Identity and Granularity of Events in Text

In this paper we describe a method to detect event descrip- tions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our com- ponent approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how se- mantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.Comment: Invited keynote speech by Piek Vossen at Cicling 201

Systematic Review of Prognostic Factors for Mortality in Dogs with Immune-mediated Hemolytic Anemia

BACKGROUND: Treatment of dogs with primary immune‐mediated hemolytic anemia (IMHA) is difficult and frequently unrewarding. Prognostic factors have been evaluated in a number of previous studies, and identification of such factors would be beneficial to enable selection of appropriate therapeutic regimens and supportive care. OBJECTIVES: The aim of the current study was to undertake a critical appraisal of the risk of bias in evidence relating to prognostic indicators for mortality in dogs with IMHA. ANIMALS: Three hundred and eighty client‐owned dogs with spontaneous primary idiopathic IMHA reported in 6 previous studies. METHODS: A systematic review was conducted to evaluate evidence relating to prognostic factors for mortality in dogs with primary IMHA. Search tools were employed to identify articles and a validated appraisal tool was used to assess the quality of individual studies by considering inclusion and exclusion criteria, measurement of prognostic, outcome and confounding variables, and statistical methods. RESULTS: Few studies evaluated prognostic indicators for IMHA in dogs, and all of these suffered from methodologic flaws in at least 1 major area. Fifteen different variables were identified as prognostic indicators, with 2 variables identified by >1 study. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE: There are few pieces of high‐quality evidence available to enable estimation of prognosis for dogs presenting with primary IMHA

Finding Stories in 1,784,532 Events: Scaling Up Computational Models of Narrative

Information professionals face the challenge of making sense of an ever increasing amount of information. Storylines can provide a useful way to present relevant information because they reveal explanatory relations between events. In this position paper, we present and discuss the four main challenges that make it difficult to get to these stories and our first ideas on how to start resolving them

Amersfoort met een missie:prachtig woongebied voor 55-plussers in Amersfoort

In opdracht van Eugene Zaaijer van ZSV-architecten en Sabine Robers van De Huiskamer, is er onderzoek gedaan naar de eisen en wensen van 55-plussers in Amersfoort gericht op langdurig wonen. De opdrachtgever wil woningen en woonomgevingen ontwikkelen op het gebied van ouderenhuisvesting, omdat er sprake is van toenemende vergrijzing in Nederland. Amersfoort staat hoog in lijst van vergrijzende gebieden, daarom is ervoor gekozen om hier het onderzoek en de ontwikkeling van de woonservicegebieden te starten. Doel van het onderzoek is dat er duidelijkheid komt in wat oudere mensen later nodig hebben in hun buurt qua service en zorg. De vergrijzende bevolking is sterk aan het groeien, daarom moet er nagedacht worden over hoe deze groeiende doelgroep over een aantal jaar gehuisvest kan worden. Er is duidelijkheid nodig voor projectontwikkelaars, zij kunnen zo beter inspelen op de behoeften van deze doelgroep. In samenwerking met het Kenniscentrum NoorderRuimte. Studentonderzoek in het kader van het thema Werklandschappe

SemEval-2010 Task 17: All-words Word Sense Disambiguation on a Specific Domain

Domain portability and adaptation of NLP components and Word Sense Disambiguation systems present new challenges. The difficulties found by supervised systems to adapt might change the way we assess the strengths and weaknesses of supervised and knowledge-based WSD systems. Unfortunately, all existing evaluation datasets for specific domains are lexical-sample corpora. This task presented all-words datasets on the environment domain for WSD in four languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, Italian). 11 teams participated, with supervised and knowledge-based systems, mainly in the English dataset. The results show that in all languages the participants where able to beat the most frequent sense heuristic as estimated from general corpora. The most successful approaches used some sort of supervision in the form of hand-tagged examples from the domain

Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in image descriptions

Automatic image description systems are commonly trained and evaluated on large image description datasets. Recently, researchers have started to collect such datasets for languages other than English. An unexplored question is how different these datasets are from English and, if there are any differences, what causes them to differ. This paper provides a cross-linguistic comparison of Dutch, English, and German image descriptions. We find that these descriptions are similar in many respects, but the familiarity of crowd workers with the subjects of the images has a noticeable influence on description specificity.Comment: Accepted for INLG 2017, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 4-7 September, 2017. Camera-ready version. See the ACL anthology for full bibliographic informatio

Vigilance in wild Thomas's langurs (Presbytis thomasi): the importance of infanticide risk

This study examines vigilance as a behavioural indicator of the importance of infanticide risk by com- paring the infanticide avoidance hypothesis with the predation avoidance and mate defence hypotheses for wild Thomas's langurs (Presbytis thomasi) in Sumatra. We found that all individuals were more vigilant in sit- uations of high predation risk, i.e. lower in the trees and in the absence of neighbours. Females were also more vigilant on the periphery of the group. However, there were variations in vigilance levels that could not be ac- counted for by the predation avoidance hypothesis. Males without infants showed higher levels of vigilance in areas of home range overlap than in non-overlap ar- eas during the early phase of their tenure, strongly suggesting mate defence. In these areas of home range overlap where Thomas's langur groups can interact, males may attack females and infants, and so the in- fanticide risk for males and females with infants is likely to be high in these areas. Only females with infants, but not males with infants or females without infants, showed higher vigilance levels in overlap areas than in non-overlap areas; in addition, in overlap areas, females with an infant were more vigilant than females without an infant, while this was not the case in non-overlap areas. Both females and males with infants were more vigilant high in the trees than at medium heights in overlap areas but not elsewhere. These findings can only be explained by the infanticide avoidance hypothesis. In contrast to predator attacks, infanticidal male attacks come from high in the canopy, and only occur in overlap areas. There was a significant sex difference in vigilance, but males were only more vigilant than females without an infant, and not more vigilant than females with an infant. We conclude that vigilance varied mainly in re- lation to the risk of predation and infanticide. Mate competition only played a role for males during the early phase of their tenure. Predation risk seems to offer the best explanation for vigilance for all individuals in the absence of infants. Both predation risk and infanticide risk played a role for females and males with infants

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen