresponding support texts.
13 We used the Weka implementations for the AdaBoot and ADTree
algorithms (Witten and Frank, 1999).
5.2 Experiments
5.2.1
First experiment: general evaluation of the

proposed method
The objective of an external multi-stream QA method is to

combine the responses from different QA systems in order
to increase the final answer accuracy. In other words, its
goal is to obtain a better result than that from the best input
stream.
In a first experiment, we attempted to evaluate the fulfillment of this objective. We compared the results obtained by our method with the accuracy from the best input
stream (53%). In addition, we also compared our method
against other multi-stream approaches (refer to Section 2).
In particular, we implemented some methods from these
approaches based on the following criteria:
The Nave Skimming Method. In this case, streams
maintain the order showed in Table 2.
14 Nil questions do not have an answer in the target document collection,
or even worst, they do not have any possible answer. As an example consider the question What is the capital of Neverland?. For
these questions give no answer is considered as a correct response.
Stream
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Right
answers nils
25
16
48
17
49
7
34
10
10
1
24
5
16
3
88
12
31
7
26
10
15
11
85
12
33
10
21
18
57
13
45
12
64
16
Wrong
answers
77
46
113
92
179
142
138
69
125
125
78
63
88
34
89
102
55
Accuracy
0.22
0.34
0.30
0.23
0.06
0.15
0.10
0.53
0.20
0.19
0.14
0.51
0.23
0.21
0.37
0.30
0.42
Table 2: Results from the input streams

The Ordered Skimming Method. It ranks the answers
in accordance to the streams overall accuracies (refer
to the last column of Table 2).
The Chorus Method. It ranks the answers based on
their repetitions across different streams.
The Dark Horse Method. It uses the factoid accuracies to rank answers corresponding to factoid questions and the definition accuracies for ranking the answers for definition questions (refer to the antepenultimate and penultimate columns of Table 2.
The Web Chorus Method. It ranks the answers based
on the number of Web pages that contain the terms of
the question (without the question word) along with
the terms of the answer.
Table 3 shows the results from the first experiment. This
table also includes the accuracy corresponding to a perfect
combination of the correct answers from all streams (87%).
This value indicates the maximum reachable accuracy for
a multi-stream approach in this data set.
The results from this first experiment show that our
method was the only multi-stream approach that could improve the result from the best input stream; it responded
correctly 58% of the questions outperforming the best individual result (53%) by a relative increase of 9%. Considering a list of five candidate answers (which is the typical
configuration of existing online QA systems) our method
outperformed the accuracy from the best input stream by
11%, a relative improvement of 18%.
The methods that rank answers based on the stream confidences, namely the Ordered Skimming Method and the
51
Dark Horse Method, also obtained relevant results. However, it is necessary to mention that in our implementations these methods made use of a perfect estimation of
these confidences15 . For that reason, and given that in a real
scenario it is practically impossible to obtain these perfect
estimations, we consider that our proposal is more robust
than these two methods.
The results from Table 3 also give evidence that the presence of several deficient streams (which generate a lot of
incorrect answers) seriously affects the performance of the
Nave Skimming Method. This phenomenon also had an
important effect over the Chorus Method, which normally
is reported as one of the best multi-stream approaches.
Finally, it is important to comment that we attribute the
poor results achieved by the Web Chorus Method to the
quantity of online information for Spanish (which it is considerably less than that for English). In order to obtain better results it is necessary to apply some question/answer
expansions, using for instance synonyms and hyperonyms.
5.2.2
Second experiment: the impact of rejecting less

reliable answers
Taking into account that the accuracy of QA systems not

only depends on the number of correctly answered questions, but also on the number of correctly unanswered nil
questions, we decided to modify the basic multi-stream
methods (including ours) in order to allow them rejecting
some answers. The idea was to incorporate some filtering
conditions that obligate the methods to eliminate the less
reliable answers. In the cases that no answer could satisfy
these conditions, the answer was set to nil. Following we
describe the modifications incorporated to each one of the
methods.
Ordered Skimming Method*. It only considers answers from the best five streams (i.e., it only returns
answers coming from the streams with the five highest global accuracies).
Chorus Method*. It only considers answers recommended by two or more streams.
Dark Horse Method*. It only returns answers coming from the best five streams for each question type.
In this case there were selected the best five streams
for answering factoid questions and the best five for
answering definition questions.
Our Method*. It only returns answers with a validation confidence greater than 0.5.
Table 4 shows the results from this second experiment.
It is interesting to notice that all methods improved their
results when they rejected some answers. The explanation
of this behavior is that with these modifications all methods
15 The confidences were calculated directly from the test set (refer to Ta-
ble 2). It was so because there is no correspondence between the systems

that were used to generate the train and test sets.
52
Nave Skimming Method

Ordered Skimming Method
Chorus Method
Dark Horse Method
Web Chorus Method
Our Method
Best Input Stream
Perfect Combination
Number of answers by question

1
2
3
4
5
0.25 0.44 0.50 0.55 0.61
0.52 0.63 0.66 0.68 0.71
0.53 0.61 0.66 0.68 0.68
0.52 0.61 0.67 0.68 0.72
0.17 0.28 0.37 0.46 0.56
0.58 0.65 0.69 0.71 0.73
0.53 0.56 0.58 0.62 0.62
0.87
-
Table 3: Results from the first experiment: general evaluation of the proposed method
could answer some nil questions. In particular, our method
correctly respond 63% of the questions outperforming the
best input stream by a relative increase of 19%.
This experiment also helped to reveal another important
characteristic of our method. It could correctly reject several answers without using any information about the confidence of streams and without considering any restriction
on the answer frequencies.
5.2.3 Third experiment: combination of our method
with other approaches
In (Jijkoun and de Rijke, 2004), Jijkoun and de Rijke describe a multi-stream QA architecture that combines the
Chorus and the Dark Horse Methods. Its evaluation results
indicate that this combination outperformed the results obtained by other systems based on one single multi-stream
strategy16 .
Motivated by this result, we designed a third experiment which considered the combination of our method
with other confidence-based methods, in particular, the
Dark Horse Method and the Ordered Skimming Method.
The combination of our method with these two other approaches was performed as follows. In a first stage, our
method selected a set of candidate answers, then, in a second stage, a confidence-based method ordered the candidate answers in accordance to their own ranking criteria17 .
Table 5 shows the results from the combination of these
methods. On the one hand, these results confirm the conclusions of Jijkoun and de Rijke since they also indicate
that the combination of methods outperformed the results
obtained by individual approaches. On the other hand, and
most important, these results demonstrate the competence
of our method since they show that its individual result outperformed that from the combination of the Chorus Method
with the Dark Horse Method (stated by Jijkoun and de Rijke as the best configuration for a multi-stream QA system).
16 In their experiments, as mentioned in Section 2, they did not consider
the answer validation approach.
17 Given that we use the same implementations for the confidence-based
methods that those described in the first experiment, in this case we also
used a perfect estimation of the streams confidences.

In this paper we proposed a new external multi-stream QA
method. This method is founded on the idea of combining
the output of different QA systems (streams) in order to
obtain a better answer accuracy.
The proposed method is based on an answer validation
approach. This way, it decides about the correctness of the
answers based on their entailment with a support text, and
does not exclusively rely on answer redundancies nor on
the stream confidences. In addition, this method only considers lexical-syntactic information and does not make use
of a deep semantic analysis of texts. All these features together make our method appropriate for dealing with poor
performance QA systems which represent the current state
for most non-English languages. In particular, we have
evaluated our method in Spanish, where current average
answer accuracy is of 26% (please refer to Table 2).
The core component of the proposed multi-stream
method is the answer validation module. This module applies a supervised approach for recognizing the textual entailment. It mainly uses a set of attributes that capture some
simple relations among the question, the answer and the
given supported text. In particular, it considers some novel
attributes that characterize: (i) the compatibility between
question and answer types; (ii) the redundancy of answers
across streams; and (iii) the overlap (as well as the nonoverlap) between the question-answer pair and the support
text. At this point, it is important to comment that an evaluation of the proposed attributes during the development
phase using the information gain algorithm showed
us that the non-overlap and answer-redundancy attributes
were the most discriminative.
From the evaluation results achieved on a test set of 190
Spanish questions from the CLEF-2006 QA collection, we
could observe the following:
The proposed method significantly enhanced the accuracy from the best individual stream. It correctly
responded to 63% of the questions, outperforming the
best QA participating system (53%) by a relative increase of 19%.
Although our method also takes advantage of the re-
Ordered Skimming Method*

Chorus Method*
Dark Horse Method*
Our Method*
Best input stream
Perfect Combination
53

1
2
3
4
5
0.55 0.66 0.69 0.70 0.71
0.58 0.64 0.67 0.67 0.67
0.55 0.64 0.68 0.69 0.69
0.63 0.69 0.72 0.73 0.73
0.53 0.56 0.58 0.62 0.62
0.87
-
Table 4: Results from the second experiment: the impact of rejecting less reliable answers
Chorus Method* + Ordered Skimming Method

Chorus Method* + Dark Horse Method
Our Method* + Ordered Skimming Method
Our Method* + Dark Horse Method
Best Input Stream
Perfect Combination

1
2
3
4
5
0.63 0.65 0.66 0.67 0.67
0.62 0.65 0.66 0.67 0.67
0.64 0.71 0.72 0.73 0.73
0.63 0.69 0.72 0.73 0.73
0.53 0.56 0.58 0.62 0.62
0.87
-
Table 5: Results from the third experiment: combination of our method with other approaches
dundancy of answers across streams, it turned out to
be less sensible to their low frequency than other approaches. For instance, it outperformed the Chorus
Method by 5%.
The proposed method allowed to significantly reduce
the number of wrong answers presented to the user. In
relation to this aspect, our method was especially adequate to deal with nil questions. It correctly responded
65% of the nil questions, outperforming the best input
stream by a relative increase of 8%.
The combination of our method with the Dark Horse
approach only produced a slightly improvement of
1%. This fact indicates that our method does not require knowing the input stream confidences.
Finally, it is clear that any improvement in the answer
validation module will directly impact the performance of
the proposed multi-stream method. Hence, our future work
will be mainly focused on enhancing this module by: (i)
considering some new features in the entailment recognition process, (ii) including a process for treatment of temporal restrictions, and (iii) using Wordnet in order to consider synonyms and hyperonyms for computing the term
and structure overlaps.
Acknowledgement
This work was done under partial support of Conacyt
(scholarship 171610). We also thank CLEF organizers for
the provided resources.
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55
Named Entity Recognition Using Appropriate Unlabeled Data, Post-processing

and Voting
Asif Ekbal and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Jadavpur University
Kolkata, 700032, India
E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]
Keywords: named entity recognition, maximum entropy, conditional random ield, support vector machine, weighted
voting, Bengali
Received: January 10, 2009
This paper reports how the appropriate unlabeled data, post-processing and voting can be effective to
improve the performance of a Named Entity Recognition (NER) system. The proposed method is based
on a combination of the following classifiers: Maximum Entropy (ME), Conditional Random Field (CRF)
and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The training set consists of approximately 272K wordforms. The
proposed method is tested with Bengali. A semi-supervised learning technique has been developed that
uses the unlabeled data during training of the system. We have shown that simply relying upon the use
of large corpora during training for performance improvement is not in itself sufficient. We describe the
measures to automatically select effective documents and sentences from the unlabeled data. In addition,
we have used a number of techniques to post-process the output of each of the models in order to improve
the performance. Finally, we have applied weighted voting approach to combine the models. Experimental
results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with the overall average recall, precision, and
f-score values of 93.79%, 91.34%, and 92.55%, respectively, which shows an improvement of 19.4% in
f-score over the least performing baseline ME based system and an improvement of 15.19% in f-score over
the best performing baseline SVM based system.
Povzetek: Razvita je metoda za prepoznavanje imen, ki temelji na uteenem glasovanju vec klasifikatorjev.
1 Introduction
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important tool in
almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) application
areas such as Information Extraction [1], Machine Translation [2], Question Answering [3] etc. The objective of NER
is to identify and classify every word/term in a document
into some predefined categories like person name, location
name, organization name, miscellaneous name (date, time,
percentage and monetary expressions etc.) and none-ofthe-above". The challenge in detection of named entities
(NEs) is that such expressions are hard to analyze using
rule-based NLP because they belong to the open class of
expressions, i.e., there is an infinite variety and new expressions are constantly being invented.
In recent years, automatic NER systems have become a
popular research area in which a considerable number of
studies have been addressed on developing these systems.
These can be classified into three main classes [4], namely
rule-based NER, machine learning-based NER and hybrid
NER.
Rule-based approaches focus on extracting names using
a number of hand-crafted rules. Generally, these systems
consist of a set of patterns using grammatical (e.g., part
of speech), syntactic (e.g., word precedence) and orthographic features (e.g., capitalization) in combination with
dictionaries [5]. A NER system has been proposed in
[6][7] based on carefully handcrafted regular expression
called FASTUS. They divided the task into three steps:
recognizing phrase, recognizing patterns and merging incidents, while [8] uses extensive specialized resources such
as gazetteers, white and yellow pages. The NYU system [9]
was introduced that uses handcrafted rules. A rule-based
Greek NER system [10] has been developed in the context of the R&D project MITOS 1 . The NER system consists of three processing stages: linguistic pre-processing,
NE identification and NE classification. The linguistic preprocessing stage involves some basic tasks: tokenisation,
sentence splitting, part of speech (POS) tagging and stemming. Once the text has been annotated with POS tags, a
stemmer is used. The aim of the stemmer is to reduce the
size of the lexicon as well as the size and complexity of
NER grammar. The NE identification phase involves the
detection of their boundaries, i.e., the start and end of all
the possible spans of tokens that are likely to belong to a
NE. Classification involves three sub-stages: application of
classification rules, gazetteer-based classification, and par1 http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/skel/mitos
56
tial matching of classified NEs with unclassified ones. The

French NER system has been implemented with the rulebased inference engine [11]. It is based on a large knowledge base including 8,000 proper names that share 10,000
forms and consists of 11,000 words. It has been used continuously since 1995 in several real-time document filtering applications [12]. Other rule-based NER systems are
University Of Sheffields LaSIE-II [13], ISOQuests NetOwl [14] and University Of Edinburghs LTG [15] [16] for
English NER. These approaches are relying on manually
coded rules and compiled corpora. These kinds of systems
have better results for restricted domains and are capable
of detecting complex entities that are difficult with learning models. However, rule-based systems lack the ability
of portability and robustness, and furthermore the high cost
of the maintenance of rules increases even though the data
is slightly changed. These types of systems are often domain dependent, language specific and do not necessarily
adapt well to new domains and languages.
Nowadays, machine-learning (ML) approaches are popularly used in NER because these are easily trainable,
adaptable to different domains and languages as well as
their maintenance are also less expensive [17]. On the
other hand, rule-based approaches lack the ability of coping with the problems of robustness and portability. Each
new source of text requires significant tweaking of rules to
maintain optimal performance and the maintenance costs
could be quite high. Some of the well-known machinelearning approaches used in NER are Hidden Markov
Model (HMM)(BBNs IdentiFinder [18] [19]), Maximum
Entropy (ME)(New York Universitys MENE in ([20];
[21]), Decision Tree (New York Universitys system in [22]
and SRAs system in [23] and CRF [24]; [25]. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) based NER system was proposed by
Yamada et al. [26] for Japanese. His system is an extension
of Kudos chunking system [27] that gave the best performance at CoNLL-2000 shared tasks. The other SVM-based
NER systems can be found in [28] and [29].
Unsupervised learning method is another type of machine learning model, where an unsupervised model learns
without any feedback. In unsupervised learning, the goal
is to build representations from data. [30] discusses an unsupervised model for NE classification by the use of unlabeled examples of data. An unsupervised NE classification
models and their ensembles have been introduced in [31]
that uses a small-scale NE dictionary and an unlabeled corpus for classifying NEs. Unlike rule-based models, these
types of models can be easily ported to different domains
or languages.
In hybrid systems, the goal is to combine rule-based and
machine learning-based methods, and develop new methods using strongest points from each method. [32] described a hybrid document centered system, called LTG
system. [33] introduced a hybrid system by combining
HMM, MaxEnt and handcrafted grammatical rules. Although, this approach can get better result than some other
approaches, but weakness of handcraft rule-based NER
A. Ekbal et al.
surfaces when there is a need to change the domain of data.

Previous works [34, 35] have also shown that combining
several ML models using voting technique always performs
better than any single ML model.
When applying machine-learning techniques to NLP
tasks, it is time-consuming and expensive to hand-label the
large amounts of training data necessary for good performance. In the literature, we can find the use of unlabeled
data in improving the performance of many tasks such as
name tagging [36], semantic class extraction [37] and coreference resolution [38]. However, it is important to decide how the system should effectively select unlabeled
data, and how the size and relevance of data impact the performance. A technique to automatically select documents
is reported in [39].
India is a multilingual country with great cultural diversities. However, the relevant works in NER involving Indian languages have started to appear very recently. Named
Entity (NE) identification in Indian languages in general
and Bengali in particular is difficult and challenging as:
1. Unlike English and most of the European languages,
Bengali lacks capitalization information, which plays
a very important role in identifying NEs.
2. Indian person names are more diverse compared to the
other languages and a lot of these words can be found
in the dictionary with some other specific meanings.
3. Bengali is a highly inflectional language providing
one of the richest and most challenging sets of linguistic and statistical features resulting in long and complex wordforms.
4. Bengali is a relatively free order language.
5. Bengali, like other Indian languages, is a resource
poor language - annotated corpora, name dictionaries,
good morphological analyzers, POS taggers etc. are
not yet available in the required measure.
6. Although Indian languages have a very old and rich
literary history, technological developments are of recent origin.
7. Web sources for name lists are available in English,
but such lists are not available in Bengali forcing the
use of transliteration for creating such lists.
A pattern directed shallow parsing approach for NER
in Bengali has been reported in [40]. The paper reports
about two different NER models, one using the lexical contextual patterns and the other using the linguistic features
along with the same set of lexical contextual patterns. A
HMM-based NER system has been reported in [41], where
more contextual information has been considered during
the emission probabilities and NE suffixes have been kept
for handling the unknown words. More recently, the works
in the area of Bengali NER can be found in [42] with ME,
in [43] with CRF and in [44] with SVM approach. These
NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION USING . . .
systems were developed with the help of a number of features and gazetteers. The method of improving the performance of NER system using appropriate unlabeled data,
post-processing and voting has been reported in [45].
Other than Bengali, the works on Hindi can be found in
[46] with CRF model using feature induction technique to
automatically construct the features that does a maximal
increase in the conditional likelihood. A language independent method for Hindi NER has been reported in [47].
Sujan et al. [48] reported a ME based system with the hybrid feature set that includes statistical as well as linguistic features. A MEMM-based system has been reported in
[49]. As part of the IJCNLP-08 NER shared task, various works of NER in Indian languages using various approaches can be found in IJCNLP-08 NER Shared Task on
South and South East Asian Languages (NERSSEAL)2 . As
part of this shared task, [50] reported a CRF-based system
followed by post-processing which involves using some
heuristics or rules. A CRF-based system has been reported
in [51], where it has been shown that the hybrid HMM
model can perform better than CRF.
Srikanth and Murthy [52] developed a NER system for
Telugu and tested it on several data sets from the Eenaadu
and Andhra Prabha newspaper corpora. They obtained the
overall f-measure between 80-97% with person, location
and organization tags. For Tamil, a CRF-based NER system has been presented in [53] for the tourism domain.
This approach can take care of morphological inflections
of NEs and can handle nested tagging with a hierarchical
tagset containing 106 tags. Shishtla et al. [54] developed
a CRF-based system for English, Telugu and Hindi. They
suggested that character n-gram based approach is more effective than the word based models. They described the
features used and the experiments to increase the recall of
NER system.
In this paper, we have reported a NER system for Bengali
by combining the outputs of the classifiers, namely ME,
CRF and SVM. In terms of native speakers, Bengali is the
seventh most spoken language in the world, second in India
and the national language of Bangladesh. We have manually annotated a portion of the Bengali news corpus, developed from the web-archive of a leading Bengali newspaper
with Person name, Location name, Organization name and
Miscellaneous name tags. We have also used the IJCNLP08 NER Shared Task data that was originally annotated
with a fine-grained NE tagset of twelve tags. This data
has been converted into the forms to be tagged with NEP
(Person name), NEL (Location name), NEO (Organization
name), NEN (Number expressions), NETI (Time expressions) and NEM (Measurement expressions). The NEN,
NETI and NEM tags are mapped to point to the miscellaneous entities. The system makes use of the different contextual information of the words along with the variety of
orthographic word level features that are helpful in predicting the various NE classes. We have considered both language independent as well as language dependent features.
2 http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/ner-ssea-08
57
Language independent features are applicable to almost all

the languages including Bengali and Hindi. Language dependent features have been extracted from the language
specific resources such as the part of speech (POS) taggers
and gazetteers. It has been observed from the evaluation
results that the use of language specific features improves
the performance of the system. We also conducted a number of experiments to find out the best-suited set of features
for NER in each of the languages. We have developed an
unsupervised method to generate the lexical context patterns that are used as the features of the classifiers. A semisupervised technique has been proposed to select the appropriate unlabeled documents from a large collection of
unlabeled corpus. The main contribution of this work is as
follows:
1. An unsupervised technique has been reported to generate the context patterns from the unlabeled corpus.
2. A semi-supervised ML technique has been developed
in order to use the unlabeled data.
3. Relevant unlabeled documents are selected using CRF
techniques. We have selected effective sentences to
be added to the initial labeled data by applying majority voting between ME model, CRF and two different
models of SVM. In the previous literature [39], the
use of any single classifier was reported for selecting
appropriate sentences.
4. Useful features for NER in Bengali are identified. A
number of features are language independent and can
be applicable to other languages also.
5. The system has been evaluated in two different ways:
Without language dependent features and with language dependent features.
6. Three different post-processing techniques have been
reported in order to improve the performance of the
classifiers.
7. Finally, models are combined using three weighted
voting techniques.
2 Named entity tagged corpus

development
The rapid development of language resources and tools using machine learning techniques for less computerized languages requires appropriately tagged corpus. There is a
long history of creating a standard for western language
resources. The human language technology (HLT) society in Europe has been particularly zealous for the standardization of European languages. On the other hand, in
spite of having great linguistic and cultural diversity, Asian
language resources have received much less attention than
their western counterparts. India is a multilingual country
with a diverse cultural heritage. Bengali is one of the most
58
popular languages and predominantly spoken in the eastern part of India. In terms of native speakers, Bengali is the
seventh most spoken language in the World, second in India
and the national language in Bangladesh. In the literature,
there has been no initiative of corpus development from the
web in Indian languages and specifically in Bengali.
Newspaper is a huge source of readily available documents. Web is a great source of language data. In Bengali,
there are some newspapers (like, Anandabazar Patrika,
Bartaman, Dainik, Ittefaq etc.), published from Kolkata
and Bangladesh, which have their internet-edition in the
web and some of them provide their archive available also.
A collection of documents from the archive of the newspaper, stored in the web, may be used as the corpus, which in
turn can be used in many NLP applications.
We have followed the method of developing the Bengali news corpus in terms of language resource acquisition using a web crawler, language resource creation that
includes HTML file cleaning, code conversion and language resource annotation that involves defining a tagset
and subsequent tagging of the news corpus. A web crawler
has been designed that retrieves the web pages in Hyper
Text Markup Language (HTML) format from the news
archive. Various types of news (International, National,
State, Sports, Business etc.) are collected in the corpus
and so a variety of linguistics features of Bengali are covered. The Bengali news corpus is available in UTF-8 and
contains approximately 34 million wordforms.
A news corpus, whether in Bengali or in any other language has different parts like title, date, reporter, location,
body etc. To identify these parts in a news corpus the tagset
described in Table 1 have been defined. Detailed of this
corpus development work can be found in [55].
The date, location, reporter and agency tags present in
the web pages of the Bengali news corpus have been automatically named entity (NE) tagged. These tags can identify the NEs that appear in some fixed places of the newspaper. In order to achieve reasonable performance for NER,
supervised machine learning approaches are more appropriate and this requires a completely tagged corpus. This
requires the selection of an appropriate NE tagset.
With respect to the tagset, the main feature that concerns
us is its granularity, which is directly related to the size of
the tagset. If the tagset is too coarse, the tagging accuracy
will be much higher, since only the important distinctions
are considered, and the classification may be easier both
by human manual annotators as well as the machine. But,
some important information may be missed out due to the
coarse grained tagset. On the other hand, a too fine-grained
tagset may enrich the supplied information but the performance of the automatic named entity tagger may decrease.
A much richer model is required to be designed to capture
the encoded information when using a fine grained tagset
and hence, it is more difficult to learn.
When we are about to design a tagset for the NE disambiguation task, the issues that need consideration include
- the type of applications (some application may required
A. Ekbal et al.
Table 2: Statistics of the NE tagged corpus

Total Number of sentences
Number of wordforms (approx.)
Number of NEs
Average length of NE
23,181
200K
19,749
2 (approx.)
more complex information whereas only category information may be sufficient for some tasks), tagging techniques
to be used (statistical, rule based which can adopt large
tagsets very well, supervised/unsupervised learning). Further, a large amount of annotated corpus is usually required
for statistical named entity taggers. A too fine grained
tagset might be difficult to use by human annotators during the development of a large annotated corpus. Hence,
the availability of resources needs to be considered during
the design of a tagset.
During the design of the tagset for Bengali, our main aim
was to build a small but clean and completely tagged corpora for Bengali. The resources can be used for the conventional usages like Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Event Tracking System, Web People Search etc.
We have used CoNLL 2003 shared task tagset as reference
point for our tagset design.
We have used a NE tagset that consists of the following
four tags:
1. Person name: Denotes the names of people. For
example, sachin[Sachin] /Person name, manmohan
singh[Manmohan Singh]/Person name.
2. Location name: Denotes the names of places. For
example, jadavpur[Jadavpur]/Location name, new
delhi[New Delhi]/Location name.
3. Organization name: Denotes the names of organizations. For example, infosys[Infosys]/Organization
name, jadavpur vishwavidyalaya[Jadavpur University]/Organization name.
4. Miscellaneous name: Denotes the miscellaneous NEs
that include date, time, number, monetary expressions, measurement expressions and percentages. For
example, 15th august 1947[15th August 1947]/Miscellaneous name, 11 am[11 am]/Miscellaneous
name, 110/Miscellaneous name, 1000 taka[1000 rupees]/Miscellaneous name, 100%[100%]/ Miscellaneous name and 100 gram[100 gram]/ Miscellaneous
name.
We have manually annotated approximately 200K wordforms of the Bengali news corpus.The annotation has been
carried out by one expert and edited by another expert. The
corpus is in the Shakti Standard Format (SSF) form [56].
Some statistics of this corpus is shown in Table 2.
We have also used the NE tagged corpus of the IJCNLP Shared Task on Named Entity Recognition for South
59
Table 1: News corpus tag set

Tag
header
title
t1
t2
date
bd
day
ed
Definition
Header of the news document
Headline of the news document
1st headline of the title
2nd headline of the title
Date of the news document
Bengali date
Day
English date
Table 3: Statistics of the IJCNLP-08 NE tagged corpus

