Search

In many areas of academic publishing, there is an explosion of literature, and sub-division of fields into subfields, leading to stove-piping where sub-communities of expertise become disconnected from each other. This is especially true in the genetics literature over the last 10 years where researchers are no longer able to maintain knowledge of previously related areas. This paper extends several approaches based on natural language processing and corpus linguistics which allow us to examine corpora derived from bodies of genetics literature and will help to make comparisons and improve retrieval methods using domain knowledge via an existing gene ontology. We derived two open access medical journal corpora from PubMed related to psychiatric genetics and immune disorder genetics. We created a novel Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger (GOST) and lexicon to annotate the corpora and are then able to compare subsets of literature to understand the relative distributions of genetic terminology, thereby enabling researchers to make improved connections between them.

Automatic semantic annotation of natural language data is an important task in Natural Language Processing, and a variety of semantic taggers have been developed for this task, particularly for English. However, for many languages, particularly for low-resource languages, such tools are yet to be developed. In this paper, we report on the development of an automatic Welsh semantic annotation tool (named CySemTagger) in the CorCenCC Project, which will facilitate semantic-level analysis of Welsh language data on a large scale. Based on Lancaster’s USAS semantic tagger framework, this tool tags words in Welsh texts with semantic tags from a semantic classification scheme, and is designed to be compatible with multiple Welsh POS taggers and POS tagsets by mapping different tagsets into a core shared POS tagset that is used internally by CySemTagger. Our initial evaluation shows that the tagger can cover up to 91.78% of words in Welsh text. This tagger is under continuous development, and will provide a critical tool for Welsh language corpus and information processing at semantic level.

Semantic annotation is an important part of corpus linguistics. A major tool for semantic tagger is the USAS developed at Lancaster University, which was originally designed for English but has been extended to cover many more languages. In the CorCenCC Project (http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/corcencc), we are extending the USAS to automatically annotate Welsh language data with the USAS semantic tagset. In this paper, we report on the development of Welsh semantic lexicons for the semantic tagger, in which we have already built a Welsh semantic lexicon containing 143,290 entries that has achieved a lexical coverage of 72.42% in an initial evaluation. An initial version of the Welsh semantic tagger has already been developed based on the lexical resource.

Automatic extraction and analysis of meaning-related information from natural language data has been an important issue in a number of research areas, such as natural language processing (NLP), text mining, corpus linguistics, and data science. An important aspect of such information extraction and analysis is the semantic annotation of language data using a semantic tagger. In practice, various semantic annotation tools have been designed to carry out different levels of semantic annotation, such as topics of documents, semantic role labeling, named entities or events. Currently, the majority of existing semantic annotation tools identify and tag partial core semantic information in language data, but they tend to be applicable only for modern language corpora. While such semantic analyzers have proven useful for various purposes, a semantic annotation tool that is capable of annotating deep semantic senses of all lexical units, or all-words tagging, is still desirable for a deep, comprehensive semantic analysis of language data. With large-scale digitization efforts underway, delivering historical corpora with texts dating from the last 400 years, a particularly challenging aspect is the need to adapt the annotation in the face of significant word meaning change over time. In this paper, we report on the development of a new semantic tagger (the Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger), and discuss challenging issues we faced in this work. This new semantic tagger is built on existing NLP tools and incorporates a large-scale historical English thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Employing contextual disambiguation algorithms, this tool is capable of annotating lexical units with a historically-valid highly fine-grained semantic categorization scheme that contains about 225,000 semantic concepts and 4,033 thematic semantic categories. In terms of novelty, it is adapted for processing historical English data, with rich information about historical usage

This paper seeks to describe the creation of a Spanish lexicon with semantic annotation in order to analyse more extensive corpora in the Spanish language. The semantic resources most employed nowadays are WordNet, FrameNet, PDEV and USAS, but they have been used mainly for English language research. The creation of a large Spanish lexicon will permit a greater amount of studies of corpora in Spanish can be undertaken. In the description of the steps followed for the construction of the lexicon, the difficulties encountered in its creation, and the solutions used to overcome them will be described. Finally, the construction of the lexicon will allow specific research tasks to be carried out, such as metaphor analysis, ACD studies and even PLN studies.

