This paper introduces a new web system that integrates English Grammatical Error Detection (GED) and course-specific stylistic guidelines to automatically review and provide feedback on student assignments. The system is being developed as a pedagogical tool for English Scientific Writing. It uses both general NLP methods and high precision parsers to check student assignments before they are submitted for grading. Instead of generalized error detection, our system aims to identify, with high precision, specific classes of problems that are known to be common among engineering students. Rather than correct the errors, our system generates constructive feedback to help students identify and correct them on their own. A preliminary evaluation of the system’s in-class performance has shown measurable improvements in the quality of student assignments.

We describe the linking of the TUFS Basic Vocabulary Modules, created for online language learning, with the Open Multilingual Wordnet. The TUFS modules have roughly 500 lexical entries in 30 languages, each with the lemma, a link across the languages, an example sentence, usage notes and sound files. The Open Multilingual Wordnet has 34 languages (11 shared with TUFS) organized into synsets linked by semantic relations, with examples and definitions for some languages. The links can be used to (i) evaluate existing wordnets, (ii) add data to these wordnets and (iii) create new open wordnets for Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mongolian, Russian, Tagalog, Urdua nd Vietnamese

In this paper we discuss the experience of bringing together over 40 different wordnets. We introduce some extensions to the GWA wordnet LMF format proposed in Vossen et al. (2016) and look at how this new information can be displayed. Notable extensions include: confidence, corpus frequency, orthographic variants, lexicalized and non-lexicalized synsets and lemmas, new parts of speech, and more. Many of these extensions already exist in multiple wordnets – the challenge was to find a compatible representation. To this end, we introduce a new version of the Open Multilingual Wordnet (Bond and Foster, 2013), that integrates a new set of tools that tests the extensions introduced by this new format, while also ensuring the integrity of the Collaborative Interlingual Index (CILI: Bond et al., 2016), avoiding the same new concept to be introduced through multiple projects.

WordNet, while one of the most widely used resources for NLP, has not been updated for a long time, and as such a new project English WordNet has arisen to continue the development of the model under an open-source paradigm. In this paper, we detail the second release of this resource entitled “English WordNet 2020”. The work has focused firstly, on the introduction of new synsets and senses and developing guidelines for this and secondly, on the integration of contributions from other projects. We present the changes in this edition, which total over 15,000 changes over the previous release.

Natural language communication between machines and humans are still constrained. The article addresses a gap in natural language understanding about actions, specifically that of understanding commands. We propose a new method for commonsense inference (grounding) of high-level natural language commands into specific action commands for further execution by a robotic system. The method allows to build a knowledge base that consists of a large set of commonsense inferences. The preliminary results have been presented.

This paper describes the creation of a new annotated learner corpus. The aim is to use this corpus to develop an automated system for corrective feedback on students’ writing. With this system, students will be able to receive timely feedback on language errors before they submit their assignments for grading. A corpus of assignments submitted by first year engineering students was compiled, and a new error tag set for the NTU Corpus of Learner English (NTUCLE) was developed based on that of the NUS Corpus of Learner English (NUCLE), as well as marking rubrics used at NTU. After a description of the corpus, error tag set and annotation process, the paper presents the results of the annotation exercise as well as follow up actions. The final error tag set, which is significantly larger than that for the NUCLE error categories, is then presented before a brief conclusion summarising our experience and future plans.

The Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) brings together researchers from various fields of linguistics, natural language processing, and information technology to present and discuss principles, case studies, and best practices for representing, publishing and linking linguistic data collections. A major outcome of our work is the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud, an LOD (sub-)cloud of linguistic resources, which covers various linguistic databases, lexicons, corpora, terminologies, and metadata repositories. We present and summarize five years of progress on the development of the cloud and of advancements in open data in linguistics, and we describe recent community activities. The paper aims to serve as a guideline to orient and involve researchers with the community and/or Linguistic Linked Open Data.

