Rule-based information extraction is an important approach for processing the increasingly available amount of unstructured data. The manual creation of rule-based applications is a time-consuming and tedious task, which requires qualified knowledge engineers. The costs of this process can be reduced by providing a suitable rule language and extensive tooling support. This paper presents UIMA Ruta, a tool for rule-based information extraction and text processing applications. The system was designed with focus on rapid development. The rule language and its matching paradigm facilitate the quick specification of comprehensible extraction knowledge. They support a compact representation while still providing a high level of expressiveness. These advantages are supplemented by the development environment UIMA Ruta Workbench. It provides, in addition to extensive editing support, essential assistance for explanation of rule execution, introspection, automatic validation, and rule induction. UIMA Ruta is a useful tool for academia and industry due to its open source license. We compare UIMA Ruta to related rule-based systems especially concerning the compactness of the rule representation, the expressiveness, and the provided tooling support. The competitiveness of the runtime performance is shown in relation to a popular and freely-available system. A selection of case studies implemented with UIMA Ruta illustrates the usefulness of the system in real-world scenarios.

In this article we tackle the problem of multi-party conversation summarization. We investigate the role of discourse segmentation of a conversation on meeting summarization. First, an unsupervised function segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the transcript into functionally coherent parts, such as Monologuei (which indicates a segment where speaker i is the dominant speaker, e.g., lecturing all the other participants) or Discussionx1x2, . . ., xn (which indicates a segment where speakers x1 to xn involve in a discussion). Then the salience score for a sentence is computed by leveraging the score of the segment containing the sentence. Performance of our proposed segmentation and summarization algorithms is evaluated using the AMI meeting corpus. We show better summarization performance over other state-of-the-art algorithms according to different metrics.

Keyphrases are the most important phrases of documents that make them suitable for improving natural language processing tasks, including information retrieval, document classification, document visualization, summarization and categorization. Here, we propose a supervised framework augmented by novel extra-textual information derived primarily from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is utilized in such an advantageous way that – unlike most other methods relying on Wikipedia – a full textual index of all the Wikipedia articles is not required by our approach, as we only exploit the category hierarchy and a list of multiword expressions derived from Wikipedia. This approach is not only less resource intensive, but also produces comparable or superior results compared to previous similar works. Our thorough evaluations also suggest that the proposed framework performs consistently well on multiple datasets, being competitive or even outperforming the results obtained by other state-of-the-art methods. Besides introducing features that incorporate extra-textual information, we also experimented with a novel way of representing features that are derived from the POS tagging of the keyphrase candidates.

Choosing the best word or phrase for a given context from among the candidate near-synonyms, such as slim and skinny, is a difficult language generation problem. In this paper, we describe approaches to solving an instance of this problem, the lexical gap problem, with a particular focus on affect and subjectivity; to do this we draw upon techniques from the sentiment and subjectivity analysis fields. We present a supervised approach to this problem, initially with a unigram model that solidly outperforms the baseline, with a 6.8% increase in accuracy. The results to some extent confirm those from related problems, where feature presence outperforms feature frequency, and immediate context features generally outperform wider context features. However, this latter is somewhat surprisingly not always the case, and not necessarily where intuition might first suggest; and an analysis of where document-level models are in some cases better suggested that, in our corpus, broader features related to the ‘tone’ of the document could be useful, including document sentiment, document author, and a distance metric for weighting the wider lexical context of the gap itself. From these, our best model has a 10.1% increase in accuracy, corresponding to a 38% reduction in errors. Moreover, our models do not just improve accuracy on affective word choice, but on non-affective word choice also.

We present research aiming to build tools for the normalization of User-Generated Content (UGC). We argue that processing this type of text requires the revisiting of the initial steps of Natural Language Processing, since UGC (micro-blog, blog, and, generally, Web 2.0 user-generated texts) presents a number of nonstandard communicative and linguistic characteristics – often closer to oral and colloquial language than to edited text. We present a corpus of UGC text in Spanish from three different sources: Twitter, consumer reviews, and blogs, and describe its main characteristics. We motivate the need for UGC text normalization by analyzing the problems found when processing this type of text through a conventional language processing pipeline, particularly in the tasks of lemmatization and morphosyntactic tagging. Our aim with this paper is to seize the power of already existing spell and grammar correction engines and endow them with automatic normalization capabilities in order to pave the way for the application of standard Natural Language Processing tools to typical UGC text. Particularly, we propose a strategy for automatically normalizing UGC by adding a module on top of a pre-existing spell-checker that selects the most plausible correction from an unranked list of candidates provided by the spell-checker. To build this selector module we train four language models, each one containing a different type of linguistic information in a trade-off with its generalization capabilities. Our experiments show that the models trained on truecase and lowercase word forms are more discriminative than the others at selecting the best candidate. We have also experimented with a parametrized combination of the models by both optimizing directly on the selection task and doing a linear interpolation of the models. The resulting parametrized combinations obtain results close to the best performing model but do not improve on those results, as measured on the test set. The precision of the selector module in ranking number one the expected correction proposal on the test corpora reaches 82.5% for Twitter text (baseline 57%) and 88% for non-Twitter text (baseline 64%).