Total Number of sentences
Number of wordforms (approx.)
Number of NEs
Average length of NE
7035
122K
5921
2 (approx.)
and South East Asian Languages (NERSSEAL)3 . A fine

grained tagset of twelve tags were defined as part of this
shared task. The underlying reason to adopt this finer NE
tagset is to use the NER system in various NLP applications, particularly in machine translation. The IJCNLP-08
NER shared task tagset is shown in Table 4. One important aspect of the shared task was to identify and classify
the maximal NEs as well as the nested NEs, i.e, the constituent part of a larger NE. But, the training data were provided with the type of the maximal NE only. For example,
mahatma gandhi road (Mahatma Gandhi Road) was annotated as location and assigned the tag NEL even if mahatma (Mahatma) and gandhi(Gandhi) are NE title person
(NETP), and person name (NEP), respectively. The task
was to identify mahatma gandhi road as a NE and classify
it as NEL. In addition, mahatma, and gandhi were to be recognized as NEs of the categories NETP (Title person) and
NEP (Person name) respectively. Some NE tags are hard to
distinguish in some contexts. For example, it is not always
clear whether something should be marked as Number or
as Measure. Similarly, Time and Measure is another
confusing pair of NE tags. Another difficult class is Technical terms and it is often confusing whether any expression is to be tagged as the NETE (NE term expression) or
not. For example, it is difficult to decide whether Agriculture is NETE, and if not then whether Horticulture is
NETE or not. In fact, this the most difficult class to identify. Other ambiguous tags are NETE and NETO (NE
title-objects). The corpus is in the Shakti Standard Format
(SSF) form [56]. We have also manually annotated a portion of the Bengali news corpus [55] with the twelve NE
tags of the shared task tagset. Some statistics of this corpus
is shown in Table 3.
We have considered only those NE tags that denote
3 http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/ner-ssea-08
Tag
reporter
agency
location
body
p
table
tc
tr
Definition
Reporter-name
Agency providing news
The news location
Body of the news document
Paragraph
Information in tabular form
Table Column
Table row
person name, location name, organization name, number expression, time expression and measurement expressions. The number, time and measurement expressions are
mapped to belong to the Miscellaneous name tag. Other
tags of the shared task have been mapped to the other-thanNE category. Hence, the final tagset is shown in Table 5.
In order to properly denote the boundaries of the NEs,
the four NE tags are further subdivided as shown in Table
6. In the output, these sixteen NE tags are directly mapped
to the four major NE tags, namely Person name, Location
name, Organization name and Miscellaneous name.
3 Named entity recognition in

Bengali
In terms of native speakers, Bengali is the seventh popular language in the world, second in India and the national
language of Bangladesh. We have used a Bengali news
corpus [55], developed from the web-archive of a widely
read Bengali newspaper for NER. A portion of this corpus containing 200K wordforms has been manually annotated with the four NE tags namely, Person name, Location name, Organization name and Miscellaneous name.
The data has been collected from the International, National, State and Sports domains. We have also used the
annotated corpus of 122K wordforms, collected from the
IJCNLP-08 NERSSEAL (http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/ner-ssea-08).
This data was a mixed one and dealt mainly with the literature, agriculture and scientific domains. Moreover, this
data was originally annotated with a fine-grained NE tagset
of twelve tags. An appropriate tag conversion routine has
been defined as shown in Table 5 in order to convert this
data into the desired forms, tagged with the four NE tags.
3.1 Approaches
NLP research around the world has taken giant leaps in the
last decade with the advent of effective machine learning
algorithms and the creation of large annotated corpora for
various languages. However, annotated corpora and other
lexical resources have started appearing only very recently
in India. In this paper, we have reported a NER system by
combining the outputs of the classifiers, namely ME, CRF
60
A. Ekbal et al.
Table 4: Named entity tagset for Indian languages (IJCNLP-08 NER Shared Task Tagset)
NE Tag
NEP
Meaning
Person name
NEL
Location name
NEO
Organization name
NED
NEA
Designation
Abbreviation
NEB
NETP
NETO
NEN
NEM
NETE
Brand
Title-person
Title-object
Number
Measure
Terms
NETI
Time
Example
sachin/NEP,
sachin ramesh tendulkar / NEP
kolkata/NEL,
mahatma gandhi road/ NEL
jadavpur bishbidyalya/NEO,
bhaba eytomik risarch sentar / NEO
chairrman/NED, sangsad/NED
b a/NEA, c m d a/NEA,
b j p/NEA, i.b.m/ NEA
fanta/NEB
shriman/NED, shri/NED, shrimati/NED
american beauty/NETO
10/NEN, dash/NEN
tin din/NEM, panch keji/NEM
hiden markov model/NETE,
chemical reaction/NETE
10 i magh 1402 / NETI, 10 am/NETI
Table 5: Tagset used in this work

IJCNLP-08
shared task tagset
NEP
Tagset used
Meaning
Person name
NEL
Location name
NEO
Organization name
NEN, NEM, NETI
Miscellaneous name
Single word/multiword
person name
location name
organization name
Single word/ multiword
miscellaneous name
NED, NEA, NEB,

NETP, NETE
NNE
Other than NEs
61
Table 6: Named entity tagset (B-I-E format)

Named Entity Tag
PER
B-PER
I-PER
E-PER
Meaning
Single word
person name
Single word
location name
Single word
organization name
Single word
miscellaneous name
Beginning, Internal or
the End of a multiword
person name
B-LOC
I-LOC
E-LOC
B-ORG
I-ORG
E-ORG
location name
organization name
B-MISC
I-MISC
E-MISC
NNE
miscellaneous name
Other than NEs
LOC
ORG
MISC
and SVM frameworks in order to identify NEs from a Bengali text and to classify them into Person name, Location
name, Organization name and Miscellaneous name. We
have developed two different systems with the SVM model,
one using forward parsing (SVM-F) that parses from left
to right and other using backward parsing (SVM-B) that
parses from right to left. The SVM system has been developed based on [57], which perform classification by
constructing a N-dimensional hyperplane that optimally
separates data into two categories. We have used YamCha toolkit (http://chasen-org/taku/software/yamcha), an
SVM based tool for detecting classes in documents and
formulating the NER task as a sequence labeling problem. Here, the pair wise multi-class decision method
and polynomial kernel function have been used. We
have used TinySVM-0.04 TinySVM classifier that seems
to be the best optimized among publicly available SVM
toolkits. We have used the Maximum Entropy package
(http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0450736/software/
maxent/maxent-20061005.tar.bz2). We have used C++
based CRF++ package (http://crfpp.sourceforge.net) for
NER.
During testing, it is possible that the classifier produces a
sequence of inadmissible classes (e.g., B-PER followed by
LOC). To eliminate such sequences, we define a transition
probability between word classes P (ci |cj ) to be equal to 1
if the sequence is admissible, and 0 otherwise. The prob4 http://cl.aist-nara.ac.jp/taku
ku/software/
Example
sachin/PER,
rabindranath/PER
kolkata/LOC, mumbai/LOC
infosys/ORG
10/MISC, dash/MISC
sachin/B-PER ramesh/I-PER
tendulkar /E-PER,
rabindranath/B-PER
thakur/E-PER
mahatma/B-LOC gandhi /I-LOC
road /E-LOC,
new/B-LOC york/E-LOC
jadavpur /B-ORG
bishvidyalya/E-ORG,
bhaba /B-ORG eytomik/I-ORG
risarch/I-ORG sentar /E-ORG
10 i /B-MISC magh/I-MISC
1402/E-MISC,
10/B-MISC am/E-MISC
kara/NNE, jal/NNE
ability of the classes c1 , c2 , . . . , cn assigned to the words

in a sentence s in a document
Qn D is defined as follows:
P (c1 , c2 , . . . , cn |S, D) = i=1 P (c1 |S, D) P (ci |ci1 )
where P (c1 |S, D) is determined by the ME/CRF/SVM
classifier.
Performance of the NER models has been limited in part
by the amount of labeled training data available. We have
used unlabeled corpus to address this problem. Based on
the original training on the labeled corpus, there will be
some tags in the unlabeled corpus that the taggers will be
very sure about. For example, there will be contexts that
were always followed by a person name (sri, mr. etc.) in
the training corpus. While a new word W is found in this
context in the unlabeled corpus then it can be predicted
as a person name. If any tagger can learn this fact about
W , it can successfully tag W when it appears in the test
corpus without any indicative context. In the similar way,
if a previously unseen context appears consistently in the
unlabeled corpus before known NE then the tagger should
learn that this is a predicative context. We have developed a
semi-supervised learning approach in order to capture this
information that are used as the features in the classifiers.
We have used another semi-supervised learning approach
in order to select appropriate data from the available large
unlabeled corpora and added to the initial training set in order to improve the performance of the taggers. The models
are retrained with this new training set and this process is
repeated in a bootstrapped manner.
62
We have also used a number of post-processing rules in

order to improve the performance in each of the models.
Finally, three models are combined together into a single
system with the help of three weighted voting schemes.
In the following subsections, some of our earlier attempts in NER have been reported that form the base of
our overall approach in NER.
3.1.1 Pattern directed shallow parsing approach
Two NER models, namely A and B, using a pattern directed
shallow parsing approach have been reported in [40]. An
unsupervised algorithm has been developed that tags the
unlabeled corpus with the seed entities of Person name,
Location name and Organization name. These seeds have
been prepared by automatically extracting the words from
the reporter, location and agency tags of the Bengali news
corpus [55]. Model A uses only the seed lists to tag the
training corpus whereas in model B, we have used the various gazetteers along with the seed entities for tagging. The
lexical context patterns generated in such way are used to
generate further patterns in a bootstrapped manner. The algorithm terminates until no new patterns can be generated.
During testing, model A can not deal with the NE classification disambiguation problem (i.e, can not handle the
situation when a particular word is tagged with more than
one NE type) but model B can handle with this problem
with the help of gazetteers and various language dependent
features.
3.1.2 HMM based NER system
A HMM-based NER system has been reported in [41],
where more context information has been considered during emission probabilities and the word suffixes have been
used for handling the unknown words. A brief description
of the system is given below:
In the HMM based NE tagging, the task is to find the sequence of NE tags T = t1 , t2 , t3 , . . . tn that is optimal for a
word sequence W = w1 , w2 , w3 . . . wn . The tagging problem becomes equivalent to searching for argmaxT P (T )
P (W |T ), by the application of Bayes law.
A trigram model has been used for transition probability,
that is, the probability of a tag depends on two previous
tags, and then we have,
P (T ) = P (t1 |$) P (t2 |$, t1 ) P (t3 |t1 , t2 )
P (t4 |t2 , t3 ) . . . P (tn |tn2 , tn1 )
where an additional tag $ (dummy tag) has been introduced to represent the beginning of a sentence. Due to
sparse data problem, the linear interpolation method has
been used to smooth the trigram probabilities as follows:
P 0 (tn |tn2 , tn1 ) = 1 P (tn ) + 2 P (tn |tn1 ) +
3 P (tn |tn2 , tn1 )
such that the s sum to 1. The values of s have been calculated by the method given in [58].
Additional context dependent feature has been introduced to the emission probability to make the Markov
model more powerful. The probability of the current word
A. Ekbal et al.
depends on the tag of the previous word and the tag to be

assigned to the current word. Now, we calculate P (W |T )
by the following equation:
P (W |T ) P (w1 |$, t1 ) P (w2 |t1 , t2 ) . . .
P (wn |tn1 , tn ).
So, the emission probability can be calculated as:
i1 ,ti ,wi )
P (wi |ti1 , ti ) = f req(t
f req(ti1 ,ti )
Here, also the smoothing technique is applied rather than
using the emission probability directly. The emission probability is calculated as:
P 0 (wi |ti1 , ti ) = 1 P (wi |ti ) + 2 P (wi |ti1 , ti ),
where 1 , 2 are two constants such that all s sum to 1.
In general, the values of s can be calculated by the same
method that was adopted in calculating s.
Handling of unknown words is an important problem in
the HMM based NER system. For words which have not
been seen in the training set, P (wi |ti ) is estimated based on
features of the unknown words, such as whether the word
contains a particular suffix. The list of suffixes has been
prepared that usually appear at the end of NEs. A null suffix
is also kept to take care of those words that have none of
the suffixes in the list. The probability distribution of a
particular suffix with respect to specific NE tag is generated
from all words in the training set that share the same suffix.
Incorporating diverse features in an HMM based NE
tagger is difficult and complicates the smoothing typically
used in such taggers. Indian languages are morphologically
very rich and contains a lot of non-independent features. A
ME [20] or CRF [25] or SVM [26] based method can deal
with the diverse and overlapping features of the Indian languages more efficiently than HMM.
3.1.3
Other NER sytems
A ME based NER system for Bengali has been reported in

[42]. The system has been developed with the contextual
information of the words along with the variety of orthographic word-level features. In addition, a number of manually developed gazetteers have been used as the features in
the model. We conducted a number of experiments in order
to find out the appropriate features for NER in Bengali. Detailed evaluation results have shown the best performance
with a contextual word window of size three, i.e., previous word, current word and the next one word, dynamic
NE tag of the previous word, POS tag of the current word,
prefixes and suffixes of length up to three characters of the
current word and binary valued features extracted from the
gazetteers.
A CRF based NER system has been described in [43].
The system has been developed with the same set of features as that of ME. Evaluation results have demonstrated
the best results with a contextual window of size five, i.e,
previous two words, current word and next two words, NE
tag of the previous word, POS tags of the current and the
previous words, suffixes and prefixes of length up to three
characters of the current word, and the various binary valued features extracted from the several gazetteers.
A SVM based NER system has been described in [44].

This model also makes use of the different contextual information of the words, orthographic word-level features
along with the various gazetteers. Results have demonstrated the best results with a contextual window of size
six, i.e., previous three words, current word and next two
words, NE tag of the previous two words, POS tags of the
current, previous word and the next words, suffixes and prefixes of length of length up to three characters of the current
word, and the various binary valued features extracted from
the several gazetteers.
4 Named entity features

Feature selection plays a crucial role in any statistical
model. ME model does not provide a method for automatic
selection of given feature sets. Usually, heuristics are used
for selecting effective features and their combinations. It is
not possible to add arbitrary features in a ME framework
as that will result in overfitting. Unlike ME, CRF does not
require careful feature selection in order to avoid overfitting. CRF has the freedom to include arbitrary features,
and the ability of feature induction to automatically construct the most useful feature combinations. Since, CRFs
are log-linear models, and high accuracy may require complex decision boundaries that are non-linear in the space of
original features, the expressive power of the models is often increased by adding new features that are conjunctions
of the original features. For example, a conjunction feature
might ask if the current word is in the person name list and
the next word is an action verb ballen(told). One could
create arbitrary complicated features with these conjunctions. However, it is infeasible to incorporate all possible
conjunctions as these might result in overflow of memory
as well as overfitting. Support vector machines predict the
classes depending upon the labeled word examples only.
It predicts the NEs based on feature information of words
collected in a predefined window size while ME or CRF
predicts them based on the information of the whole sentence. So, CRF can handle the NEs with outside tokens,
which SVM always tags as NNE. A CRF has different
characteristics from SVM, and is good at handling different kinds of data. In particular, SVMs achieve high generalization even with training data of a very high dimension. Moreover, with the use of kernel function, SVMs can
handle non-linear feature spaces, and carry out the training
considering combinations of more than one feature.
The main features for the NER task have been identified based on the different possible combination of available word and tag context. The features also include prefix and suffix for all words. The term prefix/suffix is a sequence of first/last few characters of a word, which may
not be a linguistically meaningful prefix/suffix. The use
of prefix/suffix information works well for the highly inflected languages as like the Indian languages. In addition
to these, various gazetteer lists have been developed for use
63
in the NER tasks. We have considered different combination from the following set for inspecting the best set of
features for NER in Bengali:
F={wim , . . . , wi1 , wi , wi+1 , . . . wi+n , |prefix|
n, |suffix| n, NE tag(s) of previous word(s), POS tag(s)

of the current and/or the surrounding word(s), First word,
Length of the word, Digit information, Infrequent word,
Gazetteer lists}, where wi is the current word; wim is the
previous mth word and wi+n is the next nth word.
The set F contains both language independent as well
as language dependent features. The set of language independent features includes the context words, prefixes and
suffixes of all the words, NE information of the previous
word(s), first word, length of the word, digit information
and infrequent word. Language dependent features for
Bengali include the set of known suffixes that may appear
with the various NEs, clue words that help in predicting the
location and organization names, words that help to recognize measurement expressions, designation words that
help to identify person names, various gazetteer lists that
include the first names, middle names, last names, location
names, organization names, function words, weekdays and
month names. As part of language dependent features for
Hindi, the system uses only the lists of first names, middle
names, last names, weekdays, month names along with the
list of words that helps to recognize measurement expressions. We have also used the part of speech (POS) information of the current and/or the surrounding word(s) for
Bengali.
Language independent NE features can be applied for
NER in any language without any prior knowledge of that
language. Though the lists or gazetteers are not theoretically language dependent, we call it as language dependent
as these require apriori knowledge of any specific language
for their preparation. Also, we include the POS information
in the set of language dependent features as it depends on
some language specific phenomenon such as person, number, tense, gender etc. For example, gender information
has a crucial role in Hindi but it is not an issue in Bengali. In Bengali, a combination of non-finite verb followed
by a finite verb can have several different morphosyntactic functions. For example, mere phellO [kill+non-finite
throw+finite] can mean threw after killing (here, mere
is a sequential participle) or just killed with a completive sense (where, mere is a polar verb and phellO, the
vector verb of a finite verb group). On the other hand,
constructs like henshe ballO [smile+non-finite say+finite]
might mean said while smiling (henshe is functioning as
an adverbial participle). Similarly, it is hard to distinguish
between the adjectival participle and verbal nouns. The use
of language specific features is helpful to improve the performance of the NER system. In the resource-constrained
Indian language environment, the non-availability of language specific resources such as POS taggers, gazetteers,
morphological analyzers etc. forces the development of
such resources to use in NER systems. This leads to the
necessity of apriori knowledge of the language.
64
4.1 Language independent features

We have considered different combinations from the set of
language independent features for inspecting the best set of
features for NER in Bengali. Following are the details of
the features:
Context word feature: Preceding and following words
of a particular word can be used as the features. This
is based on the observation that the surrounding words
are very effective in the identification of NEs.
Word suffix: Word suffix information is helpful to
identify NEs. This is based on the observation that
the NEs share some common suffixes. This feature
can be used in two different ways. The first and the
nave one is, a fixed length (say, n) word suffix of the
current and/or the surrounding word(s) can be treated
as feature. If the length of the corresponding word
is less than or equal to n 1 then the feature values are not defined and denoted by ND. The feature
value is also not defined (ND) if the token itself is a
punctuation symbol or contains any special symbol or
digit. The value of ND is set to 0. The second and
the more helpful approach is to modify the feature as
binary valued. Variable length suffixes of a word can
be matched with predefined lists of useful suffixes for
different classes of NEs. Various length suffixes belong to the category of language dependent features
as they require language specific knowledge for their
development.
Word prefix: Word prefixes are also helpful and based
on the observation that NEs share some common prefix strings. This feature has been defined in a similar
way as that of the fixed length suffixes.
Named Entity Information: The NE tag(s) of the previous word(s) has been used as the only dynamic feature in the experiment.
First word: This is used to check whether the current
token is the first word of the sentence or not. Though
Bengali is a relatively free order language, the first
word of the sentence is most likely a NE as it appears
in the subject position most of the time.
Digit features: Several binary valued digit features
have been defined depending upon the presence and/or
the number of digits in a token (e.g., CntDgt [token
contains digits], FourDgt [four digit token], TwoDgt
[two digit token]), combination of digits and punctuation symbols (e.g., CntDgtCma [token consists of
digits and comma], CntDgtPrd [token consists of digits and periods]), combination of digits and symbols
(e.g., CntDgtSlsh [token consists of digit and slash],
CntDgtHph [token consists of digits and hyphen],
CntDgtPrctg [token consists of digits and percentages]). These binary valued features are helpful in
A. Ekbal et al.
recognizing miscellaneous NEs, such as time expressions, measurement expressions and numerical numbers etc.
Infrequent word: The frequencies of the words in the
training corpus have been calculated. A cut off frequency has been chosen in order to consider the words
that occur with more than the cut off frequency in the
training corpus. The cut off frequency is set to 10. A
binary valued feature Infrequent is defined to check
whether the current token appears in this list or not.
Length of a word: This binary valued feature is used
to check whether the length of the current word is less
than three or not. This is based on the observation that
very short words are rarely NEs.
The above set of language independent features along
with their descriptions are shown in Table 7. The baseline
models have been developed with the language independent features.
4.2 Language dependent features

Language dependent features for Bengali have been identified based on the earlier experiments [40] on NER. Additional NE features have been identified from the Bengali
news corpus [55]. Various gazetteers used in the experiment are presented in Table 8. Some of the gazetteers are
briefly described as below:
NE Suffix list (variable length suffixes): Variable
length suffixes of a word are matched with the predefined lists of useful suffixes that are helpful to detect
person (e.g., -babu, -da, -di etc.) and location (e.g.,
-land, -pur, -liya etc.) names.
Organization suffix word list: This list contains the
words that are helpful to identify organization names
(e.g., kong, limited etc.). These are also part of organization names.
Person prefix word list: This is useful for detecting
person names (e.g., shriman, shri, shrimati etc.).
Common location word list: This list contains the
words (e.g., sarani, road, lane etc.) that are part of
the multiword location names and usually appear at
their end.
Action verb list: A set of action verbs like balen,
balalen, ballo, sunllO, hanslo etc. often determine the
presence of person names. Person names generally
appear before the action verbs.
Designation words: A list of common designation
words (e.g., neta, sangsad, kheloar etc.) has been prepared. This helps to identify the position of person
names.
65
Table 7: Descriptions of the language independent features. Here, i represents the position of the current word and wi
represents the current word
Feature
ContexT
Suf
Pre
NE
FirstWord
CntDgt
FourDgt
TwoDgt
CntDgtCma
CntDgtPrd
CntDgtSlsh
CntDgtHph
CntDgtPrctg
Infrequent
Length
Description
ContexTi = wim , . . . , wi1 , wi , wi+1 , wi+n ,
where wim
, and wi+n are the previous m-th, and the next n-th word
Suffix string of length n of wi if |wi | n
N D(= 0) if |wi | (n 1)
Sufi (n) =
or wi is a punctuation symbol
or wi contains any special symbol or digit
Prefix
string of length n of wi if |wi | n
N D(= 0) if |wi | (n 1)
Prei (n) =
or wi is a punctuation symbol
or wi contains any special symbol or digit

N Ei = NE tagof wi
1, if wi is the first word of a sentence
FirstWordi =
0, otherwise
1, if wi contains digit
CntDgti =
0, otherwise
1, if wi consists of four digits
FourDgti =
0, otherwise
1, if wi consists of two digits
TwoDgti =
0,otherwise
1, if wi contains digit and comma
CntDgtCmai =
0, otherwise
1, if wi contains digit and period
CntDgtPrdi =
0, otherwise
1, if wi contains digit and slash
CntDgtSlshi =
0, otherwise
1, if wi contains digit and hyphen
CntDgtHphi =
0, otherwise
1, if wi contains digit
and percentage
CntDgtPrctgi =
0, otherwise
Infrequenti = I{Infrequent word list} (wi )
1, if wi 3
Lengthi =
0, otherwise
66
Part of Speech information: For POS tagging, we have

used a CRF-based POS tagger [59], which has been
developed with the help of a tagset of 26 different POS
tags 5 , defined for the Indian languages. We have used
the inflection lists that can appear with the different
wordforms of noun, verb and adjectives, a lexicon [60]
that has been developed in an unsupervised way from
the Bengali news corpus, and the NE tags using a NER
system [44] as the features of POS tagging in Bengali.
This POS tagger has an accuracy of 90.2%.
The language dependent features are represented in Table 9.
5 Use of unlabeled data

We have developed two different techniques that use the
large collection of unlabeled corpus [55] in NER. The first
one is an unsupervised learning technique used to generate lexical context patterns for use as the features of the
classifiers. The second one is a semi-supervised learning
technique that is used to select the appropriate data from
the large collection of documents. In the literature, unsupervised algorithms (bootstrapping from seed examples
and unlabeled data) have been discussed in [61], [47], and
[62]. Using a parsed corpus, the proper names that appear in certain syntactic contents were identified and classified in [61].The procedures to identify and classify proper
names in seven languages, learning character-based contextual, internal, and morphological patterns are reported
in [62]. This algorithm does not strictly require capitalization but recall was much lower for the languages that do not
have case distinctions. Others such as [63] relied on structures such as appositives and compound nouns. Contextual
patterns that predict the semantic class of the subject, direct object, or prepositional phrase object are reported in
[64] and [65]. The technique to use the windows of tokens
to learn contextual and internal patterns without parsing is
described in [66] and [67]. The technique reported in [67]
enable discovery of generalized names embedded in larger
noun groups. An algorithm for unsupervised learning and
semantic classification of names and terms is reported in
[67]. They considered the positive example and negative
example for a particular name class. We have developed an
unsupervised algorithm that can generate the lexical context patterns from the unlabeled corpus. This work differs
from the previous works in the sense that here we have
also considered the patterns that yield negative examples.
These negative examples can be effective to generate new
patterns. Apart from accuracy, we have considered the relative frequency of a pattern in order to decide its inclusion
into the final set of patterns. The final lexical context patterns have been used as features of the classifiers. Here, we
have used a portion of the Bengali news corpus [55] that has
been classified on geographic domain (International, National, State, District, Metro [Kolkata]) as well as on topic
5 http://shiva.iiit.ac.in/SPSAL2007/iiit_tagset_guidelines.pdf
A. Ekbal et al.
domain (Politics, Sports, Business). Statistics of this corpus is shown in Table 10.
5.1 Lexical context pattern learning

Lexical context patterns are generated from the unlabeled
corpus of approximately 10 million wordforms, as shown
in Table 10. Given a small seed examples and an unlabeled
corpus, the algorithm can generate the lexical context patterns through bootstrapping. The seed name serves as a
positive example for its own NE class, negative example
for other NE classes and error example for non-NEs.
1. Seed list preparation: We have collected frequently
occurring words from the Bengali news corpus and the
annotated training set of 272K wordforms to use as the
seeds. There are 123, 87, and 32 entries in the person,
location, and organization seed lists, respectively.
2. Lexical pattern generation: The unlabeled corpus is
tagged with the elements from the seed lists. For example,
<Person> sonia gandhi < /Person>, <Location>
kolkata < /Location> and <Organization> jadavpur
viswavidyalya< /Organization>.
For each tag T inserted in the training corpus, the algorithm generates a lexical pattern p using a context
window of maximum width 6 (excluding the tagged
NE) around the left and the right tags, e.g., p =
[l3 l2 l1 < T > . . . < /T > l+1 l+2 l+3 ], where, li
are the context of p. Any of li may be a punctuation
symbol. In such cases, the width of the lexical patterns will vary. We also generate the lexical context
patterns by considering the left and right contexts of
the labeled examples of the annotated corpus of 272K
wordforms. All these patterns, derived from the different tags of the labeled and unlabeled training corpora, are stored in a Pattern Table (or, set P ), which
has four different fields namely, pattern id (identifies
any particular pattern), pattern example (pattern), pattern type (Person name/Location name/Organization
name) and relative frequency (indicates the number of
times any pattern of a particular type appears in the
entire training corpus relative to the total number of
patterns generated of that type). This table has 38,198
entries, out of which 27,123 patterns are distinct. Labeled training data contributes to 15,488 patterns and
the rest is generated from the unlabeled corpus.
3. Evaluation of patterns: Every pattern p in the set P
is matched against the same unlabeled corpus. In a
place, where the context of p matches, p predicts the
occurrence of the left or right boundary of name. POS
information of the words as well as some linguistic
rules and/or length of the entity have been used in detecting the other boundary. The extracted entity may
fall in one of the following categories:
67
Table 8: Gazetteers used in the experiment

Gazetteer
NE suffix
Organization suffix
Number of entries
115
94
Person prefix
245
Middle name
1491
Surname
5,288
Common Location
Action verb
Designation words
547
221
947
First names
72,206
Location name
5,125
Organization name
Month name
Weekdays
Measurement expressions
2,225
24
14
52
Source
Manually prepared
Manually created
from the news corpus
Manually created
Semi-automatically
Semi-automatically
Manually developed
Manually prepared
Semi-automatically
prepared from news corpus
Semi-automatically
prepared from the news corpus
Semi-automatically
prepared from the news corpus
Manually prepared
Manually prepared
Manually prepared
Manually prepared
Table 9: Descriptions of the language dependent features. Here, i represents the position of the current word and wi
represents the current word
Feature
FirstName
MidName
SurName
Funct
MonthName
WeekDay
MeasureMent
POS
NESuf
OrgSuf
ComLoc
ActVerb
DesG
PerPre
LocName
OrgName
Description
F irstN amei = I{First name list} (wi )
M idN amei = I{Middle name list} (wi )
W
SurN amei = I{Sur name list} (wi ) I{Sur name list} (wi+1 )
F uncti = I{Function word list} (wi )
M onthN amei = I{Month name list} (wi )
W eekDayi = I{Week day list} (wi )
M easurementi = I{Measurement word list} (wi+1 )
W
I{Measurement list} (wi+1 )
P OSi =POS tag of the current word
N ESufi = I{NE suffix list} (wi )
OrgSufi = I{Organization suffix word list} (wi )
W
I{Organization suffix word list} (wi+1 )
ComLoci = I{Common location list} (wi )
ActV erbi = I{Action verb list} (wi )
W
I{Action verb ist} (wi+1 )
DesGi = I{Designation word list} (wi1 )
P erP rei = I{Person prefix word list} (wi1 )
LocN amei = I{Location name list} (wi )
OrgN amei = I{Organization name list} (wi )
68
A. Ekbal et al.
Table 10: Corpus statistics

Total number of news documents in the corpus
Total number of sentences in the corpus
Average number of sentences in a document
Total number of wordforms in the corpus
Average number of wordforms in a document
Total number of distinct wordforms in the corpus
35, 143
940, 927
27
9, 998, 972
285
152, 617
(a) positive example: The extracted entity is of the

same NE type as that of the pattern.
5.2 Unlabeled document and sentence

selection using bootstrapping
(b) negative example: The extracted entity is of the

different NE type as that of the pattern.
We have divided the unlabeled 35,143 news documents

based on news sources/types, i.e., International, National,
State, District, Metro [Kolkata], Politics, Sports, Business
etc. in order to create segments of manageable size. This
helps us to separately evaluate the contribution of each segment using a gold standard development test set and reject those that are not helpful and to apply the latest updated best model to each subsequent segment. We have
observed that the use of unlabeled data becomes effective
if it is related to the target problem, i.e., the test set. So,
appropriate unlabeled document selection is very essential.
After selecting the documents, it is necessary to select the
tagged sentences that are useful to improve the system performance. Appropriate sentences are selected based on majority voting and depending upon the structure and/or the
contents of the sentences.
(c) error example: The extracted entity is not at all

a NE.
4. Candidate pattern acquisition: For each pattern p,
we have maintained three different lists for the
positive, negative and error examples. The type
of the extracted entity is determined by checking
whether it appears in any of the seed lists (person/location/organization); otherwise, its type is determined manually. The positive and negative examples are then added to the appropriate seed lists.
We then compute the patterns accuracy as follows:
|positive(p)|
accuracy(p) = [|positive(p)|+|negative(p)|+|error(p)|]
A threshold value of accuracy has been chosen in order to discard the patterns below this threshold. A pattern is also discarded if its total positive count is less
than a predetermined threshold value. The remaining
patterns are ranked by their relative frequency values.
The n top high frequent patterns are retained in the
pattern set P and this set is denoted as Accept Pattern.
5. Generation of new patterns: All the positive and negative examples extracted by a pattern p in Step 4 can be
used to generate further patterns from the same training corpus. Each new positive or negative instance
(not appearing in the seed lists) is used to further tag
the training corpus. We repeat steps 2-4 for each
new NE until no new patterns can be generated. The
threshold values of accuracy, positive count and relative frequency are chosen in such a way that in each
iteration of the algorithm at least 5% new patterns are
added to the set P . A newly generated pattern may
be identical to a pattern that is already in the set P .
In such a case, the type and relative frequency fields
in the set P are updated accordingly. Otherwise, the
newly generated pattern is added to the set with the
type and relative frequency fields set properly. The
algorithm terminates after 23 iterations and there are
34,298 distinct entries in the set P .
Unlabeled Document Selection: The unlabeled data

supports the acquisition of new names and contexts to
provide new evidences to be incorporated in ME, CRF
and SVM classifiers. Old estimates of the models may
be worsened by the unlabeled data if it adds too many
names whose tags are incorrect, or at least are incorrect in the context of the labeled training data and the
test data. Unlabeled data can degrade rather than improve the classifiers performance on the test set if it
is irrelevant to the test document. So, it is necessary
to measure the relevance of the unlabeled data to our
target test set.
We construct a set of key words from the test set T to
check whether unlabeled document d is useful or not.
We do not use all the words in test set T as the
key words since we are only concerned about the
distribution of name candidates. So, each document is tested with the CRF model that is developed with the language independent features
(i.e, baseline), context features and gazetteers.
It is insufficient to take only the name candidates
in the top one hypothesis for each sentence.
Thus, we take all the name candidates in the top N
best hypotheses (N = 10) for each sentence of the
test set T to construct a query set Q. Using this query
set, we find all the relevant documents that include

three (heuristically set) names belonging to the set Q.
In addition, the documents are not considered if they
contain fewer than seven (heuristic) names.
Sentence Selection: All the tagged sentences of a relevant document are not added to training corpus as incorrectly tagged or irrelevant sentences can lead to the
degradation in model performance. We are actually
concerned on how much new information is extracted
from each sentence of the unlabeled data compared to
the training corpus that already we have in our hand.
We have used majority voting approach to select the
relevant sentences. All the relevant documents are
tagged with the ME, CRF, SVM-F and SVM-B models. If the majority of models agree to the same output for at least 80% of the words in a sentence then
that sentence is selected to be added to the training
corpus. This criterion often selects some sentences
which are too short or do not include any name. These
words may make the model worse if added to the
training data. For example, the distribution of nonnames may increase significantly leading to degradation of model performance. In this experiment, we
have not included the sentences that include fewer
than five words or do not include any names.
The bootstrapping procedure is given as follows:
1. Select a relevant document RelatedD from a large corpus of unlabeled data with respect to the test set T using the document selection method described earlier.
2. Split RelatedD into n subsets and mark them
C 1 , C 2 , . . . , Cn .
3. Call the development set DevT.
4. For I = 1 to n
(a) Run initial ME, CRF, SVM-F and SVM-B on
Ci .
(b) For each tagged sentence S in Ci , if at least 80%
of the words agree with the same outputs by the
majority of models then keep S; otherwise, remove S.
(c) Assign outputs to the remaining words from the
SVM-F model.
(d) If the length of S is less than five words or it does
not contain any name then discard S.
(e) Add Ci to the training data and retrain each
model. This produces the updated models.
(f) Run the updated models on DevT; if the performance gets reduced then do not use Ci and use
the old models.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 until performance of each model becomes identical in two consecutive iterations.
69
Table 11: Statistics of the training, development and test

sets
# of sentences
#of wordforms
#of NEs
#Avg. length of NE
Training
21,340
272,000
22,488
1.5138
Development
3,367
50,000
3,665
1.6341
Test
2,501
35,000
3,178
1.6202
6 Evaluation results and discussions

We have manually annotated approximately 200K wordforms of the Bengali news corpus [55] with Person name,
Location name, Organization name and Miscellaneous
name NE tags with the help of Sanchay Editor 6 , a text
editor for the Indian languages. Out of 200K wordforms,
150K wordforms along with the IJCNLP-08 shared task
data has been used for training the models. Out of 200K
wordforms, 50K wordforms have been used as the development data. The system has been tested with a gold standard test set of 35K wordforms. Statistics of the training,
development and test sets are given in Table 11.
A number of experiments have been carried out taking
the different combinations of the available words, context
and orthographic word level features to identify the bestsuited set of features in the ME, CRF and SVM frameworks for NER in Bengali. Evaluation results of the development set for the baseline models are presented in Table 12. The baseline ME based system performs best for
the context word window of size three, dynamic NE tag
of the previous word, suffixes and prefixes of length upto
three characters of the current word, POS tag of the current
word and other word-level language independent features.
The system has demonstrated the overall f-score value of
72.49%. The baseline CRF model has shown best performance with the f-score of 75.71% for the context window
of size five, dynamic NE information of the previous word,
POS information of the current and previous words, prefixes and suffixes of length upto three characters of the current word along with other features. The SVM-F based
baseline system has performed best among the three models and has demonstrated the f-score value of 76.3% for the
context window of size six, NE information of the previous
two words, POS information of the current, previous and
the next words along with the other set of features as like
CRF. The SVM-B has shown the f-score value of 76.1%
with the same set of features used in SVM-F. In SVM models, we have conducted experiments with the different polynomial kernel functions and observed the highest f-score
value with degree 2.
The language dependent features as described in Table
9 are included into the baseline models and the evaluation
results are reported in Table 13. We have observed that all
the gazetteers are not equally important to improve the per6 Sourceforge.net/project/nlp-sanchay
70
A. Ekbal et al.
Table 12: Results of the baseline models

Model
ME
CRF
SVM-F
SVM-B
R (in %)
73.55
75.97
77.14
77.09
P (in %)
71.45
75.45
75.48
75.14
FS (in %)
72.49
75.71
76.30
76.10
Table 13: Results including language dependent features

Model
ME
CRF
SVM-F
SVM-B
R (in %)
75.26
79.03
81.37
81.29
P (in %)
74.91
80.62
80.14
79.16
FS (in %)
74.41
79.82
80.75
80.21
formance of the classifiers. The use of gazetteers increases

the performance by 2.43%, 4.11%, 4.45%, and 4.11% in
the ME, CRF, SVM-F, and SVM-B classifiers, respectively.
Results show that the effect of language dependent features
is not very impressive in ME model. Thus, it can be decided that the use of all available features can not always
improve the performance in a ME model and careful feature selection is very important.
6.1 Use of context patterns as features

High ranked patterns in the Accept Pattern set can be used
as the features of the individual classifier. Words in the left
and/or the right contexts of person, location and organization names carry effective information that could be helpful in their identification. A feature ContextInformation
is defined by observing the words in the window [3, 3]
(three words spanning to left and right) of the current word
in the following way:
Feature value is 1 if the window contains any word of the
pattern type Person name.
pattern type Location name.
pattern type Organization name.
Feature value is 4 if the window contains any word that
appears with more than one type.
Feature value is 0 for those if the window does not contain any word of any pattern.
Experimental results of the system for the development
set are presented in Table 14 by including the context features. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of context features with the improvement of f-scores by 3.17%,
3.08%, 2.82%, and 3.28% in the ME, CRF, SVM-F, and
SVM-B models, respectively. So, the context features are
effective in improving the performance of all the models.
Table 14: Results using context features

Model
ME
CRF
SVM-F
SVM-B
R (in %)
78.26
82.07
84.56
84.42
P (in %)
76.91
83.75
82.60
82.58
FS (in %)
77.58
82.90
83.57
83.49
6.2 Post-processing techniques

We have conducted error analysis for all the classifiers with
the help of confusion matrices. Several post-processing
techniques have been adopted in order to improve the performance of each of the classifiers. It has been observed
that the SVM models have the highest tendency of assigning NE tags to the words that are actually not NEs. In ME
model, a lot of NEs are not identified at all. CRF model
also suffers from this problem. The most confusing pairs
of classes in these two models are LOC vs NNE, MISC
vs NNE, PER vs NNE, E-ORG vs NNE and B-MISC vs
MISC. On the other hand the most confusing pairs are LOC
vs NNE, PER vs NNE, MISC vs NNE and E-ORG vs NNE.
Depending upon the errors involved in the models, we have
developed various mechanisms to improve the recall and
precision values of the classifiers.
Class decomposition technique for SVM: Unlike CRF,
SVM model does not predict the NE tags to the constituent words depending upon the sentence. SVM
predicts the class depending upon the labeled word
examples only. If target classes are equally distributed, the pairwise method can reduce the training
cost. Here, we have a very unlabeled class distribution with a large number of samples belonging to the
class NNE (other than NEs) (Table 11). This leads
to the same situation like one-vs-rest strategy. One
solution to this unbalanced class distribution is to decompose the NNE class into several subclasses effectively. Here, we have decomposed the NNE class
according to the POS information of the word. That
is, given a POS tagset POS, we produce new |P OS|
classes, N N E C 0 |C P OS. So, we have 26 subclasses which correspond to non-NE regions such as
NNE-NN (common noun), NNE-VFM (verb finite
main) etc. Experimental results have shown the recall, precision, and f-score values of 87.09%, 86.73%,
and 86.91%, respectively, in the SVM-F model and
87.03%, 85.98%, and 86.5%, respectively, in SVM-B
model. We have also conducted similar experiments
in the CRF models and observed the lower f-score values.
Post-processing with the n-best outputs for CRF:
There are inconsistent results in the CRF model in
some cases. We have performed a post-processing
step to correct these errors. The post-processing tries
to assign the correct tag according to the n-best results
for every sentence of the test set. We have considered

the top 15 labeled sequences for each sentence with
the confidence scores. Initially, we collect the NEs
from the high confident results and then we re-assign
the tags for low confident results using this NE list.
The procedure is given below: S is the set of sentences
in the test set, i.e, S = {s1 , s2 , . . . , sn }; R is set of nbest result (n = 15) of S, i.e, R = {r1 , r2 , . . . , rn },
where ri is a set of n-best results of si ; cij is the confidence score of rij , that is the jth result in ri .
Creation of NE set from the high confident tags:
for i = 1 to n {if (ri0 0.6) then collect all NEs
from ri0 and add to the set NESet }.
Replacement:
for i = 1 to n {if (ri0 0.6) then Result(si )=ri0 ;
else { TempResult(si )=ri0 ;
for j = 1 to m {if ( NEs of rij are included in NESet)
then Replace the NE tags
of TempResult with these new tags}.
Result(si ) =TempResult(si )}}.
Evaluation results have demonstrated the recall, precision, and f-score values of 86.75%, 85.91%, and
86.33%, respectively, in the CRF model. Thus, there
is an improvement of 4.43% f-score in the CRF
model.
Post-processing the output of ME model: We have
used the following heuristics to further improve the
performance of the ME model. Some of the rules
are useful to improve the recall values, whereas some
are effective to increase the precisions. Many of the
heuristics are also helpful to identify the boundaries
properly. Following are the set of heuristics.
1. The NNE tag of a particular word is replaced
by the appropriate NE tag, if that word appears
somewhere in the output with that NE.
2. If any word is tagged as B-XXX/I-XXX/E-XXX
(XXX: PER/LOC/ORG/MISC) and the previous
and next words are tagged as NNE then that
word is assigned the NE tag of type XXX.
3. The NNE tag of a word is replaced by the EXXX if the previous word is already tagged as
B-XXX.
4. NNE tag of a word is replaced by B-XXX, if the
next word is already tagged as E-XXX.
5. If there is sequence B-XXX/I-XXX followed by
XXX in the output, then the tag XXX is replaced
by the E-XXX.
6. If the sequence of tags is of the form XXX BXXX1/I-XXX1/E-XXX1 NNE (XXX#XXX1)
for three consecutive words in the output, then
the tag B-XXX1/I-XXX1/E-XXX1 is replaced
by the XXX1.
71
7. If current word is not tagged as B-XXX/IXXX/NNE but the following word is tagged as
B-XXX/I-XXX/E-XXX then the current word is
assigned the tag B-XXX.
8. If the words, tagged as NNE, contain the variable length NE suffixes (used as the feature in
the baseline models) then the words are assigned
the NE tags. The types of the NE tags are determined by the types of the suffixes (e.g., Person
tag is assigned if matches with the person name
suffix).
Evaluation results have demonstrated the recall, precision, and f-score values of 81.55%, 78.67%, and 80.8%,
respectively.
6.3 Impact of unlabeled data selection

In order to investigate the contribution of document selection in bootstrapping, we run the post-processed models on
35,143 news documents. This yields the gradually improving performance for the models as shown in Table 15.
We have also carried out experiments with the same unlabeled data in order to observe the effectiveness of document selection and sentence selection separately. Results
are reported in Table 16. Row 2 of the table represents results of the post-processed models that are used to tag the
unlabeled documents to be included into the initial training set in a bootstrapped manner. This presents the results
by using the majority voting selection criterion only. Comparing row 2 with row 3, we find that not using document
selection, even though it multiplies the size of the training
corpus, results in 1.04%, 1.36%, 1.02%, and 0.83% lower
performance in the ME, CRF, SVM-B, and SVM-F models, respectively. This leads us to conclude that simply relying upon large corpus is not in itself sufficient. Effective use of large corpus demands good selection criterion
of documents to remove off-topic materials. The system
has demonstrated the f-score values of 83.87%, 89.34%,
89.55%, and 89.37% in the ME, CRF, SVM-F, and SVMB models, respectively, by adding the sentence selection
method.
6.4 Voting techniques

Voting scheme is effective in order to improve the overall
performance of any multi-engine system. Here, we have
combined four models using three different voting mechanisms. But before applying weighted voting, we need to
decide the weights to be given to the individual system. We
can obtain the best weights if we could obtain the accuracy
for the true test data. However, it is impossible to estimate
them. Thus, we have used following weighting methods in
our experiments:
1. Uniform weights (Majority voting): We have assigned
the same voting weight to all the systems. The com-
72
A. Ekbal et al.
Table 15: Incremental improvement of performance

Itera
tion
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Sentences
added
0
107
213
311
398
469
563
619
664
691
701
722
ME
80.8
81.2
81.67
81.94
82.32
82.78
82.94
83.56
83.79
83.85
83.87
83.87
FS (in %)
CRF
SVM-F
86.33 86.91
86.9
87.27
87.35 87.53
87.93 88.12
88.11 88.25
88.66 88.83
89.03 89.17
89.12 89.27
89.28 89.35
89.34 89.51
89.34 89.55
89.34 89.55
SVM-B
86.5
87.13
87.41
87.99
88.18
88.71
89.08
89.15
89.22
89.37
89.37
89.37
Table 16: Incremental improvement of performance

1
2
3
4
Model
Post-processed
(1)+ Bootstrapping
(2) + Document selection
(3) + Sentence selection
bined system selects the classifications, which are proposed by the majority of the models. If four outputs
are different, then the output of the SVM-F system is
selected.
2. Cross validation f-score values: The training data is
divided into N portions. We employ the training by
using N 1 portions, and then evaluate the remaining portion. This is repeated N times. In each iteration, we have evaluated the individual system following the similar methodology, i.e., by including the
various gazetteers and the same set of post-processing
techniques. At the end, we get N f-score values for
each of the system. Final voting weight for a system is
given by the average of these N f-score values. Here,
we set the value of N to be 10. We have defined two
different types of weights depending on the cross validation f-score as follows:
Total F-Score: In the first method, we have assigned the overall average f-score of any classifier as the weight for it.
Tag F-Score: In the second method, we have assigned the average f-score value of the individual
tag as the weight for that model.
Experimental results of the voted system are presented in
Table 17. Evaluation results show that the system achieves
the highest performance for the voting scheme Tag FScore. Voting shows (Tables 16-17) an overall improve-
ME
80.8
82.01
83.05
83.87
CRF
86.33
87.36
88.72
89.34
SVM-F
86.91
88.05
88.88
89.55
SVM-B
86.50
87.81
88.83
89.37
Table 17: Results of the voted system (development set)

Voting
Majority
Total F-Score
Tag F-Score
R (in %)
93.19
93.85
93.98
P (in %)
89.35
89.97
91.46
FS (in %)
91.23
92.17
92.71
ment of 8.84% over the least performing ME based system and 3.16% over the best performing SVM-F system in
terms of f-score values.
6.5
Experimental results of the test set
The systems have been tested with a gold standard test set
of 35K wordforms. Approximately, 25% of the NEs are
unknown in the test set. Experimental results of the test
set for the baseline models have shown the f-score values
of 73.15%, 76.35%, 77.36%, and 77.23% in the ME, CRF,
SVM-F, and SVM-B based systems, respectively. Results
have demonstrated the improvement in f-scores by 8.35%,
9.67%, 8.82% and 8.83% in the ME, CRF, SVM-B, and
SVM-F models, respectively, by including the language
specific features, context features and post-processing techniques. Appropriate unlabeled sentences are then selected
by the document and sentence selection methods to be included into the training set. Models have shown the fscores of 83.77%, 89.02%, 89.17%, and 89.11% in the ME,
CRF, SVM-F, and SVM-B models, respectively. Experi-
Table 18: Results of the voted system (test set)

Voting
Majority
Total F-Score
Tag F-Score
R (in %)
92.91
93.55
93.79
P (in %)
89.77
90.16
91.34
FS (in %)
91.31
91.82
92.55
Table 19: Comparison with other Bengali NER systems

Model
A ([40])
B ([40])
HMM ([41])
ME ([42])
CRF ([43])
SVM ([68])
Proposed system
R(%)
66.53
69.32
74.02
78.64
80.02
81.57
93.79
P (%)
63.45
65.11
72.55
76.89
80.21
79.05
91.34
FS (%)
64.95
67.15
73.28
77.75
80.15
80.29
92.55
mental results of the voted system are presented in Table

18. Results show that the voting scheme that considers the
f-score value of the individual NE tag as the weight of a
particular classifier, i.e., Tag F-Score gives the best result
among the three voting methods. The voted system has
demonstrated the improvement in the f-scores by 8.78%,
3.53%, 3.38%, 3.44%, in the ME, CRF, SVM-F, and SVMB systems, respectively.
The existing Bengali NER systems based on the pattern
directed shallow parsing approach[40], HMM [41], ME
[59], CRF [43], and SVM [68] have been evaluated with
the same datasets. Comparative evaluation results are presented in Table 19. Comparisons with the works reported
in the IJCNLP-08 shared task are out of scope because of
the following reasons:
The shared task was involved with a fine-grained
tagset of twelve NE tags. In this work, we have considered only the tags that denote person name, location name, organization name, date, time and number
expressions.
73
7 Conclusion
In this paper, we have reported a NER system by combining
the classifiers, namely ME, CRF and SVM with the help of
weighted voting techniques. We have manually annotated
a portion of the Bengali news corpus, developed from the
web archive of a leading Bengali newspaper. In addition,
we have also used the IJCNLP-08 NER shared task data
tagged with a fine-grained NE tag set of twelve tags. We
have converted this data with the NE tags denoting person
name, location name, organization name and miscellaneous
name. The individual models make use of the different
contextual information of the words, several orthographic
word-level features and the binary valued features extracted
from the various gazetteers that are helpful to predict the
NE classes. A number of features are language independent in nature. We have used an unsupervised learning
technique to generate lexical context patterns to be used as
features of the classifiers. We have described the method of
selecting appropriate unlabeled documents and sentences
from a large collection of unlabeled data. This eliminates
the necessity of manual annotation for preparing the NE
annotated corpus. We have also shown how several heuristics for ME, n-best output of CRF and the class splitting
technique of SVM are effective in improving the performance of the corresponding model. Finally, the outputs of
the classifiers have been combined with the three different
weighted voting techniques. It has been shown that combination of several models performs better than any single
one.
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58
77
Assigning Library of Congress Classification Codes to Books

Based Only on their Titles
Ricardo vila-Argelles1, Hiram Calvo1,2, Alexander Gelbukh1 and Salvador Godoy-Caldern1
1
Center for Computing Research, National Polytechnic Institute

Mexico City, 07738, Mexico
E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; www.gelbukh.com; [email protected]
Nara Institute of Science and Technology

Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan
Keywords: library classification, LCC, scarce information classification, logical-combinatorial methods

Many publishers follow the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) scheme to indicate a classification
code on the first pages of their books. This is useful for many libraries worldwide because it makes
possible to search and retrieve books by content type, and this scheme has become a de facto standard.
However, not every book has been pre-classified by the publisher; in particular, in many universities,
new dissertations have to be classified manually. Although there are many systems available for
automatic text classification, all of them use extensive information which is not always available, such
as the index, abstract, or even the whole content of the work. In this work, we present our experiments
on supervised classification of books by using only their title, which would allow massive automatic
indexing. We propose a new text comparison measure, which mixes two well-known text classification
techniques: the Lesk voting scheme and the Term Frequency (TF). In addition, we experiment with
different weighing as well as logical-combinatorial methods such as ALVOT in order to determine the
contribution of the title in the correct classification. We found this contribution to be approximately one
third, as we correctly classified 36% (on average by each branch) of 122,431 previously unseen titles (in
total) upon training with 489,726 samples (in total) of one major branch (Q) of the LCC catalogue.
Povzetek: Opisan je postopek klasifikacije knjig na osnovi naslovov v ameriki kongresni knjinici.
Introduction
One of the most important tasks of librarians is book

classification. A classification system designed to meet
their requirements is the Library of Congress
Classification (LCC) scheme, which is widely known
and used by many important libraries in the world [6],
being the system with the widest coverage of books.
Besides using the previously assigned LCC code for each
book, librarians need to classify other works such as
dissertations, articles, magazines, which in most cases
lack a previously assigned LCC code [7].
Given the size of the LCC list, manual assignment of
an LCC category is a tedious and error-prone process.
There exist systems that facilitate this process using
automatic text classification techniques. However, such
systems require extensive information about the book in
machine-readable form, for example, an abstract, table of
contents, or the complete text of the work. Providing

such information when it is not available beforehand is
costly and impractical.
Our motivation for this work was to develop an
algorithm that is able to automatically assign a
classification code based only on the most basic piece of
information available: the title of the publication. We
explore the level of attainment that it is possible to obtain
given this strong restriction. On this way, we faced
several problems, such as similar titles in different
classes and a noisy data set, among others. We conducted
tests using five supervised classification algorithms;
some of them are rather simple, while other, such as
those based on Logical-Combinatorial methods, are more
sophisticated. In this paper we report on the results of
these experiments and compare the methods that we
considered.
78
R. vila-Argelles et al.
Table 1: Comparison between our system and similar systems

Systems*
Features
Uses LCC
Uses book title
Uses whole book contents
Uses LCSH thesaurus*
Uses MARC*
Uses Text Categorization and IE techniques**
Uses Machine Learning
Uses Logical-Combinatorial methods
3.
4.
800,000
19,000
800,000
Test set
Precision
50,000
55.00%
1,029
80.99%
50,000
86.00%
See below.
**
Our
system
1,500,00
0
7,200
16.90%
489,726
122,431
86.89%
Information Extraction
Related work
Predicting Library of Congress Classification from

Library of Congress Subject Headings [3].
The Utility of Information Extraction in the
classification of books [4].
Experiments in Automatic Library of congress
Classification [5].
Challenges in automated classification using library
classification schemes [2].
LCSH and MARC are lexical resources frequently used

in similar works. They can be summarized as follows:
Table 1 summarizes previous works on book

classification and compares them with our work as to the
information and resources used and the resulting
precision achieved. The systems compared in the table
are as follows:
2.
In the next section, we present a review of existing

related works. In Section 3, we describe different
algorithms that we considered. In Section 4, we explain
our experiments with the LCC catalog and present the
experimental results. Finally, in Section 5 we draw our
conclusions and outline the future work.
1.
Training set
LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) is a

collection of synonyms and antonyms of some
terms related to book contents. This collection is
updated by the Library of Congress. LCSH is
widely used for book search where queries such as
body temperature regulation should point to a title
with the word thermoregulation [8].
MARC (Machine Readable Cataloguing) defines a
bibliographic data format. It provides a protocol for
computers to exchange, use, and interpret
bibliographic information [10], [13].
These resources are available only in English.
Classification algorithms we used
We implement a supervised learning technique. We

assume that there is a collection of previously classified
titles, and assign the new title to a category where the
titles most similar to it belong in the training collection.
The main difference between supervised learning
techniques is in the definition of similarity. Accordingly,
we have tested several methods of judging similarity
between texts.
We tested several basic algorithms based on the
simple classifier, or simple term matching. These basic
algorithms and their variations, as well as more complex
algorithms, are described in the following sections.
3.1
Algorithm 0: Frequency term voting
In this algorithm we first remove stopwords (function

words, such as determiners and prepositions). Each title
is compared with other titles from each class. For
example, let Title 1 be compared with every other title in
the collection (stop words appear strikethrough, because
they are removed from consideration):
Title 1: ANATOMY from the GREEKS to HARVEY.
And for example, let Title 2 to be:
Title 2: SHORT HISTORY of ANATOMY from the
GREEKS to HARVEY.
We count then the number of words intersected from
the two titles, being in this example the similarity = 3:
Title A Title B = {ANATOMY, GREEKS, HARVEY}
Using Simple Term Matching technique, we take the
terms contained in the title to be classified, and then we
measure their frequency in each one of the classes that
contain them. The selected class is chosen by being the
one with the highest calculated frequency.
Consider a very simple example, on which we will
illustrate different algorithms. Suppose we have a title
with 4 terms and 4 subclasses from QA. Let A, F, D and
C be four consecutive terms (words) from the title to be
classified. 5 of these terms are present in class QA1, 7 in
ASSIGNING LIBRARY OF CONGRESS...
class QA103, 2 in QA242.5 and 4 in QA247. QA103 is

the one with more votes; see Figure 1 and Table 3.
QA1
C A B C
A D E I
H G H I
QA103
12
C A C C
F D G F
I G D I
Table 4: Presence counts for the intersection of title

A F D C and classes of Figure 1
A
F
D
C
Presence
12
QA247
QA 242.5
E A B C J K
J D E F L M
L G H I N
17
Figure 1: Example of terms (words, such as A)

belonging to titles for each classification (such as QA1)
Table 3: Frequency counts for the intersection of title
AFDC and classes of Figure 1
A
F
D
C
Frequency
QA1
2
0
1
2
5
QA103
1
1
2
3
7
QA242.5
0
1
1
0
2
Algorithm 1. Weighted Term Frequency Voting.

1.
2.
3.
QA247
1
1
1
1
4
4.
5.
6.
Algorithm 0. Frequency Term Voting
3.2
Extract title terms.

Remove stopwords (articles, prepositions, etc.).
Calculate the frequency of the terms in the class
Apply solution rule: the title belongs to the class
with the greatest number of coincident terms.
3.3
Extract the terms from Title T.

Remove stopwords.
Calculate Term Frequency of title T in all the
classes, weighted by the total number of
elements of each class.
Calculate Term Presence for all the classes.
Calculate S(Title, Class)= Term Frequency for
all classes + Term Presence in Class.
Apply solution rule: the selected class for title T
is the one with the highest S(T, Class).
Algorithm 2: Term frequency weighted

by TF/IDF
Following the same example, first we calculate the Term

Frequency. Then we calculate IDF for each row using the
following formula [1]. Results are shown in Table 5.
classes
IDF log
C | C is a class and w C
Algorithm 1: Weighted term frequency

voting
This algorithm considers the existence or absence of the

terms in the title to be classified with regard to the
classes where it should be classified, i.e., if the term is
present in the class it will be counted as 1 and if not, as 0.
Following the same example as with Algorithm 0,
we show the calculated Term Presence in Table 4.
QA1 QA103 QA242.5 QA247

1
1
0
1
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
3
4
2
4
It is common to have similar values, as it is shown in

previous table (A F D C would be classified in QA103 as
well as in QA247). To avoid this, we add a Term
Frequency factor to the Term Presence. See Table 2.
The algorithm can be summarized as Algorithm 1.
The algorithm can be summarized as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Finally we multiply each row by its corresponding IDF

value (for example, (2/12) 0.124939 = 0.20823), which
yields the data shown in Table 6. The selected class is the
one with the greatest TF/IDF, in this case, QA103.
We can see from this table that the term D has zeroes
in all columns, because it is present in all classes.
Because of IDF, in general, any term present in every
class has no effect in classification. On the contrary, a
particular term is present mostly in a set of classes, and
Table 2: Term Frequency and Term Presence

Class:
Word
A
F
D
C
Term Frequency
Term Presence in the class
Term Frequency + Term Presence
79
QA1
QA103
QA242.5
2/12
0/12
1/12
2/12
5/12 0.4167
3
3.4167
1/12
1/12
2/12
3/12
7/12 0.5833
4
4.5833
0/6
1/6
1/6
0/6
2/6 0.3333
2
2.3333
QA247
1/17
1/17
1/17
1/17
4/17 0.2353
4
4.2353
80
then it contributes to them proportionally to its lesser

presence in other classes.
Table 5: TF and IDF calculation for the title A F D C
Class QA1 QA103 QA242.5 QA247
Term
A
F
D
C
TF
2/12
0/12
1/12
2/12
5/12
1/12
1/12
2/12
3/12
7/12
0/6
1/6
1/6
0/6
2/6
1/17
1/17
1/17
1/17
4/17
IDF
0.124939
0.124939
0
0.124939
Table 6: TFIDF for the intersection of title A F D C and

classes of Fig. 1
Class
Word
A
F
D
C
Total
QA1 QA103 QA242.5 QA247 Total

0.020
0.000
0.000
0.020
0.041
0.010
0.010
0.000
0.031
0.052
0.000
0.020
0.000
0.000
0.020
0.007
0.007
0.000
0.007
0.022
0.038
0.038
0.000
0.059
Algorithm 2: Term Frequency weighted by TFIDF.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
3.4
Extract the terms from the title T.

Remove stopwords.
Use Algorithm 1 to calculate TF.
Calculate IDF.
Classify title T as class C for the class with the
highest TFIDF.
Algorithm 3: Term presence

discrimination
Based on our observations of the previous algorithms, we

propose this one. It is derived from Algorithm 1, but we
use only the classes with the greatest presence of terms,
while the other classes are discarded. Then we apply the
TFIDF classification from Algorithm 2 to the remaining
classes.
Algorithm 3: Term presence discrimination.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Extract the terms from the title T.

Eliminate stopwords.
Calculate term presence for each term w of title
T for each class C.
Calculate M = max (term presence).
Remove classes with term presence < M.
If only one class is left then
Classify title T in this class,
otherwise:
Calculate TFIDF for the remaining
classes.
Classify T as member of the class with the
highest TFIDF.
For example, consider Table 4. We can see that only

QA103 and QA247 are possible classifications. Then,
using only them, we calculate their TFIDF values.
3.5
Algorithms 4 and 4': Title classification

using logical-combinatorial methods
We experimented with the algorithm known as ALVOT.

It has its origin in 1965 approximately [12]. It was
developed by Yu. I. Zhuravliov and his group. ALVOT
uses feature subsets called support groups or omega
groups. For our analysis, we used the total set of terms
from a title.
The model for voting algorithms has five
components [11]:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Feature sets
Comparison criterion
Similarity function
Object evaluation (row) given a feature set
Class evaluation (column) for all feature sets
Rule of Solution
Feature sets: a non-empty set of features in terms of

which all objects will be analysed.
Comparison criterion: A function with two descriptive
features as input, from the same domain, and defining
how they should be compared, giving a result within the
range [0,1]: Cci ( A, B ) 0,1 , where A and B are
descriptive features within the same domain.

Similarity function. It is a function that performs
calculations using the defined comparison criteria for
each feature comprising the object. The similarity
function is normalized to the range [0, 1]. Its formal
description is:
f (M1 M 2 ... M r ) (M1 M 2 ... M r ) 0,1 ,
where M is the set of all features comprising the objects

of a covering.
Evaluation by object (row) given a fixed feature set is
performed once the feature set and the similarity function
are defined. In this one a process of vote counting is
performed, related to the similarity measure of the
different features of the previously classified objects,
with regard to those which are to be classified. Each row
corresponding to one object is compared to the object to
be classified by using the similarity measure.
Evaluation by class (column) for all the features set. It is
the sum of the obtained evaluations of each one of the
objects with regard to the object to be classified. This
sum is a function from the evaluations by object obtained
previously. That is, the belonging of the object is
calculated with regard to the different classes of
coverings.
Solution rule is a criterion for making a decision. Within
this, the final vote is defined. The class of the object to
be classified is decided, as well as its degree of belonging
to this class.
In our specific case these concepts have the
following meaning:
1.
The objects to classify are titles. Each title has

terms to be used by the similarity measure.
2.
3.
4.
We compared each title to be classified, using a

similarity measure, with every other title from
the sample. The result of this is a matrix with
the results of all comparisons. We call this
matrix similarity matrix.
We created 2 similarity matrices based on two
different similarity measures, that we will
describe shortly.
Our solution rule:
a. Defines the class to which each one of the
titles belong.
b. The degree of belonging of each title to the
class. As we are using hard classes (it
belongs, or it does not belong), then this
value will be 0 or 1.
Each title with all of its terms (not separated, as in

the previous algorithms) is assigned to the class where it
belongs, and we compare the new title to be classified
with all the previously classified titles.
We define two different similarity functions,
explained in the following two sections.
3.5.1
Similarity between titles (Algorithm 4)
For this case the measure is expressed by the following

formula:
STM
f T i ,T j
max T i , T j
where
f (T i , Q j )
3.5.2
Similarity of the title to be classified with

all the titles in a class (Algorithm 4')
For this case the measure is expressed by the following

formula:
i,
Tp
where:
Ti is the title to be classified,
Qj is a class to be evaluated for similarity with Ti.
The title to be classified will be compared with all
the titles from each class, so that the class which in
average has the greatest similarity will be chosen.
Consider the following example:
Title to classify: PRACTICAL MATHEMATICS,
Length = 2.
From Table 7 we can see that the selected class
would be the title with greatest similarity with the title to
be classified, i.e., QA39. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of
the system.
Algorithms 4 and 4': Title Classification Using LogicalCombinatorial methods.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
STM is the number of terms identical in the patterns,

Ti is the title to be classified,
Tj is the title previously classified,
| Ti | and | Tj | are the number of terms in Ti and Tj.
This means that the title will be compared with every
other title. The class which contains the title with the
greatest similarity will be selected.
f T
T p Q
81
Extract the terms from Title T.

Eliminate stop words.
Calculate similarity of Title T with all of the other
titles with at least one similar term.
Calculate per class average similarity.
Solution rule:
Algorithm 4: The selected class is the one which
contains the most similar title to Title T.
Algorithm 4: The selected class is the one with
greatest average similarity with Title T.
Evaluation and results
We experimented with class Q (Sciences) from the

Library of Congress (LCC). The Q class comprises the
following subclasses: QA: Math, QB: Astronomy, QC:
Physics, QD: Chemistry, QE: Geology, QH: Natural
History, QK: Botany, QL: Zoology, QM: Human
Anatomy, QP: Physiology, QR: Microbiology.
We performed 11 experiments, each of them trained
with 80% of the records, and evaluated with 20% of them
from each branch using the previously described
algorithms, namely:
Table 7: Example of similarity measures of title PRACTICAL MATHEMATICS

with other titles from all classes
Similarity
0.00
0.50
0.33
0.17
0.20
0.25
0.20
0.17
0.14
0.14
0.17
0.17
STM
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Length
1
2
3
6
5
4
5
6
7
7
6
6
Sub-Class
QA37
QA39
QA303
QA5
QA501
QA76
QA76.58
QA37
QA37.2
QA37.2
QA37.2
QA37.2
Title
BIOMATHEMATICS
MATHEMATICS USE
PURE MATHEMATICS COURSE
MATHEMATICS JA GLENN GH LITTLER DICTIONARY
PRACTICAL DESCRIPTIVE GEOMETRY, GRANT
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL COMPUTER MATHEMATICS
PRACTICAL PARALLEL COMPUTING STEPHEN MORSE
MATHEMATICS MEASUREMENTS MERRILL RASSWEILER MERLE HARRIS
APPLIED FINITE MATHEMATICS RICHARD COPPINS PAUL UMBERGER
EUCLIDEAN SPACES PREPARED LINEAR MATHEMATICS COURSE TEAM
FOUNDATIONS MATHEMATICS KENNETH BERNARD HENRY WELLENZOHN
MATHEMATICS APPLICATIONS LAURENCE HOFFMANN MICHAEL ORKIN
82
Figure 2: Screenshot of the experiment.
0. Frequency Term Voting.

1. Weighted Term Frequency Voting.
2. Term Frequency weighted by TFIDF.
3. Term Presence Discrimination.
4 and 4'. Title Classification using
Combinatorial methods.
Table 9: Experimental evaluation (1)
Logical-
In the following sections we present the average

performance of each experiment for each branch.
4.1
Learning rate (training and test sets

are the same)
The corresponding data are shown in Table 8 and

Table 9.
Table 8: Experimental data description (1)
Experiment
0 to 3
4, 4'
Training
records
515,721
8,837
Subclasses
Keywords
8,243
402
1,454,615
28,398
Test
records
515,721
8,387
Algorithm
0
1
2
3
4
4
Uncovered
0
228
0
5,35
0
0
Covered
515,721 515,493 515,721 510,286
8,837
8,837
Success
178,654 433,861 177,945 396,689
8,214
7,822
Failure
337,067 81,860 337,776 119,032
623
1,015
Precision
34.64% 84.16% 34.50% 77.74% 92.95% 88.51%
4.2
Evaluation for unseen titles (training

80%, test 20%)
The corresponding data are shown in Table 10 and

Table 11.
Table 10: Experimental data description (2)
Training
records
489,726
Subclasses
Keywords
8,377
1,441,220
Test
records
122,431
Coverage was 100% for all tests.

Algorithm
0
1
2
3
4
4'
Success
32,869 41,763 32,507 42,305 41,537 30,223
Failure
84,222 75,328 84,584 74,786 75,554 86,868
Recall
28.07% 35.67% 27.76% 36.13% 35.47% 25.81%
83
In Table 13, it can be seen that the top 5 suggestions

given by our system comprise more than 62% of the
correct classification for Algorithm 1. This suggest that
this method could be used for suggesting classifications
for a librarian reducing the number of classes he or she
has to consider for classifying a title.
proved to be Algorithms 1 and 3. These are simple

algorithms that run approximately in half the time that
the basic logical-combinatorial algorithms took.
Algorithm 1 presents the correct answer within the top 5
answers with slightly more than a 60% precision. The
highest learning rate was from the ALVOT algorithm
(Algorithms 4 and 4') that achieve more than 92.95%
accuracy. For the unseen titles test we obtained 37.74%
accuracy using the ALVOT algorithm (the version used
in Algorithm 4) based on logical-combinatorial methods.
These experiments show that the title of a book is
contributing at least one third of the information for its
correct classification, as can be shown by comparing our
results with those using more resources such as the table
of contents, the complete text contents, MARC and
LCSH (for example 36 with regard to 90) for sub-class
comparison.
In the future we plan to explore more developed
NLP methods for improving the performance of
classification based only on the title of the work. Among
other methods, we plan on involving thesauri and
stemming, as well as using more sophisticated algorithms
within the logical-combinatorial approach.
Acknowledgements
4.2.1
Evaluation up to decimal point
In this section a less strict evaluation is presented. A

complete classification would be QA237.6, being the .6
part more specific. If the decimal part is not considered,
QA237.13 would be correct as well.
Algorithm
Success
Failure
Recall
0
39,482
77,609
33.72%
1
48,857
68,234
41.73%
2
39,023
78,068
33.33%
3
48,274
68,817
41.23%
We did not perform this test for algorithm 4 and 4'.
4.2.2
Evaluation by position
Conclusions and future work
We experimented with the branch Q of the LCC

database, which comprises 612,157 titles in several
languages. We achieved to classify books using only
their title, when using the LCC classification up to its
first decimal point (v.gr. QA237.15). Our evaluation was
based on 8,377 subclasses of class Q, separately for each
main branch (QA, QB, etc.). The best two algorithms
The work was done under partial support of the

Mexican Government (CONACYT grants 50206-H and
60557, SIP-IPN 20091587, and PIFI-IPN) and the
Japanese Government. The second author is a JSPS
fellow, and the second, third, and fourth authors are
National Researchers of Mexico (SNI).
Table 13: Evaluation by position
1
2
3
4
5
Total
0
VFT
28.07%
12.37%
7.60%
5.51%
4.18%
57.73%
1
2
VFTP VFTP-TFIDF
35.67%
27.76%
12.28%
12.08%
6.88%
7.51%
4.65%
5.42%
3.40%
4.11%
56.88%
62.88%
References
[1] Manning, C. Shtze, H, Foundations of statistical
natural language Processing, MIT Press, ISBN
0262133601, Cambridge, May, 620 p., 1999.
[2] Kwan, Yi, Challenges in automated classification
using library classification schemes, Proceedings of
the 97 Information Technology with Audiovisual
and Multimedia and National Libraries IFLA 2006,
Seoul, Korea, 2006.
[3] Frank, Ebie, Gordon W. Paynter, Predicting Library
of Congress classifications from Library of
Congress subject headings, Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology,
Volume 55, Issue 3 , pp 214-227, 2004.
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
4
3
4
DPT
VT-MLC VT-MLC
36.13%
35.47%
25.81%
10.15%
8.20%
9.71%
3.83%
4.62%
6.01%
2.05%
3.31%
4.49%
1.19%
2.51%
3.54%
53.35%
54.11%
49.56%
Betts, Tom, Maria Milosavljevic, and Jon

Oberlander. The utility of information extraction in
the classification of books. In Proceedings of the
29th European Conference on Information
Retrieval (ECIR 2007), Rome, Italy, 2004.
Larson, Ray R., Experiments in automatic library of
congress classification, Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology,
Volume 43, Issur 2, pp 130-148, January 1999.
Matthis, Raimund, Adopting the library of congress
classification system. A manual methods and
techniques for application or conversion, New
York: R. R. Bowker, USA, 209 p.
Savage Helen, Droste Kathleen D., Runchock Rita,
Class Q science: Library of Congress classification
84
[8]
[9]
schedules combined with additions and changes

through 1987, Library of Congress. Subject
Cataloguing Division, Detroit, Michigan: Gale
research: Book Tower, USA, 862 p.
Immroth, John Phillip, A guide to Library of
Congress classification, Rochester libraries
unlimited, USA, 356 p.
Library of Congress/Decimal Classification Office,
Guide to use of dewey decimal classification. Based
on the practice of the practice of the decimal
classification office at the library of congress,
Forest, New york, USA, 133 p.
[10] Furrie, Betty, Conociendo MARC bibliogrfico:

catalogacin legible por mquina, Rojas Eberhard,
Bogot, Colombia, 30 pp.
[11] A.N. Dmitriev, Yu.I. Zhuravliov; F.P. Kredelev,
Acerca de los principios matemticos de la
clasificacin de objetos y fenmenos, Novosibirsk,
Rusia, Tomo 7, pp. 3-15
[12] Ruiz Shulcloper, Jos; Guzmn Arenas, Adolfo;
Martnez Trinidad J. Francisco, Enfoque lgico
combinatorio al reconocimiento de patrones,
seleccin de variables y clasificacin supervisada,
IPN, Mexico, pp. 6975.
[13] Taylor, Arlene G., The Organization of
Information, page 77. Libraries Unlimited, 2004
85
Automatic Identification of Lexical Units

Vidas Daudaravicius
Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Informatics
Vileikos 8, Kaunas, Lithuania
Keywords: lexical unit, lexical unit identification, token/type ratio, dice score, corpus size, average minimum law
Received: March 3, 2009
Lexical unit is a word or collocation. Extracting lexical knowledge is an essential and difficult task in NLP.
The methods of extracting of lexical units are discussed. We present a method for the identification of
lexical boundaries. The problem of necessity of large corpora for training is discussed. The advantage of
identification of lexical boundaries within a text over traditional window method or full parsing approach
allows to reduce human judgment significantly.
Povzetek: Opisana je metoda za avtomaticno identifikacijo leksikalnih enot.
1 Introduction
Identification of a lexical unit is an important problem in
many natural language processing tasks and refers to the
process of extracting of meaningful word chains. The Lexical unit is a fuzzy term embracing a great variety of notions. The definition of the lexical unit differs according to
the researchers interests and standpoint. It also depends
on the methods of extraction that provide researchers with
lists of lexical items. Most lexical units are usually single words or constructed as binary items consisting of a
node and its collocates found within a previously selected
span. The lexical unit can be: (1) a single word, (2) the habitual cooccurrence of two words and (3) also a frequent
recurrent uninterrupted string of words. Second and third
notion refers to the definition of a collocation or a multi
word unit. It is common to consider a single word as a lexical unit. A big variety of the definition of the collocation
is presented in Violeta Seretan work [12]. Fragments of
corpus or strings of words consisting of collocating words
are called collocational chains [7]. For many years the final
agreed definition of the collocation is not made. Many syntactical, statistical and hybrid methods have been proposed
for collocation extraction [13], [1], [5], [4]. In [10], it is
shown that MWEs are far more diverse and interesting than
is standardly appreciated. MWEs constitute a key problem
that must be resolved in order for linguistically precise NLP
to succeed. Although traditionally seen as a language independent task, collocation extraction relies nowadays more
and more on the linguistic preprocessing of texts prior to
the application of statistical measures. In [14] it is provided a language-oriented review of the existing extraction
work.
In our work we compare Dice and Gravity Counts methods for the identification of lexical units by applying them
under the same conditions. The definition of what is a Lexical Unit in a linguistic sence is not discussed in this paper.
New presented technique extracts collocations like in the

that do not have meaning and have functional purpose. A
question of keeping such collocations as lexical units is left
open. At the same time, it is interesting to see that the
frequency lists of such lexical units for English and Lithuanian (memeber of Balto-Slavonic language group) are now
comparable.
2 Extracting vs. abstracting

Most of the collocation definitions refer to the collocation,
which is constructed in an abstracting way. The collocations are not gathered directly from the text but rather constructed using syntactic and statistical information. The
abstracted collocation is constructed using statistical information extracted from the corpus. The extraction of statistical information from a corpus is only the first step for
constructing collocations. The process of constructing the
collocation is called as a collocation extraction in many research works. In this paper we make difference between the
extraction of collocation and the abstraction of colocation.
The major difference between abstracting and extracting of
collocation is the use of lexical boudaries. The extractive
technique for the identification of lexical units takes a linear approach of consecutive counts of words in a text and of
all the texts in a corpus. Thus calculations of combinability
are applied to the continuous chain of words. The first step
is to detect the strength of combinability for pairs of words
in the corpus, the second step is to detect the boundaries
of the lexical units. The Extractive technique marks lexical
boundaries in the text and a word or a word chain between
these boundaries is a lexical unit. A clear idea about the
boundaries of the lexical units allows to determine the exact size of a corpus lexicon. Abstractive technique uses a
statistical information extracted from a corpus and a definition of a threshold for a good lexical unit. The thresh-
86
V. Daudaravicius
old in many cases is frequency. Tagging and parsing are

also used for filtering out invalid results [8]. Both, abstractive and extractive, techniques use associative measures to
evaluate the combinability of two items. A new technique
is presented to solve the problem of identification of (uni)multiword lexical units without any linguistic knowlegde
when full automatization is necessary. Extractive technique
is very practical, easy to implement, and could improve
quality of results in many IR and IE tasks. Nevertheless
the results can be used for lexicografical tasks.
3 Combinability measures
Two different statistical calculations of collocability counts
are applied (Dice and Gravity Counts)in this work. A good
overview of combinability methods is presented in [3].
3.1 Dice score
f (x, y) n(x)
G(x, y) = log
+
f (x)
f (x, y) n0 (y)
+log
f (y)
(x, y) is the frequency of the pair of words x and y in the
corpus; n(x) is a number of types to the right of x; f (x)
is the frequency of x in the corpus; n0 (y) is the number of
types to the left of y; f (y) is the frequency of y in the corpus. We set the level of collocability at the Gravity Counts
1 in our experiments. This decision was based on the shape
of the curve found in [3].
4 Identifying the boundaries of

lexical units
The human have to set the level of collocability manualy.

We set the level of collocability at the Dice minus 8 in our
experiments. This decision was based on the shape of the
curve found in [3].
There were attempts to extract recurrent uninterrupted

strings of unlemmatized word-forms [7]. The chains were
identified purely on the ground of row frequency and consisted of chains up to five words in length. However, the
applied method did not reveal whether the extracted chains
are made of collocating words. In our case, the detection
of the boundaries of a lexical unit is based on a full text approach. The idea behind this approach is that the corpus is
used as a very long chain of words to calculate the combinability of adjacent word pairs. The counts starts with the
first and ends with the last word of the corpus. Thus, the
corpus is seen as a changing curve of the lexical combinability. Peaks, appearing above the point of a selected value
are taken as collocability points that can form lexical units
(see Figure 1 for an example of a sentence). Using a text as
the basis for the identification of lexical units with the help
of the collocability points allows detecting the boundaries
of each lexical unit. A lexical unit is defined as a segment of
text where the combinability of constituent adjacent word
pairs is above the arbitrarily chosen point of collocability.
The lower combinability of word pairs preceding and following the segment marks the boundaries of a lexical unit.
The list of all such segments from the corpus is the list of its
lexical units. Moreover, we introduce two new additional
definitions of the boundary of lexical unit. We call them
absolute minimum and average minimum laws.
3.2 Gravity counts
4.1 Average minimum law
Gravity Counts are based on the evaluation of the combinability of two words in a text that takes into account a variety of frequency features, such as individual frequencies of
words, the frequency of pairs of words and the number of
types in the selected span. Token/type ratio is used slightly
different. Usually this ratio is used for the whole document.
The difference is that the token/type ratio is calculated not
for a document or a corpus but for a word within a selected
span only. In our experiments we used the span equal to 1.
The expression of Gravity Counts is as follows:
In addition to the collocability requirement the average

minimum law can be applied. This law is applied to the
three adjacent collocability points. The law can be expressed as follows: if x22+x0 > x1 then the boundary
of a lexical unit is set at x1 . The boundary of a lexical
item is set, if the average of values of collocability points
on both sides are higher. This law allows making additional boundaries of lexical units when collocability points
are set. The identified lexical units are shorter and more
clearcut (see Figure 2 for an example of a sentence).
The Dice coefficient can be used to calculate the cooccurrence of words or word groups. This ratio is used,
for instance, in the collocation compiler XTract [11] and in
the lexicon extraction system Champollion [6]. It is defined
as follows [11]:
Dice(x, y) =
2 f (x, y)
f (x) + f (y)
f (x, y) being the frequency of co-occurrence of x and

y, and f (x) and f (y) the frequencies of occurrence of x
and y anywhere in the text. If x and y tend to occur in
conjunction, their Dice score will be high. The logarithm is
added in order to discern small numbers. Thus the formula
is slightly modified. The combinability of the each pair of
words using this method was measured on the basis of the
formula:
Dice0 (x, y) = log2
2 f (x, y)
f (x) + f (y)
IDENTIFICATION OF LEXICAL UNITS
87
Figure 1: Identified lexical units of an example sentence, combinability values and collocability level at value 1. / Flat rate
/ corrections / are applied to all expenditure / under / the measure or measures / concerned / unless the deficiencies / were limited to
certain areas of expenditure / individual / projects / or types of project in which case they are applied to those areas of expenditure only/
Figure 2: Identified lexical units of an example sentence, combinability values, collocability level at value 1 and average
minimum law applied. / Flat rate / corrections / are applied to / all / expenditure / under the measure / or measures / concerned /
unless the / deficiencies / were limited to certain / areas of expenditure / individual / projects / or / types of / project / in which / case /
they are / applied to those / areas of / expenditure only /
Figure 3: Identified lexical units of an example sentence, combinability values, collocability level at value 1 and absolute
minimum law applied. / Flat rate / corrections / are applied to all expenditure / under the measure or measures / concerned / unless
the / deficiencies / were limited to certain / areas of expenditure / individual / projects / or / types of project / in which case / they are /
applied to those / areas of / expenditure only /
88
V. Daudaravicius
Figure 4: The number of lexical units (types) in the selected corpus (x-axis has logarithmic scale)
Gravity Counts
average minimum law
100%
10%
1%
of the
the
and
in the
and
the
and
in the
of
to the
the
of the
on the
of
in the
the
to the
to
at the
in
in
for the
on the
a
and the
to
for
to be
or
s
of
s
to the
or
for
that
in
a
is
by the
that
by
of a
and the was
from the is
with
with the for the or
that
with
on
to
at the
on the
it was
by
from
Dice
average minimum law
100%
10%
1%
and
and
and
the
the
the
of the
of the
of
of
of
of the
in the
in the
in the
in
in
to
to
to
in
a
a
a
to the
to the
to the
s
on the
that
on the
s
for
for
for
on the
that
that
to be
or
or
and the
for the for the s
is
and the or
and the is
for the
to be
to be
was
was
at the
with
at the
with
is
Table 1: The top 20 lexical units for different size of corpus

and scores
4.2 Absolute minimum law

In addition to the collocability requirement the average
minimum law can be applied. This law is applied to the
three adjacent collocability points. The law can be expressed as follows: if x2 > x1 x0 > x1 then the
boundary is set at x1 . Informally, the boundary of a lexical item is set, if the values of collocability points on both
sides are higher. The identified lexical units are wider compared to the average minimum low (see Figure 3 for an example of a sentence).
5 Experiments and results

We used whole British National Corpus for experiments.
Three corpora sizes were used in experiments: whole, 10%
and 1% of the corpus. We used row text without any tagged
information.
100%
10%
1%
she might
have been
the
headmistress
of a
certain
type of
girls
school
, now almost extinct
, or a
mother superior
in an
enclosed
order
.
at any rate
there could be
no doubt
that she had
found
the
temptation
of the
flesh resistible
.
she might
have been the
headmistress
of a
certain type of
girls
school
, now
almost extinct
, or a
mother superior
in an
enclosed order
.
she might
have been
the
headmistress
of a
certain type of
girls
school
, now
almost extinct
, or a
mother superior
in an
enclosed order
.
at any rate
there could be
no doubt
that she had
found
the
temptation
of the
flesh resistible
.
at any rate
there could be
no doubt
that she had found
the
temptation
of the
flesh resistible
.
Table 2: The boundaries of lexical units identified by Dice
5.1 Dictionary size

The number of lexical units identified in the corpus using the respective methods is presented in Figure 4. The
number of lexical units extracted with the help of Dice
and Gravity Counts scores using average minimum law is
similar. The absolute minimum low yields to the different
size of the dictionary. The result of the number of lexical
units shows the trend line of possible total number of lexical units. We can expect maximum of about 5-6 million
of lexical units in English using Dice score and average
minimum law. This number is comparable to different languages, e. g., Lithuanian with rich morphology and almost
free word order. In [9] the number of word types in corpus
comparable to BNC is 1.8 million. In [8] the number of extracted collocations using similar method from Lithuanian
100%
she might have been the
headmistress
of a certain
type of
girls
school , now
almost
extinct
, or a
mother
superior
in an
enclosed
order .
10%
1%

headmistress
of a certain
type of
girls
school , now
almost
extinct
, or a mother
superior
in an
enclosed
order .
at any rate
there could be
no doubt
that she had
found the temptation
of the
flesh
resistible
at any rate
there could be
no doubt
that she had
found the temptation
of the
flesh
resistible
.

headmistress
of a certain
type of
girls
school , now
almost
extinct
, or a
mother
superior
in an
enclosed
order
.
at any rate
there
could be
no doubt
that she had
found the
temptation
of the
flesh
resistible
.
89
Table 3: The boundaries of lexical units identified by Gravity Counts

corpus is 20 millions. We used new laws of minimum in
our experiments. It is obvious that if the law of average
minimum would be applied in [8] work then the number of
collocations would drop to 6-7 millions or more for Lithuanian. Thus we are able to speak about the similar number of
lexical units which could be applied for any language. For
instance, the machine translation system ATLAS-II v.13 by
Fujitsu has 5.44M terminological entries and about 1M to
1.5M general entries [2].
identified using Gravity Counts changes. This is sufficient

to state that Dice score is stable, not sensitive to the corpus
size and is reliable in many NLP applications. This statement is confirmed by the examples in Table 2 and Table 3.
The same two sentences are taken and the boundaries of
lexical units are identified. The law of average minimum is
used. We can see that the identified boundaries of lexical
units using Dice score do not change considerably. While
in case of Gravity Counts the change of boundaries is observable often.
5.2 Top 20 lexical units

Another goal of our research is to discover which score is
less sensitive to the corpus size. The size of corpus differs in applications. In [3] is shown that Mutual Information score heavily depends on the corpus size and it is very
difficult to set the level of collocability. Dice and Gravity
Counts scores do not consider corpus size. We performed
several experiments to compare method dependability on
the size of the corpus. We used Dice and Gravity Counts
score together with the average minimum law on the different corpus sizes. We took 1%, 10% and full corpus of
BNC. We built the dictionaries of lexical units and took top
20 lexical units for every case. The results are shown in Table 1. The list of top 20 lexical units identified using Dice
score almost does not change. While the list of lexical units
6 Conclusions
The numbers of lexical units in most languages is comparable and amounts to 6-7 millions. It should be applicable
for the most of indoeuropean languages. The lexical unit
is very important in NLP and is applied widely. But the
notion of lexical unit is not clear and hard to define. We
propose a definition of a lexical unit as a sequence of wordforms extracted from row text by using collocability feature
and setting boundaries of lexical units. This approach is
more clear compared to a widely used n-gram definition
of a lexical unit. The boundaries are predictable and easier controlled compared to n-gram model. The result of
setting lexical boundaries for the small and large corpora
90
are stable using Dice score. Thus Dice score is reliable in

many NLP applications. The average minimum law allows
making additional boundaries of lexical units when collocability points are set. Identified lexical units are shorter
and more clearcut. Human judgment on the boundaries of
lexical unit is reduced considerably as the setting of collocability level is not so sensitive when the average minimum
law is applied.
References
[1] Brigitte Orliac, Mike Dillinger (2003) Collocation extraction for machine translation, MT Summit IX, New
Orleans, USA, 23-27 September 2003, pp.292-298
[2] Christian Boitet, Youcef Bey, Mutsuko Tomokio,
Wenjie Cao, Herv Blanchon (2006) IWSLT-06: experiments with commercial MT systems and lessons
from subjective evaluations,a International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation
Campaign on Spoken Language Translation [IWSLT
2006], November, 27-28, 2006, Kyoto, Japan, pp.23
30.
[3] Daudaravicius V., Marcinkeviciene R. (2004) Gravity
Counts for the Boundaries of Collocations, Interna
tional Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(2), pp. 321U348.
[4] Dekang Lin (1998) Extracting collocations from text
corpora, In First Workshop on Computational Termi
nology, Montreal, 1998, pp. 57U-63.
[5] Gael Dias (2003) Multiword unit hybrid extraction,
In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Multiword
Expressions, Sapporo, Japan, pp. 41U-48.

[6] Marcinkeviciene R., Grigonyte G. (2005) Lexicogrammatical Patterns of Lithuanian Phrases, The
Second Baltic Conference on Human Language Tech
nologies proceedings, Tallinn, pp. 299U-305.
[7] Rimkute E., Daudaravicius V., Utka A. (2007) Morphological Annotation of the Lithuanian Corpus, 45th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics; Workshop Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing, Praha, pp. 9499.
[8] Smadja, F. (1993) Retrieving Collocations from Text:
XTRACT, Computational Linguistics, 19(1), pp. 143177.
[9] Smadja, F., McKeown, K. R. and V. Hatzivassiloglou
(1996) Translation Collocations for Bilingual Lexicons: A Statistical Approach, Computational Linguistics, 22(1), pp. 1-38.
[10] Sag, Ivan A., Timothy Baldwin, Francis Bond, Ann
Copestake and Dan Flickinger (2002) Multiword Expressions: A Pain in the Neck for NLP, In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics
(CICLING 2002), Mexico City, Mexico, pp. 115
V. Daudaravicius
[11] Stubbs, M. (2002) Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English, International Journal of
Corpus Linguistics, 7(2), pp. 215-244.
[12] Violeta Seretan (2008) Collocation Extraction Based
on Syntactic Parsing, Ph.D. thesis, University of
Geneva.
[13] Violeta Seretan and Eric Wehrli (2006) Accurate collocation extraction using a multilingual parser, In
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on
Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(COLING/ACL 2006), Sydney, Australia, pp. 953
U960.
[14] Violeta Seretan and Eric Wehrli (2006) Multilingual
collocation extraction: Issues and solutions. In Proceedings of COLING/ACL Workshop on Multilingual
Language Resources and Interoperability, 2006, Syd
ney, Australia, pp. 40-U49.
Appendix 1. Risk Lexical units extracted using Gravity

Counts and average minimum law
1% of BNC ( 1 million words)
Lexical unit
Frequency
increase the risk of
risk
risk of
the risk
the risk of
the risk of another
1
51
8
9
5
1
Appendix 2. Risk Lexical units extracted using Dice and

average minimum law
1% of BNC ( 1 million words)
Lexical unit
Frequency
at risk
calculated risk
currency risk
environmental risk
health risk
particular risk
primary risk
real risk
reducing risk
risk
risk being
risk being disappointed
risk being considered
risk losing
risk undermining
risk using
risk of
risk than being overweight
risk than an asset
risk factor
risk slipping
risk arguing
risk assessment
risk her
risk her rage
risk damage
risk missing
risk cream
risk element
serious potential risk
serious risk
safety risk
the risk
the risk of
the risk compared with
the great risk of
were at risk
9
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
13
1
1
1
2
1
1
7
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
5
6
1
1
1
91
92
V. Daudaravicius
93
Finding Maximal Sequential Patterns in Text Document Collections

and Single Documents
Ren Arnulfo Garca-Hernndez
Tianguistenco Professional Academic Unit
Paraje el Tejocote, San Pedro Tlaltizapan, Estado de Mxico
E-mail: [email protected], http://scfi.uaemex.mx/~ragarcia/
J. Fco. Martnez-Trinidad and J. Ariel Carrasco-Ochoa
National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics
E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Keywords: text mining, maximal sequential patterns
Received: April 1, 2009
In this paper, two algorithms for discovering all the Maximal Sequential Patterns (MSP) in a document
collection and in a single document are presented. The proposed algorithms follow the pattern-growth
strategy where small frequent sequences are found first with the goal of growing them to obtain MSP.
Our algorithms process the documents in an incremental way avoiding re-computing all the MSP when
new documents are added. Experiments showing the performance of our algorithms and comparing
against GSP, DELISP, GenPrefixSpan and cSPADE algorithms over public standard databases are also
presented.
Povzetek: Predstavljena sta dva algoritma za iskanje najdaljih zaporedij v besedilu.
Introduction
Frequent pattern mining is a task into the datamining area

that has been intensively studied in the last years [Jiawei
Han et al. 2007]. Frequent patterns are itemsets,
subsequences, or substructures that appear in a data set
with frequency no less than a user-specified threshold.
Frequent pattern mining plays an important role in
mining associations, correlations, finding interesting
relationships among data, data indexing, classification,
clustering, and other data mining tasks as well. Besides,
frequent patterns are useful for solving more complex
problems of data analysis. Therefore, frequent pattern
mining has become an important area in data mining
research.
Frequent pattern mining was first proposed by
[Agrawal et al. 1993] for market basket analysis finding
associations between the different items that customers
place in their shopping baskets. Since this first
proposal there have been many research publications
proposing efficient mining algorithms, most of them, for
mining frequent patterns in transactional databases.
Mining frequent patterns in document databases is a
problem which has been less studied. Sequential pattern
mining in document databases has the goal of finding all
the subsequences that are contained at least times in a
collection of documents or in a single document, where
is a user-specified support threshold. This discovered set
of frequent sequences contains the maximal frequent
sequences which are not a subsequence of any other
frequent sequence (from now on we will use the term

Maximal Sequential Patterns, MSP), that is, the MSPs
are a compact representation of the whole set of frequent
sequences. Therefore, in the same way as occurs in
transactional databases, the sequential pattern mining in
document databases plays an important role, because it
allows identifying valid, novel, potentially useful and
ultimately understandable patterns. In this paper, we will
focus in the extraction of this kind of patterns from
textual or text document databases. Since maximal
sequential patterns can be extracted from documents
independently of the language without losing their
sequential nature they can be used to solve more complex
problems (all of them related to text mining) as question
answering [Denicia-Carral et al. 2006; Jurez-Gonzlez
et al. 2007; Aceves-Prez et al. 2007], authorship
attribution [Coyotl-Morales et al. 2006], automatic text
summarization [Ledeneva et al. 2008], document
clustering [Hernandez-Reyes et al. 2006], and extraction
of hyponyms [Ortega-Mendoza et al. 2007], among
others.
In this article, we present two pattern-growth based
algorithms, DIMASP-C and DIMASP-D, to Discover all
the Maximal Sequential Patterns in a document
collection and in a single document respectively. The rest
of this article is organized in four sections: (2) related
work, (3) problem definition, (4) algorithms for mining
frequent patterns in documents (in this section
94
experimental results are also given) and (5) concluding

remarks.
Related work
Most of the algorithms for sequential pattern mining

have been developed for vertical databases, this is,
databases with short sequences but with a large amount
of sequences. A document database can be considered as
horizontal because it could have long sequences.
Therefore, most of the algorithms for sequential pattern
mining are not efficient for mining a document database.
Furthermore, most of the sequential pattern mining
approaches assume a short alphabet; that is, the set of
different items in the database. Thus, the characteristics
of textual patterns make the problem intractable for most
of the a priori-like candidate-generation-and-test
approaches. For example, if the longest MSP has a length
of 100 items then GSP [Srikant et al., 1996] will generate
100
10 30 candidate sequences where each one
100
i 1 i
must be tested over the DB in order to verify its

frequency. This is the cost of candidate generation, no
matter what implementation technique would be applied.
For the candidate generation step, GSP generates
candidate sequences of size k+1 by joining two frequent
sequences of size k when the prefix k-1 of one sequence
is equal to the suffix k-1 of another one. Then a candidate
sequence is pruned if it is non-frequent. Even though,
GSP reduces the number of candidate sequences, it still
is inefficient for mining long sequences.
As related work, we can mention those patterngrowth algorithms that speed up the sequential pattern
mining [Jiawei Han et al. 2000; Antunes et al. 2003; Jian
Pei et al. 2004; Lin et al. 2005] when there are long
sequences. According to the empirical performance
evaluations of pattern-growth algorithms like PrefixSpan
[Jian Pei et al. 2004], GenPrefixSpan [Antunes et al.
2003], cSPADE [Zaki 2000], and DELISP[Lin et al.
2005], they outperform GSP specially when the database
contains long sequences, therefore in this paper we will
use them in our experiments. The basic idea in these
algorithms is to avoid the cost of the candidate
generation step and to focus the search on sub-databases
generating projected databases. An -projected database
is the set of subsequences in the database that are
suffixes of the sequences with prefix . In each step, the
algorithm looks for frequent sequences with prefix in
the corresponding projected database. In this sense,
pattern-growth methods try to find the sequential patterns
more directly, growing frequent sequences, beginning
with sequences of size one. Even though, these methods
are faster than apriori-like methods, some of them were
designed to find all the frequent sequences, instead of
only finding the MSP. Furthermore, none of them is
incremental.
In this paper, we present two pattern-growth based
algorithms, DIMASP-C and DIMASP-D, to Discover all
the Maximal Sequential Patterns in a document
collection and in a single document respectively. First,
DIMASP algorithms build a novel data structure from
R.A. Garca-Hernndez et al.
the document database which is relatively easy to extract.

Once DIMASP algorithms have built the data structure,
they can discover all the MSP according to a threshold
specified by the user.
In contrast with PrefixSpan, GenPrefixSpan and
DELISP; if the user specify a new threshold our
algorithms avoid rebuilding the data structure for mining
with the new threshold. In addition, when the document
database is increased, DIMASP algorithms update the
last discovered MSP by processing only the new added
documents.
Problem definition
The problem of finding patterns in documents can be

formulated following the same idea as in transactional
databases, i.e., assuming that each document of the
collection is a transaction in the database, in this way, a
sequence of items in a document will be a pattern in the
collection if it appears in a certain number of documents.
We have denominated to this formulation as the problem
of finding all the maximal sequential patterns in a
document collection.
3.1
Finding all the MSP in a document

collection
A sequence S, denoted by <s1,s2,...,sk>, is an ordered list

of k elements called items. The number of elements in a
sequence S is called the length of the sequence denoted
by |S|. A k-sequence denotes a sequence of length k. Let
P=<p1p2pn> and S=<s1s2sm> be sequences, P is a
subsequence of S, denoted PS, if there exists an integer
i1, such that p1=si, p2=si+1, p3=si+2,,pn=si+(n-1). The
frequency of a sequence S, denoted by Sf or <s1,s2,...,sn>f ,
is the number of documents in the collection where S is a
subsequence. A sequence S is -frequent in the collection
if Sf , a -frequent sequence is also called a sequential
pattern in the document collection. A sequential pattern S
is maximal if S is not a subsequence of any other
sequential pattern in the collection.
Given a document collection, the problem consists
in finding all the maximal sequential patterns in the
document collection.
Another formulation of the problem is finding
patterns in a single document. At first glance, this
problem could be solved by dividing the document into
sections or paragraphs, and by applying algorithms for
finding all the MSP in a document collection. However,
the result would depend on the way the document was
divided.
In addition, a sequence of items will be a pattern in
the document if it appears in many sections or paragraphs
without taking account the number of times the sequence
appears inside each section or paragraph. This situation
makes the problem different, therefore we will consider
that a sequence of items in a document will be a pattern
if it is frequent or appears many times inside the whole
document. We have denominated to this formulation as
the problem of finding all the maximal sequential
patterns in a single document.
FINDING MAXIMAL SEQUENTIAL PATTERNS IN...
3.2
Finding all the MSP in a single

document
Following the notation used in the section 3.1. Let XS

and YS then X and Y are mutually excluded sequences
if X and Y do not share items i.e., if (xn=si and y1=sj) or
(yn=si and x1=sj) then i<j. A sequence S is -frequent in a
document T, if it is contained at least times in T in a
mutually excluded way. A -frequent sequence is also
called a sequential pattern in a document. A sequential
pattern S is maximal if S is not a subsequence of any
other sequential pattern in the document.
Given a document, the problem consists in finding
all the maximal sequential patterns in the document.
Algorithms for mining sequential

patterns in documents
In this section, two algorithms one for mining maximal

sequential patterns in a document collection (DIMASPC) and another for mining maximal sequential patterns
in a single document (DIMASP-D), are introduced. Both
of them build a data structure containing all the different
pairs of contiguous words in the document or in the
collection and the relations among them. Then the
maximal sequential patterns are searched into this
structure, following the pattern-growth strategy.
4.1
DIMASP-C
The basic idea of DIMASP-C consists in finding all the

sequential patterns in a data structure, which is built from
the document database (DDB). The data structure stores
all the different pairs of contiguous words that appear in
the documents, without losing their sequential order.
Given a threshold specified by the user, DIMASP-C
reviews if a pair is -frequent. In this case, DIMASP-C
grows the sequence in order to determine all the possible
maximal sequential patterns containing such pair as a
prefix. A possible maximal sequential pattern (PMSP)
will be a maximal sequential pattern (MSP) if it is not a
subsequence of any previous MSP. This implies that all
the stored MSP which are subsequence of the new PMSP
must be deleted. The proposed algorithm is composed of
three steps described as follows:
In the first step, for each different word (item) in
the DDB, DIMASP-C assigns an integer number as
identifier. Also, for each identifier, the frequency is
stored, i.e., the number of documents where it appears.
These identifiers are used in the algorithm instead of the
words. Table 1 shows an example for a DDB containing
4 documents.
In the second step (Fig. 1), DIMASP-C builds a
data structure from the DDB storing all the pairs of
contiguous words <wi,wi+1> that appear in a document
and some additional information to preserve the
sequential order. The data structure is an array which
contains in each cell a pair of words C=<wi,wi+1>, the
frequency of the pair (Cf), a Boolean mark and a list of
nodes where a node stores a document identifier
(.Id), an index (.Index) of the cell where the pair appears
95
in the array, a link (.NextDoc) to maintain the list and a

link (.NextNode) to preserve the sequential order of the
pairs with respect to the document, where they appear.
Therefore, the number of different documents presented
in the list is Cf. This step works as follows: for each
pair of words <wi,wi+1> in the document DJ, if <wi,wi+1>
does not appear in the array, it is added, and its index is
gotten. In the position index of the array, add a node at
the beginning of the list . The added node has J as
.Id, index as .index, .NextDoc is linked to the first node
of the list and .NextNode is linked to the next node
corresponding to <wi+1,wi+2> of the document DJ. If the
document identifier (.Id) is new in the list , then the
frequency of the cell (Cf) is increased. In Fig. 2 the data
structure built for the document database of table 1 is
shown.
Table 1: Example of a document database and its
identifier representation
DJ
1
2
3
4
Document database
From George Washington to George W. Bush are 43 Presidents
Washington is the capital of the United States
George Washington was the first President of the United States
the President of the United States is George W. Bush
Document database (words by integer identifiers)
1
2
3
4
<1,2,3,4,2,5,6,7,8,9>
<3,10,11,12,13,11,14,15>
<2,3,16,11,17,18,13,11,14,15>
<11,18,13,11,14,15,10,2,5,6>
Step 2: Algorithm to construct the data structure from the

DDB
Input: A document database (DDB) Output: The Array
For all the documents D J DDB do
Array Add a document ( D J ) to the array
end-for
Step 2.1: Algorithm to add a document
Input: A document D J Output: The Array
For all the pairs w i , w i 1 D J do
i Create a new Pair
i .Id J //Assign the document identifier to the node
indexArray[ w i , w i 1 ] //Get the index of the cell
i .index index //Assign the index to the node
Get the first node of the list
If i .Id .Id then the document identifier is new to the list
Increment Cf
//increment the frequency
i .NextDoc //link the node at the beginning of list
List Add i as the first node //link it at the beginning

i 1 .NextNode i //do not lose the sequential order
end-if
end-for
Figure 1: Steps 2 and 2.1 of DIMASP-C.

In the last step (Fig. 3), given a threshold , DIMASP-C
uses the constructed structure for mining all the maximal
sequential patterns in the collection. For each pair of
words stored in the structure, DIMASP-C verifies if this
96
index
<wi,wi+1>
<From,George>
2
3
Cf List
<George,Washington> 2
<Washington,to>
1
2
1
1
<to,George>
<Washington,is>
<is,the>
<the,capital>
<capital,of>
<Washington,was>
10
<was,the>
11
<the,first>
3
3
10
11
12
<first,President>
13
<the,President>
14
<President,of>
12
13
14
15
15
<of,the>
16
<the,United>
17
<United,States>
18
<States,is>
19
<is,George>
20
<George,W.>
21
<W.,Bush>
14
15
16
16
17
16
17
15
17
18
19
20
20
21
21
22
<Bush,are>
23
<are,43>
24
<43,Presidents>
22
23
24
Figure 2: Data structure built by DIMASP-C for the database of the table 1.
pair is -frequent, in such case DIMASP-C, based on the
structure, grows the pattern while its frequency (the
number of documents where the pattern can grow)
remains greater or equal than . When a pattern cannot
grow, it is a possible maximal sequential pattern (PMSP),
and it is used to update the final maximal sequential
pattern set. Since DIMASP-C starts finding 3-MSP or
longer, then at the end, all the -frequent pairs that were
not used for any PMSP and all the -frequent words that
were not used for any -frequent pair are added as
maximal sequential patterns.
In order to be efficient, it is needed to reduce the
number of comparisons when a PMSP is added to the
MSP set (Fig. 4). For such reason, a k-MSP is stored
according to its length k, it means, there is a k-MSP set
for each k. In this way, before adding a k-PMSP as a kMSP, the k-PMSP must not be in the k-MSP set and must
not be subsequence of any longer k-MSP. When a PMSP
is added, all its subsequences are eliminated.
For avoiding repeating all the work for discovering
all the MSP when new documents are added to the
database, DIMASP-C only preprocesses the part
corresponding to these new documents. First the

identifiers of these new documents are defined in step 1,
then DIMASP-C would only use the step 2.1 (Fig. 1) to
add them to the data structure. Finally, the step 3.1 (Fig.
3) is applied on the new documents using the old MSP
set, to discover the new MSP set, for example, Fig. 2
shows with dotted lines the new part of the data structure
when D4 of table 1 is added as a new document. This
strategy works only if the same is used, however for a
different only the discovery step (step 3, Fig. 3) must
be applied, without rebuilding the data structure.
The experiments were done using the well-known
reuters-215781 document collection. After pruning 400
stop-words, this collection has 21578 documents with
around 38,565 different words from 1.36 million words
used in the whole collection. The average length of the
documents was 63 words. In all the experiments the first
5000, 10000, 15000 and 20000 documents were used.
DIMASP-C was compared against GSP [Srikant et al.,
1
http://kdd.ics.uci.edu/databases/reuters21578/
reuters21578.html
1996], an apriori-like candidate-generation-and-test

algorithm, and cSPADE [Zaki 2000], GenPrefixSpan
[Antunes et al. 2003] and DELISP [Lin et al. 2005], three
pattern-growth algorithms. Excepting for GSP, the
original programs provided by the authors were used. All
the experiments with DIMASP-C were done in a
computer with an Intel Pentium 4 running at 3 GHz with
1GB RAM.
Step 3: Algorithm to find all MSP
Input: Structure from step 2 and threshold
Output: MSP set
For all the documents D J ( 1 ) DDB do
MSP set Find all MSP w.r.t. the document ( D J )
Step 3.1: Algorithm to find all MSP with respect to the
document DJ
Input: A DJ from the data structure and a threshold
Output: The MSP set w.r.t. to DJ
For all the nodes i 1 n D J i.e. w i , w i 1 D J do
If Array [ i .index ].frequency then
PMSPArray[ i .index ]. w i , w i 1
//the initial pair
Copy the rest of the list of beginning from

i .NextDoc
f Number of different documents in
4.1.1
Experiments with DIMASP-C
In Fig. 5a the performance comparison of DIMASP-C

(with all the steps), cSPADE, GenPrefixSpan, DELISP
and GSP algorithms with =15 is shown. Fig. 5b shows
the same comparison of Fig. 5a but the worst algorithm
(GSP) was eliminated, here it is possible to see that
DELISP is not as good as it seems to be in Fig. 5a. In this
experiment GenPrefixSpan had memory problems;
therefore it was only tested with the first 5000 and 10000
documents. Fig. 5c compares only DIMASP-C against
the fastest algorithm cSPADE with respect to =15. Fig.
5d draws a linear scalability of DIMASP-C with respect
to =15. An additional experiment with the lowest =2
was performed, in this experiment DIMASP-C found a
MSP of length 398 because there is a duplicated
document in the collection, Fig. 5e shows these results.
In order to evaluate the incremental scalability of
DIMASP-C, 4000, 9000 14000 and 19000 documents
were processed, and 1000 documents were added in each
experiment. Fig. 5f shows the results and compares them
against cSPADE which needs to recompute all the MSP.
Fig. 5g shows the distribution of the MSP for =15
according to their length. Finally, Fig. 5h shows the
number of MSP when =1% of the documents in the
collection was used.
i i
a) Performance comparison with =15
12000
do the growth the PMSP
Array[ i1.index ].list
& i.e. | .index i1 i.NextNode

f Number of different documents in
If f
10000
Time (sec.)
While f
GSP
cSPADE
GenPrefixSpan
DELISP
DIMASP-DC
8000
6000
4000
2000
then to grow the PMSP
0
0
Array [ i1 .index ].mark used

PMSP PMSP + Array [ i 1 .index ]. w i 1
5000
Figure 3: Algorithm to add a PMSP to the MSP set.
15000
20000
Time (sec.)
c) Performance comparison with =15
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
cSPADE
DIMASP-DC
Figure 2: Step 3 of DIMASP-C.
5000
10000
15000
20000
documents in DDB
b) Performance comparison with =15
2500
cSPADE
GenPrefixSpan
DELISP
DIMASP-DC
2000
Time (sec.)
Step 3.1.1: Algorithm to add a PMSP to the MSP set

Input: A k-PMSP, MSP set
Output: MSP set
If (k-PMSP k-MSP set) or (k-PMSP is subsequence of some
longer k-MSP) then // do not add anything
return MSP set
else //add as a MSP
k-MSP set add k-PMSP
{delete S MSP set | S k-PMSP }
return MSP set
10000
documents in DDB
i i 1 i.e. i . NextNode
end-while
If |PMSP| 3 then add the PMSP to the MSP set
MSP set add a k-PMSP to the MSP set //step 3.1.1
end-for
For all the cells C Array do the addition of the 2-MSP
If Cf and C.mark = not used then add it as 2-MSP
2-MSP set add C . w i , w i 1
97
1500
1000
500
0
0
5000
10000
documents in DDB
15000
20000
98
4.2
d) Linear Scalability of DIMASP-C varing
30
25
Step 2 + 3 with
=5
Step 2 + 3 with
=15
20
Time (sec.)
15
10
5
0
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
documents in DDB
e) DIMASP-DC with =2
Time (sec.)
250
200
150
Step 2 + 3 with =2
100
50
0
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
documents in DDB
f) Incremental Scalability of
DIMASP-DC and cSPADE with =15
Time (sec.)
100
Similar to DIMASP-C, the idea of DIMASP-D consists

in finding all the sequential patterns in a data structure,
which is built, in this case, from the single document to
be analyzed. This structure stores all the different pairs of
contiguous words that appear in the document, without
losing their sequential order. Given a threshold
specified by the user, DIMASP-D reviews if a pair is frequent. In this case, DIMASP-D grows the pattern in
order to determine all the possible maximal sequential
patterns containing such pair as a prefix. The proposed
algorithm has three steps described as follows:
In the first step, the algorithm assigns an id for each
different word in the document.
The second step (fig. 6) consists in building the data
structure. DIMASP-D will construct a data structure
similar to the structure used for the document collection,
but in this case containing only a single document. Since
only one document is stored in the structure, the
document index is not needed, instead of it, the position
of the pair inside the document is stored, as it is shown in
Fig. 7, this position is used to avoid overlapping among
the instances of a maximal sequential pattern that appear
into the document.
cSPADE
80
Input: A document T
Output: The data structure
For all the pairs [ti,ti+1] T do
// if [ti,ti+1] it is not in Array, add it
PositionNode.Pos index array [ti,ti+1];
Array[index].Positions New PositionNode
Array[index].Freq array[index].Freq+ 1
Array[LastIndex].Positions.NextIndexindex;
Array[LastIndex].Positions.NextPosPositionNode;
LastIndex index;
End-for
DIMASP-DC Step 2 + Step 3
60
40
20
0
0
5000
10000
documents in DDB
15000
20000
g) Distribution of the k -MSPs for 2000

document with =15
5000
DIMASP-D
Figure 5: Step 2 of DIMASP-D.
4500
Quantity of MSPs
4000
3500
In the last step (Fig. 8), DIMASP-D finds all the

maximal sequential patterns in similar way as DIMASPC, but now the -frequency is verified inside the
document, counting how many times a pattern appears
without overlapping.
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1
10 11 12 13 14
MSPs by length
8600
h) Number of MSPs with =1% w.r.t.