Ever since the publication of their first report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has described the origin of climate change as anthropogenic and, declaring it as ‘unequivocal’ in 2007. Nevertheless, societies worldwide react in different ways while the level of scepticism remains high and the scientific evidence is challenged. This research examines the ways printed newspapers have framed climate change issues across four countries: Britain, Brazil, Germany and Italy. Our ultimate aim is to investigate the role that mass media in shaping public opinion. These countries are all major emitters of greenhouse gases but their citizens reveal different attitudes and different levels of concern towards climate-change related issues (PEW 2010; EC 2011). Here, we are interested in examining the similarities and differences across these four countries regarding the debate around climate change issues within the news media. More specifically, we aim to explore the following questions: (i) what concerns are revealed through the debate? (ii) does the data explain why these societies respond differently to climate change in terms of level of concern and proposed solutions? (iii) what kinds of social practices do people discuss in relation to the causes and ways to mitigate climate change? To what extent the results can be understood as traces of national social practices? The data is drawn from a corpus comprising newspaper articles making reference to climate change/global warming published between Jan/2003 and Dec/2013 in the four countries under analysis. The texts were selected on the basis of a set of query words/phrases, established according to Gabrielatos (2007). The British corpus consists of 61.8 million words (86,088 texts), the Brazilian corpus contains 10.9 million words (19,268 texts), while the German and the Italian corpora reach 40 million and 10 million words (19,777 texts) respectively. This paper presents the results of such cross-cultura

Technology advancement in social media software allows users to include elements of visual communication in textual settings. Emoticons are widely used as visual representations of emotion and body expressions. However, the assignment of values to the “emoticons” in current sentiment analysis tools is still at a very early stage. This paper presents our experiments in which we study the impact of positive and negative emoticons on the classifications by fifteen different sentiment tools. The “smiley” :) and the “sad” emoticon :( and raw-text are compared to verify the degrees of sentiment polarity levels. Questionnaires were used to collect human ratings of the positive and negative values of a set of sample comments that end with these emoticons. Our results show that emoticons used in sentences are able to reverse the polarity of their true sentiment values.

The last two decades have seen the development of various semantic lexical resources such as WordNet (Miller, 1995) and the USAS semantic lexicon (Rayson et al., 2004), which have played an important role in the areas of natural language processing and corpus-based studies. Recently, increasing efforts have been devoted to extending the semantic frameworks of existing lexical knowledge resources to cover more languages, such as EuroWordNet and Global WordNet. In this paper, we report on the construction of large-scale multilingual semantic lexicons for twelve languages, which employ the unified Lancaster semantic taxonomy and provide a multilingual lexical knowledge base for the automatic UCREL semantic annotation system (USAS). Our work contributes towards the goal of constructing larger-scale and higher-quality multilingual semantic lexical resources and developing corpus annotation tools based on them. Lexical coverage is an important factor concerning the quality of the lexicons and the performance of the corpus annotation tools, and in this experiment we focus on evaluating the lexical coverage achieved by the multilingual lexicons and semantic annotation tools based on them. Our evaluation shows that some semantic lexicons such as those for Finnish and Italian have achieved lexical coverage of over 90% while others need further expansion.

There are various factors that affect the sentiment level expressed in textual comments. Capitalization of letters tends to mark something for attention and repeating of letters tends to strengthen the emotion. Emoticons are used to help visualize facial expressions which can affect understanding of text. In this paper, we show the effect of the number of exclamation marks used, via testing with twelve online sentiment tools. We present opinions gathered from 500 respondents towards “like” and “dislike” values, with a varying number of exclamation marks. Results show that only 20% of the online sentiment tools tested considered the number of exclamation marks in their returned scores. However, results from our human raters show that the more exclamation marks used for positive comments, the more they have higher “like” values than the same comments with fewer exclamations marks. Similarly, adding more exclamation marks for negative comments, results in a higher “dislike”.