In this paper we present the ongoing efforts to expand the depth and breath of the Open Multilingual Wordnet coverage by introducing two new classes of non-referential concepts to wordnet hierarchies: interjections and numeral classifiers. The lexical semantic hierarchy pioneered by Princeton Wordnet has traditionally restricted its coverage to referential and contentful classes of words: such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Previous efforts have been employed to enrich wordnet resources including, for example, the inclusion of pronouns, determiners and quantifiers within their hierarchies. Following similar efforts, and motivated by the ongoing semantic annotation of the NTU-Multilingual Corpus, we decided that the four traditional classes of words present in wordnets were too restrictive. Though non-referential, interjections and classifiers possess interesting semantics features that can be well captured by lexical resources like wordnets. In this paper, we will further motivate our decision to include non-referential concepts in wordnets and give an account of the current state of this expansion.

We present a novel approach to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), using deep syntactic parsers and semantic based machine translation (MT) in diagnosing and providing explicit feedback on language learners’ errors. We are currently developing a proof of concept system showing how semantic-based machine translation can, in conjunction with robust computational grammars, be used to interact with students, better understand their language errors, and help students correct their grammar through a series of useful feedback messages and guided language drills. Ultimately, we aim to prove the viability of a new integrated rule-based MT approach to disambiguate students’ intended meaning in a CALL system. This is a necessary step to provide accurate coaching on how to correct ungrammatical input, and it will allow us to overcome a current bottleneck in the field — an exponential burst of ambiguity caused by ambiguous lexical items (Flickinger, 2010). From the users’ interaction with the system, we will also produce a richly annotated Learner Corpus, annotated automatically with both syntactic and semantic information.

Optimally, a translated text should preserve information while maintaining the writing style of the original. When this is not possible, as is often the case with figurative speech, a common practice is to simplify and make explicit the implications. However, in our investigations of translations from English to another language, English-to-Chinese texts were often found to include idiomatic expressions (usually in the form of Chengyu 成è ̄) where there were originally no idiomatic, metaphorical, or even figurative expressions. We have created an initial small lexicon of Chengyu, with which we can use to find all occurrences of Chengyu in a given corpus, and will continue to expand the database. By examining the rates and patterns of occurrence across four genres in the NTU Multilingual Corpus, a resource may be created to aid machine translation or, going further, predict Chinese translational trends in any given genre.

Sense-annotated parallel corpora play a crucial role in natural language processing. This paper introduces our progress in creating such a corpus for Asian languages using English as a pivot, which is the first such corpus for these languages. Two sets of tools have been developed for sequential and targeted tagging, which are also easy to set up for any new language in addition to those we are annotating. This paper also briefly presents the general guidelines for doing this project. The current results of monolingual sense-tagging and multilingual linking are illustrated, which indicate the differences among genres and language pairs. All the tools, guidelines and the manually annotated corpus will be freely available at compling.ntu.edu.sg/ntumc.

In this paper we describe the construction of an illustrated Japanese Wordnet. We bootstrap the Wordnet using existing multiple existing wordnets in order to deal with the ambiguity inherent in translation. We illustrate it with pictures from the Open Clip Art Library.

After a long history of compilation of our own lexical resources, EDR Japanese/English Electronic Dictionary, and discussions with major players on development of various WordNets, Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology started developing the Japanese WordNet in 2006 and will publicly release the first version, which includes both the synset in Japanese and the annotated Japanese corpus of SemCor, in June 2008. As the first step in compiling the Japanese WordNet, we added Japanese equivalents to synsets of the Princeton WordNet. Of course, we must also add some synsets which do not exist in the Princeton WordNet, and must modify synsets in the Princeton WordNet, in order to make the hierarchical structure of Princeton synsets represent thesaurus-like information found in the Japanese language, however, we will address these tasks in a future study. We then translated English sentences which are used in the SemCor annotation into Japanese and annotated them using our Japanese WordNet. This article describes the overview of our project to compile Japanese WordNet and other resources which relate to our Japanese WordNet.

We describe various syntactic and semantic conditions for finding abstractnouns which refer to concepts of adjectives from a text, in an attempt to explore the creation of a thesaurus from text. Depending on usages, six kinds of syntactic patterns are shown. In the syntactic and semantic conditions an omission of an abstract noun is mainly used, but in addition, various linguistic clues are needed. We then compare our results with synsets of Japanese WordNet. From a viewpoint of Japanese WordNet, the degree of agreement of ?Attribute? between our data and Japanese WordNet was 22%. On the other hand, the total number of differences of obtained abstract nouns was 267. From a viewpoint of our data,the degree of agreement of abstract nouns between our data and Japanese WordNet was 54%.