documents in DDB
Quantity of MSPs
8400
8200
8000
7800
7600
7400
7200
7000
5000
10000
15000
20000
MSPs by length
Figure 4: Performance results using Reuters-2157

collection.
4.2.1 Experiments with DIMASP-D
For the experiments, we chose from the collection Alex2

the document Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson
with around 243,115 chars corresponding to: 31,517
words (approx. 100 pages); and the document
LETTERS by Thomas Jefferson with around
1,812,428 chars and 241,735 words (approx. 800 pages).
In both documents the stop words were not removed and
only the numbers and punctuation symbols were omitted.
In order to show the behavior of the processing time
against the number of words in the document, we
computed the MSP using DIMASP-D with the minimum
threshold value, =2.
2
Public domain documents from American and English

literature as well as Western philosophy.
http://www.infomotions.com/alex/
NextPos List
Positions
1 2
2 3
3 4
4 5
5
6
e
l
l
a
1
1
5 6
10 3
Position of
the pair
11 0
7 4
Position Node
Pos Next
Index
Index of the
next pair (s,a)
9 2
NextPos
(b)
(b
8 1
6 3
Pos:
1 2
3 4
Item: e s
(a)
99
NextNode
ind Ids Freq
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
a d e l a d e s a d
Input: Data structure from phase 2

Output: MSP list
Actual1 //First element of NextPos List
while Actual 0 do
if Array[Actual].Frequency , then
temporal Copy ( Array[Actual].Positions)
PMS Array[Actual].Id1 + Array [Actual].Id2
aux Array [Actual].NextIndex
while aux 0 do //expand the 2-sequence
temporal Match((temporal.Pos + 1) AND
(Array[aux].Positions.Pos)
If | temporal | , then
if aux = Array, then there is a cycle,
PMSP Cycle( , temporal, Array, Actual, aux )
If the PMSP cannot grow then exit from the while
else PMSP PMSP + Array[aux].Id2
aux Array[Actual].NextIndex
end-while
delete all the MSP PMSP
if (PMSP MSP) then MSPAdd(PMSP)
Actual Array[Actual].NextIndex
End-while
Figure 7: Step 3 of DIMASP-D.
8
4
Steps 1 and 2
600
LETTERS
400
Steps 1 and 2
200
0
40
2
0
10
15
20
25
120
160
Words in thousand
30
200
240
For the same documents, the whole document was

processed to find all the MSP, in order to appreciate (Fig.
10) how the performance of our algorithm is affected for
different values of the threshold . Fig. 10a shows the
time in seconds for Autobiography and Fig. 10b for
LETTERS.
Time (sec)
Autobiography
6
4
2
0
10
15
20
25
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0 =
a)
80
Figure 8: Processing time for: a) Autobiography and,

(
b) LETTERS.
a)
Time (sec)
Time (sec)
a) Autobiography
Autobiography
b) Letters
800
Each graph in Fig. 9 corresponds to one document,

processing different quantities of words. In the fig. 9a,
we started with 5,000 words and used an increment of
5,000, in order to see how the processing time grows
when the number of processed words is increased in the
same document. In the fig. 9b, an increment of 40,000
words was used in order to see how the processing time
grows for a big document. By the way, in both graphs the
time for steps (1 and 2) is shown.
Time (sec)
Figure 6: a) Data structure built by DIMASP-D for the text: esadeladesad

b) Node for positions list
10
LETTERS
15
20
25
Figure 10: Time performance for different values of

for: a) Autobiography and b) LETTERS.
100
MSP in hundred
Furthermore, we have included in Fig. 11 an

analysis of the number of MSP obtained from the same
documents for different values for .
Additionally to these experiments, we processed the
biggest document from the collection Alex, An Inquiry
into the nature by Adam Smith with 2,266,784 chars
corresponding to 306,156 words (approx. 1000 pages)
with =2, all MSP were obtained in 1,223 seconds
(approx. 20 min). All the experiments with DIMASP-D
were done in a computer with an Intel Centrino Duo
processor running at 1.6 GHz with 1GB RAM.
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
=2
=5
=10
10
15
20
25
30
25
30
MSP in hundred
Words in thousand
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
=2
=5
=10
10
15
20
Words in thousand
Figure 11: Amount of MSP generated for different values

of for a) Autobiography and b) LETTERS.
Concluding remarks
In this work, we have introduced two new algorithms for

mining maximal sequential patterns into a document
collection (DIMASP-C) and into a single document
(DIMASP-D).
According to our experiments, DIMASP-C is faster
that all the previous algorithms. In addition, our
algorithm allows processing the document collection in
an incremental way; therefore if some documents are
added to the collection, DIMASP-C only needs to
process the new documents, which allows updating the
maximal sequential patterns much faster than mining
them over the whole modified collection by applying any
of the previous algorithms.
DIMASP-D is a first approach for mining maximal
sequential patterns into a single document, which allows
processing large documents in a short time.
Since our proposed algorithms were designed for
processing textual databases, they are faster than those
proposed for transactional databases, therefore our
algorithms are more suitable to apply maximal sequential
patterns for solving more complex problems and
applications in text mining, for example: question
answering [Denicia-Carral et al. 2006; Jurez-Gonzlez
et al. 2007; Aceves-Prez et al. 2007], authorship
attribution [Coyotl-Morales et al. 2006], automatic text

summarization [Ledeneva et al. 2008], document
clustering [Hernandez-Reyes et al. 2006], and extraction
of hyponyms [Ortega-Mendoza et al. 2007], among
others.
As future work, we are going to adapt DIMASP-C
and DIMASP-D for mining Maximal Sequential Patterns,
allowing a bounded gap between words.
References
[1]
Aceves-Prez Rita Marina, Montes-y-Gmez

Manuel, Villaseor Pineda Luis, Enhancing CrossLanguage Question Answering by Combining
Multiple Question Translations, 8th Intelligent
Text Processing and Computational Linguistics
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[2] Agrawal R, Imielinski T, Swami A, Mining
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international conference on management of data
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Mining with Gap Constraints, Third IAPR
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MLDM2003 LNCS 2734, 2003, pp. 239251.
[4] Coyotl-Morales Rosa Maria, Villaseor-Pineda
Luis, Montes y Gmez Manuel, Rosso Paolo,
Authorship Attribution Using Word Sequences,
11th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern
Recognition (CIARP2006), LNCS 4225, Springer
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[5] Denicia-Carral Claudia, Montes-y-Gmez Manuel,
Villaseor-Pineda Luis, Garca Hernndez Ren,
A Text Mining Approach for DefinitionQuestion
Answering, 5th International Conference on NLP
(Fintal 2006), LNAI 4139, Springer-Verlag, 2006,
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[6] Hernandez-Reyes E, Garcia-Hernandez RA,
Carrasco-Ochoa JA, J. Fco. Martnez-Trinidad,
Document clustering based on maximal frequent
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(Fintal 2006), LNAI 4139, Springer-Verlag, 2006,
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Patterns by Pattern-Growth: The PrefixSpan
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Concepts and Techniques, Morgan Kaufmann
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Frequent pattern mining: current status and future
directions, Data Min Knowl Disc 15, 2007, pp.
5586.
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Delicia-Carral Claudia, Montes-y-Gmez Manuel
and Villaseor-Pineda Luis, Using Machine
Learning and Text Mining in Question Answering,

7th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation
Forum, CLEF 2006, LNCS 4730, Springer-Verlag,
2007, pp. 415423.
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Frequent
Sequences
for
Extractive
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Summarization, LNCS 4919, Springer-Verlag,
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Sequential Patterns with Time Constraints by
Delimited Pattern-Growth, Knowledge and
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and Montes-y-Gmez Manuel, Using Lexical
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Mexican International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence MICAI 2007, LNAI 4827, SpringerVerlag, 2007, pp. 904-911.
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102
Informatica 34 (2010) 103-110 103
Grammar of ReALIS and the Implementation of its Dynamic

Interpretation
Gbor Alberti and Judit Kleiber
Department of Linguistics, University of Pcs, 7624 Pcs, Ifjsg 6, Hungary
Keywords: lexical and discourse semantics, Hungarian, total lexicalism
ReALIS, REciprocal And Lifelong Interpretation System, is a new post-Montagovian theory
concerning the formal interpretation of sentences constituting coherent discourses, with a lifelong model
of lexical, interpersonal and encyclopaedic knowledge of interpreters in its centre including their
reciprocal knowledge on each other. First we provide a 2 page long summary of its 40 page long
mathematical definition. Then we show the process of dynamic interpretation of a Hungarian sentence
(Hungarian is a challenge because of its rich morphology, free word order and sophisticated
information structure). We show how an interpreter can anchor to each other in the course of dynamic
interpretation the different types of referents occurring in copies of lexical items retrieved by the
interpreter on the basis (of the morphemes, word order, case and agreement markers) of the sentence
performed by the speaker. Finally, the computational implementation of ReALIS is demonstrated.
Povzetek: Predstavljen je sistem ReALIS za dinamino interpretacijo zapletenih stavkov.
Introduction
eALIS [2] [4], REciprocal And Lifelong Interpretation
System, is a new post-Montagovian [15] [17] theory
concerning the formal interpretation of sentences
constituting coherent discourses [9], with a lifelong
model
[1]
of
lexical,
interpersonal
and
cultural/encyclopaedic knowledge of interpreters in its
centre including their reciprocal knowledge on each
other. The decisive theoretical feature of eALIS lies in
a peculiar reconciliation of three objectives which are all
worth accomplishing in formal semantics but could not
be reconciled so far.
The first aim concerns the exact formal basis itself
(Montagues Thesis [20]): human languages can be
described as interpreted formal systems. The second aim
concerns compositionality: the meaning of a whole is a
function of the meaning of its parts, practically
postulating the existence of a homomorphism from
syntax to semantics, i.e. a rule-to-rule correspondence
between the two sides of grammar.
In Montagues interpretation systems a traditional
logical representation played the role of an intermediate
level between the syntactic representation and the world
model, but Montague argued that this intermediate level
of representation can, and should, be eliminated. (If is
a compositional mapping from syntax to discourse
representation and is a compositional mapping from
discourse to the representation of the world model, then
= must be a compositional mapping directly from
syntax to model.) The post-Montagovian history of
formal semantics [17] [9], however, seems to have
proven the opposite, some principle of discourse
representationalism: some level of [intermediate]

representation is indispensable in modelling the
interpretation of natural language [14].
The Thesis of eALIS is that the two fundamental
Montagovian objectives can be reconciled with the
principle of discourse representationalism by
embedding discourse representations in the world model,
getting rid of an intermediate level of representation in
this way while preserving its content and relevant
structural characteristics. This idea can be carried out in
the larger-scale framework of embedding discourse
representations in the world model not directly but as
parts of the representations of interpreters minds, i.e.
that of their (permanently changing) information
states [3].
Definition
The frame of the mathematical definition of eALIS

(whose 40 page long complete version is available in [4]
(Sections 3-4)) is summarized in this section. As
interpreters mind representations are part of the WORLD
MODEL, the definition of this model = U, W0, W is a
quite complex structure where
U is a countably infinite set: the UNIVERSE
W0 = U0, T, S, I, D, , A: the EXTERNAL WORLD
W is a partial function from set ITm where W[i,t] is
a quintuple U[i], [i,t], [i,t], [i,t], [i,t]: the
INTERNAL-WORLD FUNCTION.
The external world consists of the following components:
104
Informatica 34 (2010) 103110
U0 is the external universe (U0 U), whose elements

are called entities
T = T, is a structured set of temporal intervals (T
U0)
S = S, is a structured set of spatial entities (S
U0)
I = I, is a structured set of interpreters (I U0)
D = D, is a structured set of linguistic signs
(practically morph-like entities and bigger chunks of
discourses) (D U0)
TU0* is the set of core relations (with time
intervals as the first argument of all core relations)
A is the information structure of the external world
(which is nothing else but relation structure
reformulated as a standard simple information
structure, as is defined in [22: 245]; its basic elements
are called the infons of the external world
T, S, I and D are pairwise disjoint, infinite, proper
subsets of the external universe U0 which meet further
requirements that cannot be elaborated here.
The above mentioned internal-world function W is
defined as follows:
The relation structure W[i,t] is called the internal world
(or information state) of interpreter i at moment t
U[i] U is an infinite set: interpreter is internal
universe (or the set of is referents, or internal
entities); U[i] and U[i] are disjoint sets if i and i
are two different interpreters
in our approach what changes during a given
interpreters lifespan is not his/her referent set U[i] but
only the four relations among the (peg-like [12])
referents, listed below, which are called is internal
functions:
[i,t] : U[i] U[i] is a partial function: the
eventuality function (where is a complex label
characterizing argument types of predicates)1
[i,t] : U[i] U[i]U0 is another partial
function: the anchoring function ( practically
identifies referents, and contains complex labels
referring to the grammatical factors legitimizing these
identifications)
[i,t] : U[i] U[i] is a third partial function: the
level function (elements of are called level labels);
the level function is practically intended to capture
something similar to the box hierarchy among
referents in complex Kampian DRS boxes [10]
enriched with some rhetorical hierarchy in the style of
SDRT [2]
[i,t] : U[i] is also a partial function: the
cursor, which points to certain temporary reference
points prominently relevant to the interpreter such as
Now, Here, Ego, Then, There, You etc.
1
The DRS condition [e: p t r1 ... rK] [10] (e.g. [e: resemble now
Peter Paul]) can be formulated with the aid of this function as
follows (with i and t fixed):
(Pred, , e) = p, (Temp, , e) = t, (Arg, 1, e)= r1,
..., (Arg, K, e)= rK.
G. Alberti et al.
The temporary states of these four internal functions

above an interpreters internal universe (which meet
further requirements that cannot be elaborated here)
serve as his/her agent model [11] in the process of
(static and dynamic) interpretation.
Suppose the information structure A of the external
world (defined above as a part of model = U, W0, W)
contains the following infon: = PERCEIVE, t, i, j, d, s,
where i and j are interpreters, t is a point of time, s is a
spatial entity, d is a discourse (chunk), and PERCEIVE is a
distinguished core relation (i.e. an element of ). The
INTERPRETATION of this perceived discourse d can be
defined in our model relative to an external world W0 and
internal world W[i,t].
The DYNAMIC INTERPRETATION of discourse d is
essentially a mapping from W[i,t], which is a temporary
information state of interpreter i, to another (potential)
information state of the same interpreter that is an
extension of W[i,t]; which practically means that the
above mentioned four internal functions (, , , ) are
to be developed monotonically by simultaneous
recursion, expressing the addition of the information
stored by discourse d to that stored in W[i,t].
The new value of eventuality function chiefly
depends on the lexical items retrieved from the
interpreters internal mental lexicon as a result of the
perception and recognition of the words / morphemes of
the interpreters mother tongue in discourse d. This
process of the unification of lexical items can be
regarded as the first phase of the dynamic interpretation
of (a sentence of) d. In our eALIS framework, as will
be shown in the next section, extending function
corresponds to the process of accumulating DRS
condition rows [17] containing referents which are all
still regarded as different from each other.
It will be the next phase of dynamic interpretation to
anchor these referents to each other (by function ) on
the basis of different grammatical relations which can be
established due to the recognized order of morphs /
words in discourse d and the case, agreement and other
markers it contains. In our approach two referents will
never have been identified (or deleted), they will only be
anchored to each other; but this anchoring essentially
corresponds to the identification of referents in DRSs.
The third phase in this simplified description of the
process of dynamic interpretation concerns the third
internal function, , the level function. This function is
responsible for the expression of intra- and intersentential scope hierarchy [21] / information structure
[23] / rhetorical structure [9], including the embedding of
sentences, one after the other, in the currently given
information state by means of rhetorical relations more
or less in the way suggested in SDRT [9].
It is to be mentioned at this point that the
information-state changing dynamic interpretation and
the truth-value calculating static interpretation are
mutually based upon each other. On the one hand, static
interpretation operates on the representation of sentences
(of discourses) which is nothing else but the output result
of dynamic interpretation. On the other hand, however,
GRAMMAR OF REALIS AND THE IMPLEMENTATION
the above discussed phases of dynamic interpretation

(and chiefly the third phase) include subprocesses
requiring static interpretation: certain presuppositions are
to be verified [17].
The interpreters fourth internal function, cursor ,
plays certain roles during the whole process of dynamic
interpretation. Aspect, for instance, can be captured in
our approach as the resetting or retaining of the temporal
cursor value as a result of the interpretation of a sentence
( non-progressive / progressive aspect). It can be said
in general that the input cursor values have a
considerable effect on the embedding of the new
information carried by a sentence in the interpreters
current information state and then this embedding will
affect the output cursor values.
DYNAMIC INTERPRETATION in a eALIS model
=U, W0, W, thus, is a partial function Dyn which
maps a (potential) information state W to a discourse d
and an information state W[i,t] (of an interpreter i):
Dyn(d) : ,W[i,t] W, e, U, where U, shown up
in the output triple, is the COST of the given dynamic
interpretation (coming from presuppositions legitimized
by accommodation instead of verification), and e is the
eventuality that the output cursor points to (eis to be
regarded as representing the content of discourse d).
Function Dyn(d) is partial: where there is no output
value, the discourse is claimed to be ill-formed in the
given context. Due to the application of cost, illformedness is practically a gradual category in eALIS:
a great cost of interpretation qualifies the discourse to be
almost unacceptable.
The STATIC INTERPRETATION of a discourse d is
nothing else but the static interpretation of the
eventuality referent representing it. Its recursive
definition is finally based upon anchoring internal
entities of interpreters to external entities in the external
universe, and advances from smaller units of (the
sentences of) the discourse towards more complex units.
We do not intend to enter into details in this paper.
Example
The detailed analysis of a Hungarian sentence will serve

as an illustration of the process of dynamic interpretation.
Hungarian is a challenge because of its very rich
morphology and extremely free word order [18], which
enables to express subtle differences in meaning [23].
We claim that the very abstract and morpheme-based
monostratal eALIS approach to grammar, relying on
the four internal functions , , and (discussed
above) and a complex system of ranked lexical
requirements (which is nearly an apparatus similar to
those known from optimality theories [8]), neutralizes
the difference between languages where the meaning of a
sentence can primarily be calculated on the basis of
words in a strict order and languages where what are
relevant to this calculation are basically morphemes
within words and affixes (e.g. case and agreement
markers).
Informatica 34 (2010) 103110 105
How can an interpreter anchor to each other the

different types of referents occurring in copies of lexical
items retrieved in the course of dynamic interpretation?
Let us consider the Hungarian sentence below:
( 1 ) REQUIREMENTS () AND OFFERS () IN LEXICAL
ITEMS
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Pter hasonlt ar-ra a magas nmet

sz-bajnok-ra.
Peter resemble that-onto the tall
German
swimming-champion-onto
Peter resembles that tall German swimming
champion.
Pter:
[eP: ? eP eP, eP : pPeter rP]
eP :: ...
eP :: ...
eP :: .supp eP
5th row eP :: .cons eP
rP :: Pred: Cat,+2,X ,
Agr,+2,3Sg
:: Ant: ...
:: : Cat,0,PropN,
Case,0,, Agr,0,3Sg
hasonlt:
[eres : presemble rres rres]
eres :: ...
rres :: ArgN: Ord,-7,Nei,
Cat,+2,N, Case,+2,
:: ArgD: Cat,+2,GQD
5th row
:: : Cat,0,V+rA,
Agr,0,3Sg
rres :: ArgN: Ord,+7,Nei,
Cat,+2,N, Case,+2,rA
:: ArgD: Cat,+2,GQD
:: : Cat,0, V+rA
arra:
rthat :: Adj: Ord,+6,Nei,
Cat,+2,N, Agr,+2,{3,Sg,rA}
:: Out: Gest,+2,Glance,
Dist,+2,Long
a(z):
[ethe: ? ethe ethe, (Arg,
, ethe)= rthe]
ethe :: ...
ethe :: ...
ethe :: ...
5th row ethe :: .supp ethe
ethe :: .cons ethe
rthe :: Adj: Ord,+5,Nei,
Cat,+2,N
:: Pred: ...
:: Ant: ...
10th row
:: Arg: Cat,0,+Art
magas:
[etall: etall etall, etall: ptall
rtall]
etall :: ...
etall :: .conj etall
etall :: .conj etall
5th row
rtall :: Adj: Ord,+2,Nei,
106
Informatica 34 (2010) 103110
Cat,+2,N
f.
g.
h.
:: : Cat,0,Acolor
nmet:
egerm: egerm egerm,
egerm: pGerman rgerm]
egerm :: ...
egerm :: .conj egerm
egerm :: .conj egerm
5th row rgerm :: Adj: Ord,+1,Nei,
Cat,+2,N
:: : Cat,0,Anation
sz-:
[esw: esw esw,
esw: pswimming rsw]
esw :: ...
esw:: .conj esw
esw :: .conj esw
5th row
rsw :: Adj: Ord,+ ,Nei,
Cat,0,N
:: : ...
bajnok:
[ech: pchampion rch]

ech :: ...
rch :: Pred: Cat,+5, X
:: : Cat,0,ComN,
Case,0,, Agr,0,3Sg)
-ra:
ronto :: Stem: Ord, Nei, Cat,+2, N
ronto :: Pred: Cat,+2, X-rA
In eALIS the lexical representation belonging to a
morpheme typically contains reference to a predicate
(e.g. pchampion) furnished with argument referents (e.g. rch
above in (1h)), a temporal referent and a referent
referring to the fact that the given predicate holds true
(the eventuality referent ech refers to the fact that
somebody is a champion). In the analysis that this paper
provides temporal referents are ignored for the sake of
simplicity. As was mentioned earlier, this eventuality
construction is registered by internal function .
The lexical representation belonging to a morpheme
should predict about these referents how they will
connect to referents coming from other lexical
representations retrieved in the course of dynamic
interpretation of a sentence when the given morpheme
gets into the given sentence. We mean the extension of
, practically responsible for identification, and ,
responsible for scope hierarchy and/or rhetorical
relations. Lexical items thus impose requirements on
the
potential
intrasentential
environments
accommodating the given morphemes and provide
offers for other morphemes items to help them (these
other morphemes) find them.
In what follows we provide comments on a few (but
not all) lexical requirements and offers. Let the verb
(hasonlt resemble) be the first (1b), with its 8 row long
lexical description. The first row contains the eventual
representation of the semantic contribution of this verb,
which consists of an eventuality referent (referring to the
fact that somebody resembles somebody), a predicate
referent, a temporal referent (ignored), and two argument
referents. What the second row says is that the
G. Alberti et al.
eventuality referent, which practically represents the

piece of information carried by this word-size
morpheme) should be linked to some part of the
interpreters current information state (potentially
including pieces of information coming from the
sentence being interpreted) by means of an appropriate
level label.
According to the third row, the referent belonging to
the first argument of the verb (rres) should be anchored to
the referent coming from the lexical description of a
morpheme (word) in the neighbourhood (Nei) as for
word order (Ord), which belongs to the category of
nouns (Cat,...,N) and bears the Nominative case,
which is unmarked in Hungarian (). What the fourth
row adds to this complex requirement is that referent rres
should also be anchored to a referent coming from the
lexical item of a morpheme (or word) which can play the
role of a generalized-quantifier determiner GQD [10].
Let us look at (2f-g) below: the proper name Pter is
suitable for both roles as it is a noun in the nominative
and implicitly includes an article (the person called
Peter). The fifth row says that lexical item (1b) offers
a verb with two specific arguments (V+rA) in 3Sg. On
the basis of this characterization referent rP in lexical
item (1a) may find rres; see (2a) below. The intuitive
content of the lexical information conveyed in rows 3-5
is that who resembles somebody is nothing else but
Peter2; the three equations below in (2a, f, g) declare this
fact three times, on the basis of different grammatical
evidence.
Rows 6-8 characterize the second argument of
hasonlt. Its referent rres should be anchored to two
different referents: one coming from the lexical
description of a noun (ArgN) (2h, x) and another one
contained by the item of a determiner-like element
(ArgD) (2i, m). In this way the interpreter can identify
the person that Peter resembles with one mentioned as
the champion.
(2) THE CONNECTIONS COMPLETED AMONG SIMPLE
REFERENTS
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
2
rP :: Pred: Cat, Agr rres

rP :: Ant: ... rPter
eP :: ? ?
eP :: ? ?
eres:: .cons ? (assertion!)
rres :: ArgN: Ord, Cat, Case rP
rres :: ArgD: Cat rP
rres :: Arg: Ord, Cat, Case rch
rres :: Arg: Cat rthe
rthat :: Adj: Ord, Cat, Agr rch
rthat :: Out: Gest, Dist uHansMller
rthe :: Adj: Ord, Cat rch
rthe :: Pred: ... rres
We call this relation established between two lexical items

that show some grammatical sensitivity to each other (e.g.
agreement, case marking, adjacency in word order)
copredication: they provide two predications about the same
referent.
n.
o.
p.
q.
r.
s.
t.
u.
v.
w.
x.
y.
z.
aa.
rthe :: Ant: ... ra

ethe :: .cons ? (argument position!)
ethe :: ? ?
ethe :: ? ?
rtall :: Adj: Ord, Cat rch
etall :: ? ?
rgerm :: Adj: Ord, Cat rch
egerm :: ? ?
rsw :: Adj: Ord, Cat rch
esw :: ? ?
rch :: Pred: Cat rres
ronto :: Stem: Ord, Cat rch
ronto :: Pred: Cat rres
ech :: ? ?
Now let us turn to the lexical item that belongs to the

noun stem bajnok champion (1h). According to row 3,
a predicate with a nominative argument is to be found
because, according to row 4, this stem is a common noun
which seems to be in the nominative case. Number 5
in row 3, however, permits that the requirement in
question be satisfied indirectly. Numbers like this in the
middle of the triples expressing requirements are ranks.
If this rank is 1, the given requirement must be satisfied
in the way described. If the rank is weaker (>1), there
are also alternative ways of satisfaction at our disposal,
typically with reference to higher ranked requirements
(e.g. (1i.row3). Requirement (1h.row3), thus, can be
satisfied (2x), but indirectly, due to (2z)).
It is also typical that requirements concerning word
order can be satisfied indirectly. There are five lexical
items in the example that contain requirements
demanding that a certain word immediately precede the
common noun champion (see (1c-g)). The adjective
expressing nationality is required to be the word adjacent
to the noun to the highest degree: rank +1 expresses
this fact in (1f.5). The fraction rank in (1g.5) implies an
even stricter neighbourhood but this should be carried
out within one word in Hungarian (szbajnok
swimming champion). The other adjective referring to
a personal characteristic, tall, should remain before
German because of its rank number 2 in (1e.5). Then
the weaker ranks 5 in the lexical item of the definite
article (1d.7) and 6 in that of the demonstrative
pronoun (1c.2) lead to the following grammatical word
order in the prenominal zone in question: arra a magas
nmet szbajnokra that the tall German
swimming champion. Alternative orders are illformed.
The explanation relies on the ranks discussed above:
an adjacency requirement of rank k concerning words w
and w can be regarded as satisfied if w is adjacent to
w, indeed, or each word between w and w is such
that the requirement demanding its being there is of a
higher rank n (n<k, or nk) or is a dependent of a word
like this. We have a hypothesis concerning the nature of
UG highly relevant to the efficiency of implementation:
it is possible to work out a system of adjacency ranks in a
way that enables us to check whether there is a single
legitimate word between w and w in the above
Informatica 34 (2010) 103110 107
discussed sense, instead of checking in the case of all

