Andrew Cowell


2023

pdf bib
Mapping AMR to UMR: Resources for Adapting Existing Corpora for Cross-Lingual Compatibility
Julia Bonn | Skatje Myers | Jens E. L. Van Gysel | Lukas Denk | Meagan Vigus | Jin Zhao | Andrew Cowell | William Croft | Jan Hajič | James H. Martin | Alexis Palmer | Martha Palmer | James Pustejovsky | Zdenka Urešová | Rosa Vallejos | Nianwen Xue
Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)

This paper presents detailed mappings between the structures used in Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and those used in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR). These structures include general semantic roles, rolesets, and concepts that are largely shared between AMR and UMR, but with crucial differences. While UMR annotation of new low-resource languages is ongoing, AMR-annotated corpora already exist for many languages, and these AMR corpora are ripe for conversion to UMR format. Rather than focusing on semantic coverage that is new to UMR (which will likely need to be dealt with manually), this paper serves as a resource (with illustrated mappings) for users looking to understand the fine-grained adjustments that have been made to the representation techniques for semantic categoriespresent in both AMR and UMR.

pdf bib
UMR Annotation of Multiword Expressions
Julia Bonn | Andrew Cowell | Jan Hajič | Alexis Palmer | Martha Palmer | James Pustejovsky | Haibo Sun | Zdenka Uresova | Shira Wein | Nianwen Xue | Jin Zhao
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

Rooted in AMR, Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a graph-based formalism with nodes as concepts and edges as relations between them. When used to represent natural language semantics, UMR maps words in a sentence to concepts in the UMR graph. Multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a particular challenge to UMR annotation because they deviate from the default one-to-one mapping between words and concepts. There are different types of MWEs which require different kinds of annotation that must be specified in guidelines. This paper discusses the specific treatment for each type of MWE in UMR.

2021

pdf bib
Theoretical and Practical Issues in the Semantic Annotation of Four Indigenous Languages
Jens E. L. Van Gysel | Meagan Vigus | Lukas Denk | Andrew Cowell | Rosa Vallejos | Tim O’Gorman | William Croft
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop

Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enabling speakers of indigenous minority languages to participate in government, education, and other domains of public life in their own language. However, many languages – mainly those with small native speaker populations and without written traditions – have little to no digital support. One hurdle in creating such resources is that for many languages, few speakers would be capable of annotating texts – a task which requires literacy and some linguistic training – and that these experts’ time is typically in high demand for language planning work. This paper assesses whether typologically trained non-speakers of an indigenous language can feasibly perform semantic annotation using Uniform Meaning Representations, thus allowing for the creation of computational materials without putting further strain on community resources.

2020

pdf bib
Cross-lingual annotation: a road map for low- and no-resource languages
Meagan Vigus | Jens E. L. Van Gysel | Tim O’Gorman | Andrew Cowell | Rosa Vallejos | William Croft
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

This paper presents a “road map” for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diverse languages, with potentially few linguistic resources, and often no existing computational resources. Past semantic annotation efforts have focused largely on high-resource languages, or relatively low-resource languages with a large number of native speakers. However, there are certain typological traits, namely the synthesis of multiple concepts into a single word, that are more common in languages with a smaller speech community. For example, what is expressed as a sentence in a more analytic language like English, may be expressed as a single word in a more synthetic language like Arapaho. This paper proposes solutions for annotating analytic and synthetic languages in a comparable way based on existing typological research, and introduces a road map for the annotation of languages with a dearth of resources.

2019

pdf bib
Improving Low-Resource Morphological Learning with Intermediate Forms from Finite State Transducers
Sarah Moeller | Ghazaleh Kazeminejad | Andrew Cowell | Mans Hulden
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages Volume 1 (Papers)

2018

pdf bib
A Neural Morphological Analyzer for Arapaho Verbs Learned from a Finite State Transducer
Sarah Moeller | Ghazaleh Kazeminejad | Andrew Cowell | Mans Hulden
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages

We experiment with training an encoder-decoder neural model for mimicking the behavior of an existing hand-written finite-state morphological grammar for Arapaho verbs, a polysynthetic language with a highly complex verbal inflection system. After adjusting for ambiguous parses, we find that the system is able to generalize to unseen forms with accuracies of 98.68% (unambiguous verbs) and 92.90% (all verbs).

2017

pdf bib
Creating lexical resources for polysynthetic languages—the case of Arapaho
Ghazaleh Kazeminejad | Andrew Cowell | Mans Hulden
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

2016

pdf bib
Applying Universal Dependency to the Arapaho Language
Irina Wagner | Andrew Cowell | Jena D. Hwang
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

2006

pdf bib
Retrospective Analysis of Communication Events - Understanding the Dynamics of Collaborative Multi-Party Discourse
Andrew Cowell | Jereme Haack | Adrienne Andrew
Proceedings of the Analyzing Conversations in Text and Speech