Dawn Knight


2023

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Open-Source Thesaurus Development for Under-Resourced Languages: a Welsh Case Study
Nouran Khallaf | Elin Arfon | Mo El-Haj | Jonathan Morris | Dawn Knight | Paul Rayson | Tymaa Hasanain Hammouda | Mustafa Jarrar
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge

2022

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Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems
Ignatius Ezeani | Mahmoud El-Haj | Jonathan Morris | Dawn Knight
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Welsh is an official language in Wales and is spoken by an estimated 884,300 people (29.2% of the population of Wales). Despite this status and estimated increase in speaker numbers since the last (2011) census, Welsh remains a minority language undergoing revitalisation and promotion by Welsh Government and relevant stakeholders. As part of the effort to increase the availability of Welsh digital technology, this paper introduces the first Welsh summarisation dataset, which we provide freely for research purposes to help advance the work on Welsh summarisation. The dataset was created by Welsh speakers through manually summarising Welsh Wikipedia articles. In addition, the paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of different summarisation systems for Welsh. The summarisation systems and results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarisers in other minority language contexts.

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PriPA: A Tool for Privacy-Preserving Analytics of Linguistic Data
Jeremie Clos | Emma McClaughlin | Pepita Barnard | Elena Nichele | Dawn Knight | Derek McAuley | Svenja Adolphs
Proceedings of the Workshop on Ethical and Legal Issues in Human Language Technologies and Multilingual De-Identification of Sensitive Data In Language Resources within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

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Creation of an Evaluation Corpus and Baseline Evaluation Scores for Welsh Text Summarisation
Mahmoud El-Haj | Ignatius Ezeani | Jonathan Morris | Dawn Knight
Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022

As part of the effort to increase the availability of Welsh digital technology, this paper introduces the first human vs metrics Welsh summarisation evaluation results and dataset, which we provide freely for research purposes to help advance the work on Welsh summarisation. The system summaries were created using an extractive graph-based Welsh summariser. The system summaries were evaluated by both human and a range of ROUGE metric variants (e.g. ROUGE 1, 2, L and SU4). The summaries and evaluation results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarisers and evaluation metrics in other minority language contexts.

2019

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Leveraging Pre-Trained Embeddings for Welsh Taggers
Ignatius Ezeani | Scott Piao | Steven Neale | Paul Rayson | Dawn Knight
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2019)

While the application of word embedding models to downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks has been shown to be successful, the benefits for low-resource languages is somewhat limited due to lack of adequate data for training the models. However, NLP research efforts for low-resource languages have focused on constantly seeking ways to harness pre-trained models to improve the performance of NLP systems built to process these languages without the need to re-invent the wheel. One such language is Welsh and therefore, in this paper, we present the results of our experiments on learning a simple multi-task neural network model for part-of-speech and semantic tagging for Welsh using a pre-trained embedding model from FastText. Our model’s performance was compared with those of the existing rule-based stand-alone taggers for part-of-speech and semantic taggers. Despite its simplicity and capacity to perform both tasks simultaneously, our tagger compared very well with the existing taggers.

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Unsupervised multi-word term recognition in Welsh
Irena Spasić | David Owen | Dawn Knight | Andreas Artemiou
Proceedings of the Celtic Language Technology Workshop

2018

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Towards a Welsh Semantic Annotation System
Scott Piao | Paul Rayson | Dawn Knight | Gareth Watkins
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Leveraging Lexical Resources and Constraint Grammar for Rule-Based Part-of-Speech Tagging in Welsh
Steven Neale | Kevin Donnelly | Gareth Watkins | Dawn Knight
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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Lexical Coverage Evaluation of Large-scale Multilingual Semantic Lexicons for Twelve Languages
Scott Piao | Paul Rayson | Dawn Archer | Francesca Bianchi | Carmen Dayrell | Mahmoud El-Haj | Ricardo-María Jiménez | Dawn Knight | Michal Křen | Laura Löfberg | Rao Muhammad Adeel Nawab | Jawad Shafi | Phoey Lee Teh | Olga Mudraya
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

The last two decades have seen the development of various semantic lexical resources such as WordNet (Miller, 1995) and the USAS semantic lexicon (Rayson et al., 2004), which have played an important role in the areas of natural language processing and corpus-based studies. Recently, increasing efforts have been devoted to extending the semantic frameworks of existing lexical knowledge resources to cover more languages, such as EuroWordNet and Global WordNet. In this paper, we report on the construction of large-scale multilingual semantic lexicons for twelve languages, which employ the unified Lancaster semantic taxonomy and provide a multilingual lexical knowledge base for the automatic UCREL semantic annotation system (USAS). Our work contributes towards the goal of constructing larger-scale and higher-quality multilingual semantic lexical resources and developing corpus annotation tools based on them. Lexical coverage is an important factor concerning the quality of the lexicons and the performance of the corpus annotation tools, and in this experiment we focus on evaluating the lexical coverage achieved by the multilingual lexicons and semantic annotation tools based on them. Our evaluation shows that some semantic lexicons such as those for Finnish and Italian have achieved lexical coverage of over 90% while others need further expansion.

2008

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Introducing DRS (The Digital Replay System): a Tool for the Future of Corpus Linguistic Research and Analysis
Dawn Knight | Paul Tennent
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper outlines the new resource technologies, products and applications that have been constructed during the development of a multi-modal (MM hereafter) corpus tool on the DReSS project (Understanding New Forms of the Digital Record for e-Social Science), based at the University of Nottingham, England. The paper provides a brief outline of the DRS (Digital Replay System, the software tool at the heart of the corpus), highlighting its facility to display synchronised video, audio and textual data and, most relevantly, a concordance tool capable of interrogating data constructed from textual transcriptions anchored to video or audio, and from coded annotations of specific features of gesture-in-talk. This is complemented by a real-time demonstration of the DRS interface in-use as part of the LREC 2008 conference. This will serve to show the manner in which a system such as the DRS can be used to facilitate the assembly, storage and analysis of multi modal corpora, supporting both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of collected data.