words between w and w whether they are legitimate
inhabitants in that zone.
Our next comment concerns the semantic content of
the definite article (1d.1), which is represented by
eventuality referent ethe. Following [3], we assume that
the organizes the semantic content of a sentence in the
form of an implication with the information coming from
a certain noun and its dependents as its premise (ethe)
and the information typically coming from the verb as
the conclusion (ethe). What ethe expresses, thus, is
something like this: if somebody is a tall German
swimming champion (3e, g, h, i), then somebody
resembles him (3f).
Similarly, the lexical item belonging to the proper
name (1a) also contains an implication (eP) due to the
implicit definite article hidden in (Hungarian) proper
names (1a.1). Its approximate content will prove to be
the following at the end of the successful dynamic
interpretation: if somebody is a person called Peter
(1a.1), then (3b) he resembles a tall German swimming
champion.
(3) THE CONNECTIONS COMPLETED AMONG REFERENTS
REFERRING TO EVENTUALITIES
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
eP :: .exp prev(Eve) (topic!; What a

surprise!)
eP :: ... ethe
eres:: .cons etall (eres will represent the
assertion of the sentence)
ethe :: .cons eP (argument position!)
ethe :: Adj: Ord, Cat etall
ethe :: Adj: Ord, Cat eres
etall :: Adj: Ord, Cat egerm
egerm :: Adj: Ord, Cat esw
esw :: Adj: Ord, Cat ech
ech :: .cons eP
A sentence like the one in (1) is to be embedded in

the interpreters current information state, converting the
double implicative structure into a (one-level) collection
of conjunctions partly due to the successful anchoring of
referents rP (2b) and rch (2j-l) to two specific persons
(say, Pter Pusks and Hans Mller) and the linking of
the main eventuality of the sentence to some previous
piece of information (prev(Eve) in (3a) where is the
cursor function). What we receive in this way can be as
follows, for instance: Pter resembles a tall German
swimming champion, Hans Mller; and this fact serves
as an Explanation (.exp) [9] for the speakers
surprise.
Implementation
The syntactic background of ReALIS has a totally

lexicalist nature, which means that the grammar consists
only of lexical items and their highly rich descriptions:
properties and expectations (offers () and requirements
() as used above). Phrase structure trees are not built,
the only operation is unification. In this homogenous
grammar word order is handled exactly like any other
108
Informatica 34 (2010) 103110
requirement (e.g. case or agreement). This is a more

universal approach than applying phrase structure rules,
since some languages hardly have any restrictions for
word order (but have much more rules about agreement).
We have been working on the implementation of this
totally lexicalist grammar, which uses ReALIS for
semantic analysis and representation.
In the past few years lexicalist parsers have become
more and more successful and widely used. They can
provide more detailed analysis than any other parser
(some of them even have semantic component), and they
can handle languages with rich morphology and free
word order as well; furthermore, the outputs of these
analyses can be parallel, thus machine translation can be
achieved more easily. Coverage has been a secondary
issue (many of these applications are still in experimental
phase), but some of these parsers have actually reached
the coverage of parsers using shallow techniques and
statistical methods (e.g. the HPSG-based DELPH-IN,
[12], or the LFG-based Parallel Grammar, [13]).
The success of lexicalist approaches (not only in
theory but in the field of language technology as well)
encourages us to keep working on the implementation,
and see whether a totally lexicalist approach can be even
more successful. A further argument for developing a
parser based on ReALIS is the lack of programs which
aim at providing detailed analysis and semantic
representation, and can handle phenomena like rhetoric
relations, discourse functions (topic, focus) and aspect.
Finally, we believe that if the semantic representation is
detailed enough (and ReALIS is more sophisticated than
any earlier one) it can serve as some kind of interlingua,
which could make it easier to achieve languageindependent machine translation. (Lexicalist approaches
like LFG and HPSG usually use transfer-based machine
translation, which needs different transfer lexicons for
every language pair.)
The first step of the implementation was to create a
relational (SQL) database for the lexicon [24], which is
universal enough to be able to store any lexical item of
any language with all their properties () and
requirements (). This can be possible because properties
are stored as tuples (rows) and not as attributes
(columns), and the lexical items (which are also rows in
the system) are connected to the relevant features by
matching tables. This way we have gained a dynamically
expandable system, since we do not have to define all
possible properties of every language at the beginning,
we can easily add new ones any time without changing
the structure of the database.
The parsing begins with finding the main predicate
(verb or nominal in Hungarian), then its requirements ()
have to be satisfied by finding all the necessary elements
with the proper features (), and then their requirements
have to be satisfied, etc. The cursor controls the search,
and makes sure that every need is fulfilled. Finally, the
remaining morphemes have to be legitimized, such as
adverbs or adjectives. An important operation is
unification, which is responsible for the right matches.
G. Alberti et al.
Since our aim is to provide a highly detailed

semantic representation, the logical choice was to
proceed from the semantics: even the syntactic search
is directed by the semantic need to find the referents
which play a role in the meaning of the sentence [6]. If
all the referents which are present in a lexical items
requirements () can be identified with other referents in
other lexical items properties (), then the sentence is
grammatical, and the proto-DRSs and the identity
relations are listed.
In our system lexical items are morphemes (stems
and affixes) for two reasons. The practical reason is
effectiveness: in the case of agglutinative languages (like
Hungarian) the size of the lexicon would be enormous if
every possible word form were added. The other more
important reason is theoretical: the idea of total
lexicalism is better served by this approach (TLM,
Totally Lexicalist Morphology [5]), and higher degree of
universality can be achieved. TLM does not follow the
usual way by having a morphological component, which
first creates the words, and then syntax and semantics
can operate on them. In TLM every kind of morpheme
can have their own requirements and semantic content
(but not all of them actually have). This way a main
difference between Hungarian and English can disappear
[7], namely that in Hungarian suffixes express e.g.
causativity or modality, while in English separate words
are responsible for the same roles (there is a similar
approach for Japanese [16]).
(4) nekel
- tet - het
l - ek.
sing
cause - may - 2sg.obj - 1sg.subj
I may make you sing.
The cost of TLM is that the usual information is not
cumulated in a word (e.g. the case of a noun), but it can
be solved by rank parameters.
Using rank parameters is a crucial point of the
theory, and so the implementation. Every expectation can
be overridden by a stronger requirement (like in
optimality theory); in other words, every requirement can
be satisfied directly or indirectly (by fulfilling a stronger
need). This way several phenomena can be handled
easily, such as word order (see above), or case and
agreement (without gathering the information of all the
morphemes of a word). Consider the above mentioned
construction hasonlt a bajnok-ra (resembles the
champion-onto), for instance: one of the requirements of
the verb hasonlt (resemble) is to find a noun which is
in sublative case (-ra/-re). It could be satisfied directly if
a pronoun was found (e.g. rm, sublative form of me,
onto-me). In this case direct satisfaction is not possible,
since the noun bajnok (champion) is in nominative case;
but it can be satisfied indirectly, because there is an
element, the suffix -ra (onto), which is identified with
the bajnok (champion) by a referent, and this
morpheme can meet the verbs expectation.
The implementational significance of the function
(footnote 1) is that robustness can be achieved by using
it. This function makes it possible to separate the
referents of an eventuality, such as predicate, time, first
argument, second argument, etc. This way we can assign

semantic representations to ungrammatical or incomplete
sentences as well (when producing complete condition
rows fails).
The size of the database is rather small at the
moment, but there are applications which do not need a
large corpus. The first one we will develop is a system
which can find the focus (or foci) of a sentence (the
phenomena is very interesting in Hungarian, since the
element is marked by a change in word order as well, not
only emphasis). Our approach is different from the usual
phrase-structure approach, where only a whole phrase
can be the focused element. The totally lexicalist method
is more appropriate since any word can be the focus (kt,
okos, fival):
(5) Pter kt okos fi - val tallkoz-ott.
Peter two clever boy-with meet - past
Peter met two clever boys.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated a new post-Montagovian theory

of interpretation, called ReALIS. After arguing for its
decisive theoretical innovation (the reconciliation of
compositionality and some kind of discourse
representationalism) and sketching its definition, we
have shown the process of dynamic interpretation of a
Hungarian sentence in this framework: how an
interpreter can anchor to each other the different types of
referents occurring in copies of lexical items retrieved by
the interpreter on the basis of the morphemes, word and
morpheme order, case and agreement markers of the
sentence performed by the speaker. The last section has
been devoted to the demonstration of the computational
implementation of ReALIS. Due to its totally lexicalist
(morpho-)syntactic background and ranked lexical
requirements, we avoid building phrase structure trees in
the course of producing semantic representations. The
only operation is unification of lexical constructions. In
this abstract approach the radical differences between
languages like English and Hungarian will practically
disappear.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks are due to the National Scientific Fund of
Hungary (OTKA K60595) for their financial support.
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Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
111
Using Bagging and Boosting Techniques for Improving Coreference Resolution

Smita Vemulapalli
Center for Signal and Image Processing (CSIP),
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
Xiaoqiang Luo, John F. Pitrelli and Imed Zitouni
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
E-mail: {xiaoluo,pitrelli,izitouni}@us.ibm.com
Keywords: coreference resolution, information extraction, classifier combination, bagging, boosting, entity detection and
tracking, majority voting
Classifier combination techniques have been applied to a number of natural language processing problems.
This paper explores the use of bagging and boosting as combination approaches for coreference resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort that examines and evaluates the applicability of
such techniques to coreference resolution. In particular, we (1) outline a scheme for adapting traditional
bagging and boosting techniques to address issues, like entity alignment, that are specific to coreference
resolution, (2) provide experimental evidence which indicates that the accuracy of the coreference engine
can potentially be increased by use of multiple classifiers, without any additional features or training data,
and (3) implement and evaluate combination techniques at the mention, entity and document level.
Povzetek: Kombiniranje ucnih algoritmov je uporabljeno za iskanje koreferenc.
1 Introduction
Classifier combination techniques have been applied
to many problems in natural language processing (NLP). Popular examples include the ROVER
system [Fiscus1997] for speech recognition, the
Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) system [Jayaraman and Lavie2005], and also part-ofspeech tagging [Brill and Wu1998, Halteren et al.2001].
Even outside the domain of NLP, there have
been numerous interesting applications for classifier combination techniques in the areas of biometrics
[Tulyakov and Govindaraju2006],
handwriting recognition [Xu et al.1992] and data mining [Aslandogan and Mahajani2004] to name a few. Most
of these techniques have shown a considerable improvement over the performance of single-classifier baseline
systems and, therefore, lead us to consider implementing
such a multiple classifier system for coreference resolution
as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
effort that utilizes classifier combination techniques for
improving coreference resolution.
This study shows the potential for increasing the accuracy of the coreference resolution engine by combining
multiple classifier outputs and describes the combination
techniques that we have implemented to establish and tap
into this potential. Unlike other domains where classifier combination has been implemented, the coreference
resolution application presents a unique set of challenges
that prevent us from directly using traditional combination
schemes [Tulyakov et al.2008]. We, therefore, adapt some
of these popular yet simple techniques to suit our application, and study the results of the implementation.
The main advantage of using combination techniques is
that in cases where we have multiple classification engines,
we do not merely use the classifier with highest accuracy,
but instead, we combine all of the available classification
engines attempting to achieve results superior to the single
best engine. This is based on the assumption that the errors
made by each of the classifiers are not identical and therefore if we intelligently combine multiple classifier outputs,
we may be able to correct some of these errors.
The main contributions of this paper are:
demonstrating the potential for improvement in the
baseline By implementing a system that behaves like
an oracle, where we combine the outputs of several
coreference resolution classifiers with knowledge of the
truth i.e. the correct output generated by a human, we
have shown that the output of the combination of multiple classifiers has the potential to be significantly higher
in accuracy than any of the individual classifiers. This
has been proven in certain other areas of NLP; here, we
112
Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
have experimentally demonstrated the potential for this

to be true in the area of coreference resolution.
adapting traditional bagging techniques for coreference resolution Multiple classifiers were generated
from the same classification engine by subsampling
the training-data set and the feature set. These classifiers were combined using entity-level sum rule and
mention-level majority voting, after overcoming the
problem of entity alignment between the classifier outputs.
implementing a document-level boosting algorithm for
coreference resolution A document-level boosting
algorithm was implemented in which a coreference
resolution classifier was iteratively trained using a
reweighted training set. Here, the training set is a set
of documents, and since coreference resolution is performed for the entire document, the reweighting is done
at the document level. This reweighting of the training set took into account the distribution of documents
from different genres such as broadcast news, web logs
and newswire articles.
addressing the problem of entity alignment To implement any combination technique for coreference resolution, we need to compensate for the fact that the number of entities and the number of mentions in each of
the entities are different in the outputs of the coreference resolution classifiers to be combined. Therefore,
there is the big challenge of aligning the entities before
any of the traditional combination techniques may be
implemented.
1.1 Organization of the paper

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we briefly describe the existing coreference resolution system and the data set used. Sections 3 and 4 present
our adaptation of traditional bagging and boosting techniques. Section 5 contains an experimental evaluation of
the proposed combination techniques. Section 6 discusses
the related work. Finally, we conclude in Section 7 with
suggestions for future work.
2 Coreference system and data

The terminologies used in the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) task [NIST] are adopted in this paper: a mention
is an instance of reference to an object, and the collection of
mentions referring to the same object in a document form
an entity. Coreference resolution is nothing but partitioning mentions into entities. For example, in the following
sentence:
John said Mary was his sister.
there are four mentions: John, Mary, his, and sister.
John and his belong to the same entity since they refer
S. Vemulapalli et al.
to the same person; so do Mary and sister. Furthermore, John and Mary are named mentions, sister is a
nominal mention and his is a pronominal mention.
The basic coreference system is similar to the one described by Luo et al. [Luo et al.2004]. In such a system,
the mentions in a document are processed sequentially, and
at each step, a mention is either linked to one of existing entities, or used to create a new entity. At the end of this process, each possible partition of the mentions corresponds to
a unique sequence of link or creation actions, each of which
is scored by a statistical model. The one with the highest
score is output as the final coreference result.
Experiments reported in the paper are done on the ACE
2005 data [NIST2005], which is available through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). The dataset consists of
599 documents from rich and diversified sources (called
genres in this paper), which include newswire articles, web
logs, and Usenet posts, transcription of broadcast news,
broadcast conversations and telephone conversations. We
reserve the last 16% documents of each source as the test
set, and use the rest of the documents as the training set.
The number of documents, words, mentions and entities of
this data split are tabulated in Table 1.
3 Bagging
One way to obtain multiple classifiers is via
bagging or bootstrap aggregating, proposed by
Breiman [Breiman1996] to improve the classification
by combining outputs of classifiers that are trained using
randomly-generated training sets. We have implemented
bagging by using semi-randomly generated subsets of the
entire training set and also subsets of the feature set.
3.1 Generation of multiple classifiers

In bagging, multiple classifiers are obtained by randomly
generating subsets of the training set. Here, the training
set refers to the set of documents that we use to train the
system. When we subsample the training set, we do it at
the document level.
We generated several classifiers by two techniques: the
first is by semi-randomly sampling the training set and the
second is by sampling the feature set. In the first technique,
we try to sample the training set in a random fashion and
generate a few classifiers by maintaining the initial distribution of the documents of different genres and a few others by not maintaining this distribution. In the second technique, we need to reduce the feature set and this is not done
in a random fashion. Instead, we use our understanding of
the individual features and also their relation to other features to decide which features may be dropped. In most
of our experiments, we used classifiers in which either the
training set or the feature set was subsampled, but not both.
USING BAGGING AND BOOSTING TECHNIQUES FOR. . .
Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
113
Table 1: Statistics of ACE 2005 data: number of documents, words, mentions and entities in the training and test set.
DataSet
Training
Test
Total
#Docs
499
100
599
#Words
253771
45659
299430
#Mentions
46646
8178
54824
#Entities
16102
2709
18811
entity class, etc.

(R, S) =
Figure 1: Working of the oracle
3.2 Oracle
In this paper, we refer to an oracle system which uses
knowledge of the truth. In this case, truth, called gold standard henceforth, refers to mention detection and coreference resolution done by a human for each document. It
is possible that this gold standard may have errors and is
not perfect truth, but, as in most NLP systems, the humanannotated gold standard is considered the reference for purposes of evaluating computer-based coreference resolution.
To understand the oracle itself, consider an example in
which we have two classifiers, and their outputs for the
same input document are C1 and C2 , as illustrated in Figure 1. The number of entities in C1 and C2 may not be the
same and even in cases where they are, the number of mentions in corresponding entities may not be the same. In fact,
even finding the corresponding entity in the other classifier
or in the gold standard output G is not a trivial problem and
requires us to be able to align any two classifier outputs.
The alignment between any two coreference labelings,
say C1 and G, for a document is done by finding the best
one-to-one map between the entities of C1 and the entities of G, using the algorithm explained by Luo [Luo2005].
To align the entities of C1 with those of G, under the assumption that an entity in C1 may be aligned with at most
only one entity in G and vice versa, we need to generate a bipartite graph between the entities of C1 and G.
Now the alignment task is a maximum bipartite matching
problem. This is solved by using the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm [Kuhn1955, Munkres1957]. The weights of the
edges of the graph, in this case, are entity-level alignment
measures. The metric we use is a relative measure of the
similarity between the two entities. To compute the similarity metric (R, S) for the entity pair (R, S), we use the
formula shown in Equation 1, where the intersection ()
is the commonality with attribute-weighted partial scores.
Attributes are things such as (ACE) entity type, subtype,
2 |R S|
|R| + |S|
(1)
The oracle output is a combination of the entities in C1

and C2 with the highest entity-pair alignment measures
with the entities in the gold standard G. We can see in
Figure 1 that the entity G-E1 is aligned with entities C1-E1
and C2-E1. We pick the entity with the highest entity-pair
alignment measure (highlighted in gray in Figure 1) with
the corresponding gold standard entity which, in this case,
is C1-E1. This is repeated for every entity in G. The oracle output can be seen in the right-hand side of Figure 1.
This technique can be scaled up to work for any number of
classifiers.
3.3 Preliminary classifier combination

approaches
Imitating the oracle. Making use of the existing framework
of the oracle, we implement a combination technique that
imitates the oracle except that in this case, we do not have
the gold standard. If we have N classifiers Ci , i = 1 to N
that we plan to combine, then we replace the gold standard
by each of the N classifiers in succession, to get N outputs
Combi , i = 1 to N .
The task of generating multiple classifier combination
outputs that are of a significantly higher accuracy than the
original classifiers is often considered to be easier than the
task of finding out which of the output classifiers is highestaccuracy to pick as the final output. We used the formulas
in Equations 2, 3 and 4 to assign a score Si to each of the
N combination outputs Combi obtained, and then we pick
the one with the highest score. The function Sc gives the
similarity between the entities in the pair (R, S). Here,
we have used the function in Equation 1 to compute the
similarity between the entity-pair that forms the argument
of the function Sc.
Si =
1 X
Sc(Combi , Cj )
N 1
(2)
Si = Sc(Combi , Cj )
(3)
j6=i
Si =
1 X
Sc(Combi , Combj )
N 1
j6=i
(4)
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Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
Figure 2: Entity alignment between classifier outputs
4 Boosting
Figure 3: Mention-level majority voting

Entity-level sum-rule. We implemented a basic sum-rule at
the entity level, where we generate only one combination
classifier output by aligning the entities in the N classifiers
and picking only one entity at each level of alignment. In
the oracle, the reference for entity-alignment was the gold
standard and here, since the gold standard is not available,
we make use of the full system to do this. The full system is
the baseline system where the entire training set and feature
set have been used. The entity-level alignment has been
represented as a table in Figure 2.
Let Ai , i = 1 to M be the aligned entities in one row
of the table in Figure 2. Here, M N if we exclude
the baseline from the combination and M N + 1 if
we include it. To pick one entity out of these M entities,
we use traditional sum rule [Tulyakov et al.2008], shown
in Equation 5, to compute the S(Ai ) for each Ai and pick
the entity with the highest S(Ai ) value. Again, we use the
function in Equation 1 to compute Sc(Ai , Aj ).
S(Ai ) =
Sc(Ai , Aj )
the number of times a mention is found in a set of aligned

entities. So for every row in the table, we have a mention
count. The row with the highest mention count is assigned
the mention in the output. This is repeated for each mention
in the document. In Figure 3, we are voting for the mention
m1, which is found to have a voting count of 3 at the entity
level A and a count of 1 at the entity-level of C, so the mention is assigned to the entity A as it has the majority vote.
It is important to note that some entities of the classifiers
may not align with any of the baseline classifiers entities
as we allow only a one-to-one mapping during alignment.
This leads to some entities not being a part of the alignment
table. If this number is large, it may have a considerable effect on the combination.
(5)
j6=i
3.4 Mention-level majority voting

In the previous techniques, entities are either picked or rejected as a whole but never broken down further. In the
mention-level majority voting technique, we work at the
mention level, so the entities created after combination may
be different from the entities of all the classifiers that are
being combined.
As shown in Figure 3, we have made use of the entitylevel alignment table. This table is generated by aligning
the entities output by the classifiers with the baseline system, as explained in the Section 3.3. In the entity-level
alignment table, A, B, C and D refer to the entities in the
baseline system and A1, A2, ..., D4 represent the entities of
the input classifiers that are aligned with each of the baseline classifier entities. Majority voting is done by counting
Unlike bagging techniques, the document-level boosting

algorithm that we have implemented is adaptive in nature.
The training set of the classifier is adaptively reweighted
based on the performance of the previous classifiers. Since
coreference resolution is done for a whole document, we
can not split a document further. So when we reweight
the training set, we are actually reweighting the documents.
Figure 4 shows the overview of the document-level boosting algorithm.
The decision of which documents to boost is made using two thresholds: percentile threshold Pthresh and the Fmeasure threshold Fthresh . Documents in the test set that
are in the lowest Pthresh percentile and that have a document F-measure less than Fthresh will be boosted in the
training set for the next iteration. We shuffle the training set
to create some randomness and then divide it into groups
of training and test sets in a round-robin fashion such that
a predetermined ratio of the number of training documents
to the number of test documents is maintained. In Figure 4,
the light gray regions refer to the training documents and
the dark gray regions refer to the test documents. Another
important consideration is that it is difficult to achieve good
coreference resolution performance on documents of some
genres compared to others, even if they are boosted significantly. In an iterative process, it is likely that documents
of such genres will get repeatedly boosted. Also our training set has more documents of some genres and fewer of
others. So we try to maintain, to some extent, the ratio of
documents from different genres in the training set while
splitting this training set further into groups of training and
test sets.
Evaluation
This section describes the general setup used to conduct the

experiments and presents an evaluation of the combination
techniques that were implemented.
Experimental setup. The coreference resolution system
used in our experiments makes use of a Maximum En-
Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
115
Figure 4: Document-level boosting

Table 2: Accuracy of the generated and baseline classifiers
Classifier
C1 C15 Average
Highest
Lowest
C0 Baseline
Accuracy (%)
77.52
79.16
75.81
78.53
tropy model which has lexical, syntactical, semantic and

discourse features [Luo et al.2004]. The data set used here,
which is split into the training and test sets, is part of the
ACE 2005 data [NIST2005]. A short description of this
data set may be found in Section 2 of this paper. For
the purpose of evaluation, we make use of the humanannotated gold standard, described in Section 3.2, as the
reference.
5.1 Bagging
The classifiers for the following experiments were generated using bagging techniques described in Section 3.1.
A total of 15 classifiers (C1 to C15 ) were generated, 12
of which were obtained by semi-random sampling of the
training set and the remaining 3 by sampling of the feature
set. We also make use of the baseline classifier C0 , which
was trained using the full training and feature sets. The
accuracy of classifiers C0 to C15 has been summarized in
Table 2. The agreement between the generated classifiers
output was found to be in the range of 93% to 95%. In
this paper, the metric used to compute the accuracy of the
coreference resolution is the Constrained Entity-Alignment
F-Measure (CEAF) [Luo2005] with the entity-pair similarity measure in Equation 1.
Oracle. To conduct the oracle experiment described in
Section 3.2, we train 1 to 15 classifiers, whose output are
aligned to the gold standard. For all system-generated entities aligned with a gold entity, we pick the one with the
highest score as the output. We measure the performance
for varying number of classifiers, and the result is plotted
in Figure 5.
First, we observe a steady and significant increase in
CEAF for every additional classifier. This is not surprising
since an additional classifier can only improve the alignment score. Second, it is interesting to note that the oracle
performance is 87.58% for a single input classifier C1 , i.e.
an absolute gain of 9% compared to the baseline. This is
because the availability of gold entities makes it possible to
remove many false-alarm entities. Finally, the performance
of the oracle output when all 15 classifiers (C1 to C15 ) are
used as input is 94.59%, a 16.06% absolute improvement.
The oracle experiment is a cheating one since the gold
standard is used. Nevertheless, it helps us understand the
performance bound of combining multiple classifiers and
the quantitative contribution of every additional classifier.
Preliminary classifier combination approaches. While the
oracle result is encouraging, a natural question is. how
much performance gain can be attained if the gold standard is not available. To answer this question, we replace
the gold standard with one of the 15 classifiers C1 to C15 ,
and align the rest classifiers. This is done in a round robin
fashion as described in Section 3.3. The best performance
of this procedure is 77.93%. The sum-rule combination
output had an accuracy of 78.65% with a slightly different
baseline of 78.81%. In other words, these techniques do
not yield a statistically significant increase in CEAF relative to the baseline. This is not entirely surprising as the
the 15 classifiers C1 to C15 are highly correlated.
Mention-level majority voting. This experiment is conducted to evaluate and understand the mention-level majority voting technique for coreference resolution. Compared with the baseline, the results of this experiment are
not statistically better, but they give us valuable insight into
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Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
the working of the combination technique. The example in

Figure 6 shows the contents of a single entity-alignment
level for the full system C0 and 3 classifier outputs C1 , C2 ,
and C3 and the combination output by mention-level majority voting. The mentions are denoted by the notation
EntityID - MentionID, for example 7-10 is the mention
with EntityID=7 and MentionID=10. Here, we use the EntityID in the gold file. The mentions with EntityID=7 are
correct i.e. they belong in this entity, and the others are
wrong i.e. they do not belong in this entity.
The aligned system mentions are of the following four
types:
Type I mentions These mentions have a highest voting
count of 2 or more at the same entity alignment level
and therefore appear in the output.
Type II mentions These mentions have a highest voting count of 1 and are also present in more than one
input classifier. So, there is a tie between the mention
counts for a single mention at different entity alignments. The rule to break the tie is that mentions are
included if they are also seen in the full system C0 .
As can been seen, this rule brings in correct mentions
such as 7-61, 7-63, 7-64, but it also admits 20-33,20-39
and 20-62. This is a fundamental difference between
the oracle and real experiment: in the oracle, the gold
standard helps to remove entities with false-alarm mentions, while the full system output itself is noisy and it
is not strong enough to reliably remove undesired mentions.
Type III mentions There is only one mention 20-66
which is of this type. It is selected in the combination
output since it is present in C2 and the baseline C0 ,
although it has been rejected as a false-alarm in C1 and
C3 .
Type IV mentions These mentions are false-alarm
mentions (relative to C0 ) and are rejected in the output.
As can be seen, this correctly rejects mentions such as
15-22 and 20-68, but it also rejects correct mentions
7-18, 7-19 and 7-30.
In summary, the current implementation of the mentionlevel majority voting technique has a limited ability to
distinguish correct mentions from wrong ones due to the
Figure 5: Oracle performance vs. number of classifiers
Table 3: Results of document-level boosting

Iteration
1
2
3
4
Accuracy (%)
78.53
78.82
79.08
78.37
noisy nature of the full system C0 which is used for alignment. We also observe that mentions spread across different alignments often have low-count and they are often
tied in count. Therefore, it is important to set a minimum
threshold for accepting these low-count majority votes and
also investigate better tie-breaking techniques.
5.2
Boosting.
This experiment is conducted to evaluate the documentlevel boosting technique for coreference resolution. Table 3
shows the results of this experiment with the ratio of the
number of training documents to the number of test documents equal to 80:20, F-measure threshold Fthresh = 74%
and percentile threshold Pthresh = 25%. The accuracy increases by 0.7%, relative to the baseline. Due to computational complexity considerations, we used fixed values
for the parameters. Therefore, these values may be suboptimal and may not correspond to the best possible increase in accuracy.
6 Related work
A large body of literature related to statistical methods for coreference resolution is available [Ng and Cardie2003, Yang et al.2003, Ng2008,
Poon and Domingos2008, McCallum and Wellner2003].
Poon and Domingos [Poon and Domingos2008] use an
unsupervised technique based on joint inference across
mentions and Markov logic as a representation language
for their system on both MUC and ACE data. Ng [Ng2008]
proposed a generative model for unsupervised coreference
resolution that views coreference as an EM clustering process. In this paper, we make use of a coreference engine
similar to the one described by Luo et al. [Luo et al.2004],
where a Bell tree representation and a Maximum entropy
framework are used to provide a naturally incremental
framework for coreference resolution. To the best of
our knowledge, this is the first effort that utilizes classifier combination techniques to improve coreference
resolution. Combination techniques have earlier been
applied to various applications including machine translation [Jayaraman and Lavie2005] and part-of-speech
tagging [Brill and Wu1998]. However, the use of these
techniques for coreference resolution presents a unique
set of challenges, such as the issue of entity alignment
Informatica 34 (2010) 111118
117
Figure 6: A real example showing the working of mention-level majority voting

between the multiple classifier outputs.

