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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
LabEx EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics) (2011 – 2021)
Participants : Laurence Danlos, Benoît Sagot, Chloé Braud, Marie-Hélène Candito, Benoit Crabbé, Pierre Magistry, Djamé Seddah, Sarah Beniamine, Maximin Coavoux, Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie.
Linguistics and related disciplines addressing language have achieved much progress in the last two decades but improved interdisciplinary communication and interaction can significantly boost this positive trend. The LabEx (excellency cluster) EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics), launched in 2011 and headed by Jacqueline Vaissière, opens new perspectives by adopting an integrative approach. It groups together some of the French leading research teams in theoretical and applied linguistics, in computational linguistics, and in psycholinguistics. Through collaborations with prestigious multidisciplinary institutions (CSLI, MIT, Max Planck Institute, SOAS...) the project aims at contributing to the creation of a Paris School of Linguistics, a novel and innovative interdisciplinary site where dialog among the language sciences can be fostered, with a special focus on empirical foundations and experimental methods and a valuable expertise on technology transfer and applications.
Alpage is a very active member of the LabEx EFL together with other linguistic teams we have been increasingly collaborating with: LLF (University Paris 7 & CNRS) for formal linguistics, LIPN (University Paris 13 & CNRS) for NLP, LPNCog (University Paris 5 & CNRS) LSCP (ENS, EHESS & CNRS) for psycholinguistics, MII (University Paris 4 & CNRS) for Iranian and Indian studies. Alpage resources and tools have already proven relevant for research at the junction of all these areas of linguistics, thus drawing a preview of what the LabEx is about: experimental linguistics (see Section 4.6 ). Moreover, the LabEx provides Alpage with opportunities for collaborating with new teams, e.g., on language resource development with descriptive linguists.
Benoît Sagot is the head one of the 7 autonomous scientific “strands” of the LabEx EFL, namely the strand 6 on “Language Resources”. Marie-Hélène Candito and Benoit Crabbé are respectively deputy-head of strands 5 on “Computational semantic analysis” and 2 on “Experimental grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective”. Several project members are in charge of research operations within these 3 strands.
ANR
ANR project ASFALDA (2012 – 2015)
Participants : Marie-Hélène Candito [principal investigator] , Marianne Djemaa, Benoît Sagot, Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie, Laurence Danlos, Virginie Mouilleron, Vanessa Combet.
Alpage is principal investigator team for the ANR project ASFALDA , lead by Marie-Hélène Candito. The other partners are the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille (LIF), the CEA-List, the MELODI team (IRIT, Toulouse), the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LLF, Paris Diderot) and the Ant'inno society.
The project aims to provide both a French corpus with semantic annotations and automatic tools for shallow semantic analysis, using machine learning techniques to train analyzers on this corpus. The target semantic annotations are structured following the FrameNet framework [57] and can be characterized roughly as an explicitation of “who does what when and where”, that abstracts away from word order / syntactic variation, and to some of the lexical variation found in natural language.
The project relies on an existing standard for semantic annotation of predicates and roles (FrameNet), and on existing previous effort of linguistic annotation for French (the French Treebank). The original FrameNet project provides a structured set of prototypical situations, called frames, along with a semantic characterization of the participants of these situations (called roles). We propose to take advantage of this semantic database, which has proved largely portable across languages, to build a French FrameNet, meaning both a lexicon listing which French lexemes can express which frames, and an annotated corpus in which occurrences of frames and roles played by participants are made explicit. The addition of semantic annotations to the French Treebank, which already contains morphological and syntactic annotations, will boost its usefulness both for linguistic studies and for machine-learning-based Natural Language Processing applications for French, such as content semantic annotation, text mining or information extraction.
To cope with the intrinsic coverage difficulty of such a project, we adopt a hybrid strategy to obtain both exhaustive annotation for some specific selected concepts (commercial transaction, communication, causality, sentiment and emotion, time), and exhaustive annotation for some highly frequent verbs. Pre-annotation of roles will be tested, using linking information between deep grammatical functions and semantic roles.
The project is structured as follows:
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Task 1 concerns the delimitation of the focused FrameNet substructure, and its coherence verification, in order to make the resulting structure more easily usable for inference and for automatic enrichment (with compatibility with the original model);
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Task 2 concerns all the lexical aspects: which lexemes can express the selected frames, how they map to external resources, and how their semantic argument can be syntactically expressed, an information usable for automatic pre-annotation on the corpus;
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Task 3 is devoted to the manual annotation of corpus occurrences (we target 20000 annotated occurrences);
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In Task 4 we will design a semantic analyzer, able to automatically make explicit the semantic annotation (frames and roles) on new sentences, using machine learning on the annotated corpus;
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Task 5 consists in testing the integration of the semantic analysis in an industrial search engine, and to measure its usefulness in terms of user satisfaction.
The scientific key aspects of the project are:
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an emphasis on the diversity of ways to express the same frame, including expression (such as discourse connectors) that cross sentence boundaries;
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an emphasis on semi-supervised techniques for semantic analysis, to generalize over the available annotated data.
ANR project Polymnie (2012-2016)
Participants : Laurence Danlos, Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie, Julie Hunter.
Polymnie is an ANR research project headed by Sylvain Podogolla (Sémagramme, Inria Lorraine) with Melodi (INRIT, CNRS), Signes (LABRI, CNRS) and Alpage as partners. This project relies on the grammatical framework of Abstract Categorial Grammars (ACG). A feature of this formalism is to provide the same mathematical perspective both on the surface forms and on the more abstract forms the latter correspond to. ACG allows for the encoding of a large variety of grammatical formalisms, in particular Tree Adjoining grammars (TAG).
The role of Alpage in this project is to develop sentential or discursive grammars written in TAG and to participate in their conversion in ACG. Results were first achieved in 2014 concerning text generation: GTAG formalism created by Laurence Danlos in the 90's has been rewritten in ACG [25] , [26] , [27] . As regards discursive analysis, D-STAG formalism created by Laurence Danlos in the 00's is currently been rewritten in ACG and enhanced to cover attributions with some preliminary linguistic work on attributions [33] .
Other national initiatives
“Investissements d'Avenir” project PACTE (2012 – 2015)
Participants : Benoît Sagot, Kata Gábor, Pierre Magistry.
PACTE (Projet d'Amélioration de la Capture TExtuelle) is an “Investissements d'Avenir” project sumbitted within the call “Technologies de numérisation et de valorisation des contenus culturels, scientifiques et éducatifs”. It started in November 2012, although the associated fundings only arrived at Alpage in July 2013.
PACTE aims at improving the performance of textual capture processes (OCR, manual script recognition, manual capture, direct typing), using NLP tools relying on both statistical (-gram-based, with scalability issues) and hybrid techniques (involving lexical knowledge and POS-tagging models). It addresses specifically the application domain of written heritage. The project takes place in a multilingual context, and therefore aims at developing as language-independant techniques as possible.
PACTE involves 3 companies (Numen, formerly Diadeis, main partner, as well as A2IA and Isako) as well as Alpage and the LIUM (University of Le Mans). It brings together business specialists, large-scale corpora, lexical resources, as well as the scientific and technical expertise required.
The results obtained at Alpage in 2014 within PACTE are described in 6.3
FUI project COMBI (2014-2016)
Participants : Laurence Danlos, Vanessa Combet, Jacques Steinlin.
COMBI is is an “FUI 16” project. It started in February 2014 for a two year duration. It groups 5 industrial partners (Temis, Isthma, Kwaga, Yseop and Qunb) and Alpage. Temis and Istma work on data mining from texts and big data. Kwaga works on the interpretation and inferences that can be drawn from the data retrieved in the analysis module. Alpage and Qunb work, under the supervision of Yseop, on the production of respectively texts and graphics describing the results of the interpretation module. Currently, COMBI aims at creating the full chain for a user case concerning the weekly activity of an on-line service.
Alpage works on text generation, with the adaptation of TextElaborator, a generation system developed in the 10's by WatchAssistance and based on G-TAG. Alpage also works on the opportunity to describe pieces of information by texts, graphics or both.
Consortium Corpus Écrits within the TGIR Huma-Num
Participants : Benoît Sagot, Djamé Seddah.
Huma-Num is a TGIR (Very Large Research Infrastructure) dedicated to digital humanities. Among Huma-Num initiatives are a dozen of consortia, which bring together most members of various research communities. Among them is the Corpus Écrits consortium, which is dedicated to all aspects related to written corpora, from NLP to corpus development, corpus specification, standardization, and others. All types of written corpora are covered (French, other languages, contemprorary language, medieval language, specialized text, non-standard text, etc.). The consortium Corpus Écrits is managed by the Institut de Linguistique Française, a CNRS federation of which Alpage is a member since June 2013, under the supervision of Franck Neveu.
Alpage is involved in various projects within this consortium, and especially in the development of corpora for CMC texts (blogs, forum posts, SMSs, textchat...) and shallow corpus annotation, especially with MElt.