The NLP Seminar is organised by the Linguistic Engineering Group at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (ICS PAS). It takes place on (some) Mondays, normally at 10:15 am, in the seminar room of the ICS PAS (ul. Jana Kazimierza 5, Warszawa). All recorded talks are available on YouTube.

2 October 2017

Paweł Rutkowski (University of Warsaw)

Polish Sign Language from the perspective of corpus linguistics

Polish Sign Language (polski język migowy, PJM) is a full-fledged visual-spatial language used by the Polish Deaf community. It started to evolve in the second decade of the nineteenth century, with the foundation of the first school for the deaf in Poland. Until recently, PJM attracted very little attention from the linguistic community in Poland. The aim of this talk is to present a large-scale research project aimed at creating an extensive and representative corpus of PJM. The corpus is currently being compiled at the University of Warsaw. It is a collection of video clips showing Deaf people using PJM in a variety of different communication contexts. The videos are richly annotated: they are segmented, lemmatized, translated into Polish, tagged for various grammatical features and transcribed with HamNoSys symbols. The Corpus of PJM is currently one of the two largest sets of annotated sign language data in the world. Special attention will be paid to the issue of lexical frequency in PJM. Studies of this type are available for a handful of sign languages only, including American Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language, British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language and Slovene Sign Language. Their empirical basis ranged from 100,000 tokens (NZSL) to as little as 4,000 tokens (ASL). The present talk contributes to our understanding of lexical frequency in sign languages by analyzing a much larger set of relevant data from PJM.

23 October 2017

Katarzyna Krasnowska-Kieraś, Piotr Rybak, Alina Wróblewska (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Towards the evaluation of feature embedding models of the fusional languages in the context of morphosyntactic disambiguation and dependency parsing

Neural networks are recently very successful in various natural language processing tasks. An important component of a neural network approach is a dense vector representation of features, i.e. feature embedding. Various feature types are possible, e.g. words, part-of-speech tags. In our talk we are going to present results of an analysis showing what should be used as features in estimating embedding models of the fusional languages – tokens or lemmata. Furthermore, we are going to discuss the methodological question whether the results of the intrinsic evaluation of embeddings are informative for downstream applications, or the embedding models should be evaluated extrinsically. The accompanying experiments were conducted on Polish – a fusional Slavic language with a relatively free word order. The mentioned research has inspired us to implement a morphosyntactic disambiguator – Toygger (Krasnowska-Kieraś, 2017). The tool won the shared task 1 (A) in PolEval 2017 competition and will be presented in our talk.

6 November 2017

Szymon Łęski (Samsung R&D Poland)

Deep neural networks in language models

In my talk I will first give introduction to language models: traditional, n-gram based, and new, based on recurrent networks. Then, based on recent papers, I will discuss the most interesting extensions and modifications to RNN-based language models, such as modifying word representations or models with output not limited to a pre-defined vocabulary.

20 November 2017

Michał Ptaszyński (Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan)

Capturing Emotions in Context as a way towards Computational Phronesis

Research on emotions within Artificial Intelligence and related fields has flourished rapidly through recent years. Unfortunately, in most research emotions are analyzed without their context. I will argue, that recognizing emotions without recognizing their context is incomplete and cannot be sufficient for real-world applications. I will also describe some consequences of disregarding the context of emotions. Finally, I will present one approach, in which the context of emotions is considered and briefly describe some of the first experiments performed in this matter.

4 December 2017

Adam Dobaczewski, Piotr Sobotka, Sebastian Żurowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)

Dictionary of Polish reduplications and repetitions

In our talk we will present a dictionary prepared by the team from the Institute of Polish Language of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (grant NPRH 11H 13 0265 82). We document In the dictionary expressions of the Polish language in which the presence of reduplication or repetition of forms of the same lexemes can be observed. We distinguish the units of language according to the Bogusławski's operational grammar framework and divide them into two basic groups: (i) lexical units consisting of two such segments or forms of the same lexeme (Pol. całkiem całkiem; fakt faktem); operational units based on some pattern of repetition of words belonging to a certain class predicted by this scheme (Pol. N[nom] N[inst] ale _, where N stands for any noun, e.g. sąd sądem, ale _; miłość miłością, ale _). We have prepared a dictionary in traditional (printed) form due to the relatively small number of registered units. Its material base is the resources of the NKJP, which were searched using dedicated search engine of repetitions in the NKJP. This tool was specially prepared for this project at the LEG ICS PAS.

29 January 2018 (NOTE: the video and slides will be made available in February)

Roman Grundkiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań/University of Edinburgh)

Automatic Grammatical Error Correction using Machine Translation  

In my presentation I will be talking about the task of automated grammatical error correction (GEC) in texts written by non-native English speakers. I will present our experiments on the application of the phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT), and our GEC system, which achieved new state-of-the-art results. The importance of the parameter optimization towards the task-specific evaluation metric and new GEC-adapted dense and sparse features will be discussed. I will also briefly describe the results of further research using neural machine translation (NMT).

12 February 2018

Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Aleksander Wawer, Małgorzata Marciniak, Piotr Rychlik (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Recognition of metaphorical noun phrases in Polish with distributional semantics  

More information will be given shortly.

Please see also the talks given in 2000–2015 and 2015–2017.