This paper examined and evaluated the applicability of various bagging and boosting techniques to coreference resolution. In this paper, we also provided empirical evidence
that coreference resolution accuracy can potentially be improved by making use of multiple classifiers. We proposed and evaluated new approaches to well-known classifier combination techniques that work at the mention, entity and document level. In future, we plan to work on a
better alignment strategy and also explore various possibilities for improving mention-level majority voting such
as setting a minimum threshold for the majority-vote and
better tie-breaking. We would also like to work on further
development of the document-level boosting algorithm to
automatically find optimal values for the parameters that
have been manually set in this paper. Another possible avenue for future work would be to test these combination
techniques with other coreference resolution systems.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge Ganesh N. Ramaswamy for his guidance and support in conducting the
research presented in this paper.
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119
Cascaded Regression Analysis Based Temporal Multi-document

Summarization
Ruifang He, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Sheng Li
Information Retrieval Lab, Harbin Institute of Technology P.O.Box 321, HIT,P.R.China 150001
E-mail: [email protected], http://ir.hit.edu.cn/
Keywords: temporal multi-document summarization, temporal semantic labeling, macro
importance discriminative model, micro importance discriminative model
Temporal multi-document summarization (TMDS) aims to capture evolving information of a single topic
over time and produce a summary delivering the main information content. This paper presents a cascaded regression analysis based macro-micro importance discriminative model for the content selection of
TMDS, which mines the temporal characteristics at different levels of topical detail in order to provide the
cue for extracting the important content. Temporally evolving data can be treated as dynamic objects that
have changing content over time. Firstly, we extract important time points with macro importance discriminative model, then extract important sentences in these time points with micro importance discriminative
model. Macro and micro importance discriminative models are combined to form a cascaded regression
analysis approach. The summary is made up of the important sentences evolving over time. Experiments
on five Chinese datasets demonstrate the encouraging performance of the proposed approach, but the problem is far from solved.
Povzetek: Metoda kaskadne regresije je uporabljena za izdelavo zbirnega besedila.
1 Introduction
Multi-document summarization is a technology of information compression, which is largely an outgrowth of the late
twentieth-century ability to gather large collections of unstructured information on-line. The explosion of the World
Wide Web has brought a vast amount of information, and
thus created a demand for new ways of managing changing
information. Multi-document summarization is the process
of automatically producing a summary delivering the main
information content from a set of documents about an explicit or implicit topic, which helps to acquire information
efficiently. It has drawn much attention in recent years and
is valuable in many applications, such as intelligence gathering, hand-held devices and aids for the handicapped.
Temporal multi-document summarization (TMDS) is the
natural extension of multi-document summarization, which
captures evolving information of a single topic over time.
The greatest difference from traditional multi-document
summarization is that it deals with the dynamic collection
about a topic changing over time. It is assumed that a user
has access to a stream of news stories that are on the same
topic, but that the stream flows rapidly enough that no one
has the time to look at every story. In this situation, a person
would prefer to dive into the details that include the most
important, evolving concepts within the topic and have a
trend analysis.
The key problem of summarization is how to identify
important content and remove redundant content. The
common problem for summarization is that the information in different documents inevitably overlaps with each
other, and therefore effective summarization methods are
needed to contrast their similarities and differences. However, the above application scenarios, where the objects to
be summarized face to some special topics and evolve with
time, raise new challenges to traditional summarization algorithms. One challenge for TMDS is that the information in summary must contain the evolving content. So we
need to effectively take into account this temporally evolving characteristics during the summarization process. Thus
a good TMDS must include information as much as possible, keeping information as novel as possible. In this paper,
we focus on how to summarize the series news reports by
the generic and extractive way.
Considering the temporal characteristic of the series
news reports at different levels of topic detail, redundancy
is a good feature. We adopted cascaded regression analysis to model the temporal redundancy from the macro and
micro view. We hierarchically extract important information with the macro and micro importance discriminative
models. We detected the important time points based on
macro importance discriminative model, and extracted the
important sentences based on micro importance discriminative model. Macro and micro importance discriminative
models are combined to form a cascaded regression analysis model. This method not only reduces the complexity of
the problem, but also fully mines the temporal characteristics of evolving data over time. The summary is made up of
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Informatica 34 (2010) 119124
R. He et al.
the important sentences evolving over time. Experiments

on five Chinese datasets demonstrate the encouraging performance of the proposed approach, but the problem is far
from solved.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section
2 introduces related work. The details of the proposed approach are described in Section 3. Section 4 presents and
discusses the evaluation results. We conclude this paper
and discuss future work in Section 5.
plore whether the temporal distribution information helps

to enhance event-based summarization based on corpus of
DUC2001.
Due to different tasks, the above researches do not uniformly incorporate the temporal characteristics. While
macro and micro importance discriminative models based
on cascaded regression analysis approach can mine the
temporal characteristics at different levels of topic detail
and produce summary.
2 Related work
3 Cascaded regression analysis

approach
Temporal summary is a relatively new research direction,

which originates from text summarization and topic detection and tracking (TDT). It is also related to time line
construction techniques. Alan et al.[1] firstly put forward
the concept of temporal summary inspired by TDT in SIGIR2001. Given a sequence of news reports on certain
topic, they extract useful and novel sentences to monitor the
changes over time. Usefulness is captured by considering
whether a sentence can be generated by a language model
created from the sentences seen to date. Novelty is captured
by comparing a sentence with prior sentences. They report
that it is difficult to combine the two factors successfully.
Other researchers exploit distribution of events and extract
the hot topics on time line by statistical measures. Swan
and Allan[8] employ 2 statistics to measure the strength
that a term is associated with a specified date, and then extract and group important terms to generate topics" defined by TDT. In [3], Chen et al. import the aging theory
to measure the hotness" of a topic by analyzing the temporal characteristic of news report. The aging theory implies that a news event can be considered as a life form
that goes through a life cycle of birth, growth, decay, and
death, reflecting its popularity over time. Then hot topics
are selected according to energy function defined by aging theory. Lim et al.[5] anchor documents on time line
by the publication dates, and then extract sentences from
each document based on surface features. Sentence weight
is adjusted by local high frequency words in each time slot
and global high frequency words from all topic sentences.
They evaluate the system on Korean documents and report
that time can help to raise the percentage of model sentences contained in machine generated summaries. Jatowt
and Ishizuka[2] investigate the approaches to monitor the
trends of dynamic web documents. They employ a simple
regression analysis on word frequency and time to identify whether terms are popular and active. The importance
of a term is measured by its slope, intercept and variance.
The weight of a sentence is measured by the sum of the
weights of the terms inside the sentence. The sentences
with highest scores are extracted into a summary. However, they do not report any quantitative evaluation results.
In [7], Mani is devoted to temporal information extraction,
knowledge representation and reasoning, and try to apply
them to multi-document summarization. In [4], Li et al. ex-
We know news has strong temporal characteristic. If there

is a novel happening, many websites will concern it, and
naturally produce vast relevant news reports, this time point
would be very important at the moment. If happening
is gradually disappearing, the relevant new reports will
also decrease accordingly, whose importance would reduce. From macro view, redundancy implies the whole
trends of the happening, which also hints the more finer
progress from micro view. We model the temporal redundancy from macro and micro view, and integrate macro and
micro importance discriminative models into a cascaded regression analysis framework for the content selection for
TMDS. Algorithm 1 shows the basic steps.
Algorithm 1 Framework for Temporal Multi-document
Summarization based on Cascaded Regression Analysis
Input: Stream of Chinese series news stories within the
same topic; Output: Sentences containing important events
evolving over time;
1: Parse the documents into the set of the sentences, and
recognize and resolve the time expressions contained
in sentences;
2: Construct the article/sentence count-time distribution
curve;
3: Convert the curve given by step 2 to be the relative
importance curve of the time points;
4: Extract the important time points with macro importance discriminative model;
5: Extract important events with micro importance discriminative model in each important time point;
6: Rank sentences according to the publication time and
the real time;
3.1 Selection of content unit

Since series news reports are made up of time points, each
time point consists of articles/sentences. Here, the ith time
point ti , the jth sentence sj is formalized as the following,
respectively: ti = {sj },
sj = {Tp , Tr , T rigger, Scope}, i, j = 1...n, T p is publication time, T r is real time through time resolution,
CASCADED REGRESSION ANALYSIS BASED. . .
121

$UWLFOH
6HQWHQFH

T rigger is the set of trigger words, and Scope is the sentence description containing events. Reference to the definition of event in ACE evaluation1 , a trigger word indicates the existence of an event. However, Chinese event
extraction technology is not mature, we ignore the relevant
attributes of event, including type, subtype, modality, polarity, genericity and tense. Generally, trigger word is verb
or action noun. We just consider the situation of verb so as
to simplify the question. Thus, the j th sentence can also
be simply formalized as follows: sj = {vk }, j, k = 1...n.
The importance of a sentence depends on the importance
of the verbs contained in a sentence. Based on the above
analysis, we choose the time point and verb as the content
unit of importance discrimination from macro and micro
view, respectively.
Informatica 34 (2010) 119124
Figure 1: Article/Sentence count-time distribution about

the Solomon turbulence news report.

3.2 Macro importance discriminative model
$U WLF OH

6H QWH QF H

1 ACE2007 evaluation plan:

http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ace/intro.html

In the new World Wide Web environment, the number of

news articles is increasing dramatically, and we can conveniently and instantaneously get the rich data. Usually,
the reports about the same story from the different websites are mostly similar, especially the start and end time
points and the important time points. With the evolution
of an abrupt news story, the number of the news articles
or events will form a distribution curve along the time axis.
From the intuitive observation of macro view, this temporal
characteristic of news articles gives us a good illumination
on TMDS.
For example, figure 1 shows the temporal trends about
the number of the news reports on the topic Solomon turbulence from the Sina. The horizontal axis is time, and the
vertical axis is the number of articles or sentences. For the
benefit of clearly observing the temporal characteristics of
the curve and comparing the difference in extracting the
important time points between articles and sentence counttime distribution curve, we convert it into the relative importance curve of time point and enlarge 100 times. This
transformation can further help us modify the choice of the
important time points. The concrete method is as follows:
the relative importance value of time point is computed by
the ratio of the article/sentence count in each time point
to the article/sentence count in the highest peak. Figure 2
shows the curve through transformation.
According to this kind of distribution curve and our intuition, we give the macro importance discriminative model,
including one assumption and one definition.
Assumption 1: The start and end time points, and the
time points having more documents contain important information with a high probability. Valleys and slowly
changing time points contain unimportant information with
a high probability.
Definition of Slowly changing time point: If the left
slope and right slope of the current time point are both
lower than (we empirically assign 2 to ), we say this time
Figure 2: Relative importance distribution curve of time

points.
point changes slowly. They are defined as follows:
left_Slope(ti ) =
right_Slope(ti ) =
RI(left)
Td(left)
(1)
RI(right)
Td(right)
(2)
RIleft = I(ti ) I(ti1 ), RI(right) = I(ti+1 )

I(ti ),Td(left) = date(ti ) date(ti1 ), Td(right) =
date(ti+1 ) date(ti ), i = 2...n, right_Slope(ti ),
right_Slope(ti ) are formed by the current time point, the
left adjacent one, and the right adjacent one. RI(left),
RI(right) is the relative importance difference value computed by the current time point, the left adjacent one, and
right adjacent one, respectively. I(ti ) is the relative importance value of the ith time point. Td(left), Td(right) is
the duration that the left one, the right one deviates from
the current one, respectively. date(ti ) is the date of the ith
time point.
Based on the above description, we give the algorithm
of detecting the important time points with importance discriminative model.
3.3 Micro importance discriminative model

In order to extract the important sentences, we need to define the importance scoring scheme. Trigger words are core
representatives of event, whose importance can reflect the
importance of sentence. Therefore, we statistically analyze
the importance of trigger words and define three kinds of
scoring schemes as follows:
122
Informatica 34 (2010) 119124
R. He et al.
Algorithm 2 Detecting the important time points

Input:
all time points; Output:
the importance
points;
1: Use climbing algorithm to find all the peaks and valleys, and keep the start and end time points;
2: Remove the valleys and the slowly changing time
points, and get four time point sets figured out by the
two kinds of relative importance distribution curve of
time points;
3: Compute the intersection of four time point sets, then
get the important time point set;
TFIOF based scoring scheme Depending on the basic

idea of the feature weight about TFIDF, TFIOF is proposed
to compute the importance of a trigger. ti , i, k = 1...n,
tf iof (vk ) = tfi (vk ) log
n
of (vk )
(3)
tfi (vk ) is the occurrence number of vk in the current time

point. n is the number of all time points, of (vk ) is the
number of time points containing vk .
Slope based scoring scheme ti , ti1 , i = 2...n, k =
1...n,
lef t_Slope(vk ) =
tfi (vk ) tfi1 (vk )

T d(lef t)
(4)
tfi1 (vk ) denotes the occurrence number of vk in the left

adjacent time point. lef t_Slope(vk ) is the instantaneous
left slope of the event on behalf of vk , which adopts the
linear regression method to express the consequent relation
between time and event variables. If it is a positive value,
it means that the event triggered by vk is emerging, or the
past event triggered by vk is disappearing. It also shows
whether this trigger word is active in the local scope.
Variance analysis based scoring scheme The model for
the arrival of trigger words can be considered as a random process, and the arrival of every trigger word is a
random variable. The variance value of the random variable X on behalf of vk is represented as V ariance(X) =
E{(X E(X))2 } It represents the average magnitude of
X in term of importance for a period of time, which helps
us to detect the important trigger words in the global scope.
The larger the V ariance(X) is, the more precious the trigger word. Every trigger word has a variance value. In order
to compare the importance of trigger words in each time
point, we normalize every random variable as X :
X = p
X E(X)
V ariance(X)
Algorithm 3 Selection and ranking of sentences

Input: Stream of series news reports through preprocessing; Output: Assume si to be the set of final summary in
ti , initially si = ;
1: Extract the trigger words;
2: Compute the importance weight of each trigger word
according to three scoring schemes;
3: Rank the trigger words according to the weight from
step 2, respectively;
4: repeat
5:
For each time point, according to each ranked vk , select the most important, but not redundant sentence
including vk with highest weight sum to add into si
6:
if vk si then
7:
Compute the value of the goal function: f(vk ) =
|si ||sj |
|sNi |
N
8:
end if
9:
if f(vk ) ( = 2/N) then
10:
sj is the redundant sentence, where N is the number of trigger words in the ith time point
11:
end if
12: until Summary length is satisfied
13: Rank the sentences within different time points by their
publication date, and rank the sentences within the
time points by their real date; If the two sentences have
the same real date, we donot care their relative rank;
4 Experiments
4.1 Corpus and evaluation metrics
TMDS is a new research, and there is no public corpus and
evaluation metric. Therefore we have to build the corpus
and the evaluation metric.
Corpus Our Chinese corpus construction includes two
parts, one is the construction of raw corpus, another is the
construction of reference summary. Five groups of Chinese
data set are chosen from Sinas2 international news topics
between 2005 and 2006. Table1 illustrates the settings of
the corpus, where there are five topics, 78 time points, 734
articles, 13486 sentences. Simultaneously, for each date
set, we let experts annotate three groups of reference summary in term of the compression rate 10% and 20%.
ID
1
2
3
4
5
#time points
20
25
3
20
10
#articles
214
250
17
158
95
#sentences
4310
5253
101
2278
1544
(5)
Based on the importance scoring schemes, we give the

algorithm of the important sentences extraction and ranking, see algorithm 3.
Table 1: Corpus settings

Evaluation Metrics ROUGE[6] is used as the evalua2 http://news.sina.com.cn
CASCADED REGRESSION ANALYSIS BASED. . .
Informatica 34 (2010) 119124
tion metric, which has been widely adopted by DUC for

automatic summarization evaluation. It measured summary
quality by counting overlapping units such as the n-gram,
word sequences and word pairs between the candidate summary and the reference summary. ROUGE toolkit reported
separate scores for 1, 2, 3 and 4-gram, and also for longest
common subsequence co-occurrences and so on. However, this evaluation metrics faces to English. Based on
it, we develop a Chinese-style ROUGE-N evaluation tool
CROUGE-N. The evaluation measure is F score:
i=n
P
F =
i=1
Fi
, Fi =
2Pi Ri
Pi + Ri
(6)
i = 1...n, i denotes the number of reference summary.

Pi , Ri , Fi is Precision, Recall and F score, respectively.
4.2 Experiment results and analysis

Two groups of experiments are designed to validate the performance of hierarchical regression analysis approach for
TMDS.
Experiment1: Micro importance discriminative model
In the first experiment, we use the micro importance discriminative model to produce the summaries under compression rate (CRate) 10% and 20%.
CRate
10%
20%
TFIOF
17.29%
27.18%
Slope
19.11%
27.56%
Variance
14.81%
27.02%
Table 2: Performance of content selection from micro view

with CROUGE-4
The goal of Experiment 1 is to evaluate the performance of different micro importance discriminative modelscn which extracts the important content from the fine particle scale. Table 2 shows that slope based micro model has
the best performance whatever compression rate is 10% or
20%. It is because that this model can better represent the
instantaneously temporal characteristics of series news reports. The performance of variance based micro model is
the lowest, however, it is still meaningful. Variance of random variable indicates the average changing magnitude of
its importance. It can capture the importance information
from the global scope. While TFIOF based micro model
is easy to be implemented and can extract important information from local and global scope. Three models observe
micro information from different views, respectively. We
can adopt the different micro models according to different
practical applications. The more effective model incorporating their merits will be explored in the future. When the
compression rate is 20%, the performance difference between three models is little. It shows that more ordinary
sentences are added into the summary, while our models is
apt to capture the particular sentences.
123
Experiment2: Macro and micro importance discriminative model

Based on the best micro importance discriminative
model adopting slope scoring scheme, we further validated
the performance of hierarchically extracting important information with macro and micro importance discriminative
model.
The experiment results from Table 3 validated that macro
and micro importance discriminative model displays the
better system performance than the single micro model.
The linear regression based macro and micro importance
discriminative model that we adopted receives the best performance. Macro model is used to extract the important
time points, which helps to have a coarse content selection.
In the whole process, we try to mine the temporal characteristic of the articles, events and terms from the macro
and micro view, and use the regression analysis to summarize the relationship between the time and the frequency of
articles, sentences and terms. Macro importance discriminative model and micro importance discriminative model
have the recursive properties to some extent. No matter
what the slope used to select important time points or the
slope used to extract important trigger words, their slope
value from the regression different from zero represents the
evolving trends of the series news. If it has a positive value,
it means that the event abruptly happens, or the event is disappearing.
Though our system performance cannot directly be compared with that of Document Understanding Conference
(DUC), it still has the similar performance trend. Our
CROUGE-2 score is higher than CROUGE-4 score, and
it is reasonable. Because of the limitation of space, our
approach s CROUGE-2 score wasnt listed here.
CRate
10%
20%
Micro
19.11%
27.56%
Macro+Micro
20.46%
29.13%
Table 3: Performance of content selection from macro and

micro view with CROUGE-4
5 Conclusion and future work

This paper tries to explore the optimization content selection model for temporal multi-document summarization
from different levels of topic detail. We mine the temporal
characteristics of articles count, sentences count and events
count with a topic changing over time, and proposed a cascaded regression analysis based macro and micro importance discriminative model to guide the content selection.
This model not only reduces the complexity of the problem, but also could fully use the temporal characteristics
from different levels of topic detail. However, since there
are no public evaluation corpus and metrics for temporal
124
Informatica 34 (2010) 119124
multi-document summarization, our approach cannot compare with others.

In the future, we will explore the more effective model
from information fusion view. Considering series news report has the strong temporal characteristic, we will further
use the techniques of temporal text mining and temporal
information extraction to improve the system performance.
We also hope to do some contributions for Chinese temporal multi-document summarization evaluation.
References
[1] J. Allan, R. Gupta, and V. Khandelwal. Temporal summaries of new topics. Proceedings of the
24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on
Research and development in information retrieval,
pages 10-18, 2001.
[2] A. Jatowt and M. Ishizuka. Temporal Web Page Summarization. 5th International Conference On Web Information Systems Engineering, Brisbane, Australia,
November 22-24, 2004.
[3] C. Kuan-Yu, L. LUESUKPRASERT, and T. Sengcho. Hot Topic Extraction Based on Timeline Analysis and Multidimensional Sentence Modeling. IEEE
Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering,
pages 1016-1025, 2007.
[4] M. L. Q. W. K. Li, W.J.and Wu. Integrating temporal
distribution information into event-based summarization. International Journal of Computer Processing of
Oriental Languages, 19:201-222, 2006.
[5] J. Lim, I. Kang, J. J.Bae, and J. Lee. Sentence extraction using time features in multi-document summarization. In Proceedings of the Asia Information
Retrieval Symposium, pages 82-932, 2004.
[6] C. Lin. ROU2GE: A Package for Automatic Evaluation of Summaries. Proceedings of the Workshop
on Text Summarization Branches Out, pages 25-26,
2004.
[7] I. Mani. Recent Developments in Temporal Information Extraction. Nicolov, N., and Mitkov, R. Proceedings of RANLP, 3, 2004.
[8] R. Swan and D. Jensen. Constructing Topic-Specific
Timelines with Statistical Models of Word Usage.
Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), pages
73-80, 2000.
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Informatica 34 (2010)
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Wojciech Olejniczak, Jerzy Olszewski, Cherry Owen, Mieczyslaw Owoc, Tadeusz Pankowski, Jens Penberg,
William C. Perkins, Warren Persons, Mitja Peru, Fred Petry, Stephen Pike, Niki Pissinou, Aleksander Pivk, Ullin
Place, Peter Planinec, Gabika Polcicov, Gustav Pomberger, James Pomykalski, Tomas E. Potok, Dimithu
Prasanna, Gary Preckshot, Dejan Rakovic, Cveta Razdevek Pucko, Ke Qiu, Michael Quinn, Gerald Quirchmayer,
Vojislav D. Radonjic, Luc de Raedt, Ewaryst Rafajlowicz, Sita Ramakrishnan, Kai Rannenberg, Wolf Rauch, Peter
Rechenberg, Felix Redmill, James Edward Ries, David Robertson, Marko Robnik, Colette Rolland, Wilhelm
Rossak, Ingrid Russel, A.S.M. Sajeev, Kimmo Salmenjoki, Pierangela Samarati, Bo Sanden, P. G. Sarang, Vivek
Sarin, Iztok Savnik, Ichiro Satoh, Walter Schempp, Wolfgang Schreiner, Guenter Schmidt, Heinz Schmidt, Dennis
Sewer, Zhongzhi Shi, Mria Smolrov, Carine Souveyet, William Spears, Hartmut Stadtler, Stanislaw Stanek,
Olivero Stock, Janusz Stokosa, Przemysaw Stpiczynski, Andrej Stritar, Maciej Stroinski, Leon Strous, Ron Sun,
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Gheorge Tecuci, Piotr Teczynski, Stephanie Teufel, Ken Tindell, A Min Tjoa, Drago Torkar, Vladimir Tosic,
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Marko Uric, Tadeusz Usowicz, Romana Vajde Horvat, Elisabeth Valentine, Kanonkluk Vanapipat, Alexander P.
Vazhenin, Jan Verschuren, Zygmunt Vetulani, Olivier de Vel, Didier Vojtisek, Valentino Vranic, Jozef Vyskoc,
Eugene Wallingford, Matthew Warren, John Weckert, Michael Weiss, Tatjana Welzer, Lee White, Gerhard
Widmer, Stefan Wrobel, Stanislaw Wrycza, Tatyana Yakhno, Janusz Zalewski, Damir Zazula, Yanchun Zhang,
Ales Zivkovic, Zonling Zhou, Robert Zorc, Anton P. eleznikar
Informatica
An International Journal of Computing and Informatics
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Volume 34 Number 1 March 2010
Editors Introduction to the Special Issue on System

Modeling and Transformation Principles
Recent Advances in Computational Linguistics
Paraphrase Identification Using Weighted
Dependencies and Word Semantics
Challenging Issues of Automatic Summarization:
Relevance Detection and Quality-based Evaluation
Low-Bias Extraction of Domain-Specific Concepts
Towards Multi-Stream Question Answering Using
Answer Validation
Named Entity Recognition Using Appropriate
Unlabeled Data, Post-processing and Voting
Assigning Library of Congress Classification Codes
to Books Based Only on their Titles
Automatic Identification of Lexical Units
Finding Maximal Sequential Patterns in Text
Document Collections and Single Documents
Grammar of ReALIS and the Implementation of its

Dynamic Interpretation
Using Bagging and Boosting Techniques for
Improving Coreference Resolution
Cascaded Regression Analysis Based Temporal
Multi-document Summarization
ISSN 0350-5596
Y. Ledeneva,
G. Sidorov
Y. Ledeneva,
G. Sidorov
M.C. Lintean, V. Rus
19
E. Lloret, M. Palomar
29
A.-C. N. Ngomo
A. Tllez-Valero,
M. Montes-y-Gmez,
L. Villaseor-Pineda,
A. Peas-Padilla
A. Ekbal,
S. Bandyopadhyay
R. vila-Argelles,
H. Calvo, A. Gelbukh,
S. Godoy-Caldern
V. Daudaravicius
R.A. GarcaHernndez,
J.Fco. MartnezTrinidad,
J.A. Carrasco-Ochoa
G. Alberti, J. Kleiber
37
45
55
77
85
93
103
S. Vemulapalli, X. Luo, 111

J.F. Pitrelli, I. Zitouni
R. He, B. Qin, T. Liu,
119
S. Li
Informatica 34 (2010) Number 1, pp. 1125

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Volume 34 Number 1 March 2010

EDITORIAL BOARDS, PUBLISHING COUNCIL

Informatica 34 (2010) 1-1

namely, the book title. Several measures of comparison

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

Recent Advances in Computational Linguistics

After this we present most popular CL application areas:

In this paper, we present an overview of recent advances

Information Retrieval (IR) consists of finding

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

methods are widely used in modern research in CL. Text

Levels of language and areas of

Computational linguistic research is correlated with

At the phonetic level, we analyze the phones

ellipsis, when some substructure is omitted but can be

Speech recognition and synthesis,

The correspondence between these directions of

RECENT ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL...

marked data, then it uses knowledge coded into a corpus,

Automatic morphological analysis

As an example of implementation of a linguistic

First of all, let us discuss the differences related to

Grammeme is a value of the grammar category, for example,

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

combined within one word. An example of these

Each grammar morpheme expresses exactly one

Examples of the agglutinative languages are Turk

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

the agglutinative morphology is much more regular than

Models for automatic morphological

Our next step is to find out what models or what types of

As far as model of analysis is concerned, there are two

Use a trick known as analysis through generation

Another dichotomy related to the models of analysis is:

If we prefer the algorithmic processing, then we should

In our opinion, any computer implementation is

Method analysis through generation

In this section, we discuss how to develop an

RECENT ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL...

analysis procedure and allows using morphological

Types of grammatical information

We use two types of grammatical information:

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

Grammatical type (in Russian, there are three genders

Types of morphological models

Three morphological models are used:

Informatica 34 (2010) 318

Using the models we have constructed, the flexion is

Given an input string (a word form), we analyze it in the

Our method needs some preliminary work of data

Describe and classify all words of the given language

To perform the last two steps, the dictionary record

The letters are separated one by one from right to

If a word form consists of several morphemes (a stem

The generation process is simple. Given the data from

Treatment of unknown words

The treatment of unknown words is also simple. We

RECENT ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL...

dictionary, we use the longest match stem (matching the