LASSY

... he refused to be a dog just like Lassy was ...

LASSY (Large Scale Syntactic Annotation of written Dutch) is a STEVIN project. STEVIN is a Flemish-Dutch Language and Speech Processing Technology Programme launched by de Nederlandse Taalunie. The STEVIN programme office is run jointly by NWO Humanities Division and SenterNovem.

A large corpus of written Dutch texts (1,000,000 words) has been syntactically annotated (manually corrected), based on D-COI and its successor. In addition, a very large corpus (about 1,500,000,000 words) has been syntactically annotated automatically. The project extends the available syntactically annotated corpora for Dutch both in size as well as with respect to the various text genres and topical domains. In addition, various browse and search tools for syntactically annotated corpora have been developed and made available. Their potential for applications in corpus linguistics and information extraction is illustrated and evaluated in a series of case studies.

Partners

Lassy is carried out by a consortium consisting of the University of Groningen and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Researchers involved in the project include:

Lassy Initiatives

• Lassy sponsored the invited lecture of Anette Frank at the ACL 2007 workshop Deep Linguistic Processing, June 28, 2007 in Prague. Further information is available from the DLP website
• Lassy initiated the local organization of TLT7: the Seventh International Conference on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. January 23-24, 2009 in Groningen. Further information can be obtained from the TLT7 webpage.
• Lassy has sponsored an invited keynote lecture by Ken Churck (Microsoft Research) at the 30th anniversary TaBu symposium on June 11 and 12, 2009 in Groningen. Further information is available from the conference website.
• Lassy sponsored a workshop entitled Distributional Semantics Workshop, on June 23, 2010 in Groningen. More information can be obtained from the workshp webpage. The sponsorship made possible invited presentations at the workshop by Yves Peirsman (Leuven), Sophia Katrenko (Amsterdam) and Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha (Cambridge).
• Lassy sponsored an extra CLCG Linguistics Colloquium, with a presentation by Mrs. Valia Kordoni (Saarbrücken and Berlin) entitled Enhancing Performance of Deep Linguistic Grammars. More information is available from the CLCG website

List of Resources

Descriptions of the project

• Project Proposal
• Short project description in DIXIT (in Dutch)
• A0 portrait poster (june 2008)
• A0 landscape poster (september 2008)

  Annotation Manuals

• Lassy Syntactic Annotation Manual
• D-Coi POS-tagging and Lemmatization Manual

  User Manuals for Software

• User Guide: How to use the Alpino/D-Coi/Lassy Treebank Tools
• User Guide: How to annotate with Alpino Needs updating w.r.t. off-line annotation
• User Guide: How to use Alpino

  DTD for Lassy XML files

• Use your right mouse button to save the following link: DTD for Lassy Dependency Structures

  External Links

• Alpino parser and related tools
• DACT, an easy to use corpus tool for Lassy corpora, developed by Daniel de Kok en Jelmer van der Linde.

  Some annotated sentences

  In Lassy two annotated corpora will be delivered.
  1. Lassy Small is a 1 million word corpus with manually verified syntactic annotations.
     • first official release of the Lassy Small corpus You need to get a licence from the TST-Centrale to use this.
     • idem, live version You can browse the manually corrected syntactic annotations with an XHTML-aware browser such as Firefox.
     • Search demo
  2. Lassy Large is a 1500 million word corpus with automatically assigned syntactic annotations.
     • live version of Lassy Large corpus, in development You can browse the automatically assigned syntactic annotations with an XHTML-aware browser such as Firefox. In particular, this contains at the moment the following corpora. Note that not all links will work, due to copyright restrictions.
       • CLEF. Corpus that was used in the CLEF Question Answering track 2005. 4.2 million sentences, 78 million tokens.
       • Eindhoven corpus. 40 thousand sentences, 713 thousand tokens.
       • EMEA corpus. Over 1 million sentences, 13 million tokens.
       • Europarl corpus. Over 1 million sentences, 37 million tokens.
       • Mediargus corpus. 103 million sentences, 1396 million tokens.
       • Wikipedia dump of 2010. 12 million sentences, 159 million tokens.
       • Senseval corpus of Dutch. 12 thousand sentences, 156 thousand tokens.
       • Sonar corpus, release 2. 17 million sentences, 246 million tokens. Note: some overlap with other corpora in Lassy Large.
       • Small corpus including the annual "Troonrede" of Queen Beatrix since 1990.
       • newspaper parts of TwNC-05 corpus. 26 million sentences, 454 million tokens.

  Deliverables

  • Deliverable 1.1 (report)
  • Deliverable 1.2 (report)
  • Deliverables 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 are collectively available as the first release of the Lassy corpus
  • Deliverable 3.4 (report)
  • Deliverable 3.5 (manual)
  • Deliverable 4.1 is improved version of Alpino. The most recent version of Alpino is found here.
  • Deliverable 4.2 (report)
  • Deliverable 5.1 (report)
  • Deliverable 5.2 (report)
  • Deliverable 5.2 is the first release of the tools. These are part of the Alpino distribution available here.
  • Deliverable 6.1 (case study 1)
  • Deliverable 6.2 (case study 2)
  • Deliverable 6.3 (case study 3)

  Internal stuff

  • Wiki for STEVIN projects
  • Progress report 1 (pdf)
  • Progress report 2 (pdf)
  • Bijlage Progress report 2 (xls)
  • Progress report 3 (pdf)
  • Bijlage Progress report 3 (xls)
  • Progress report 4 (pdf)
  • Bijlage Progress report 4 (xls)
  • Progress report 5 (pdf)
  • Bijlage Progress report 5 (xls)
  • Progress report 6 (pdf)
  • Bijlage Progress report 6 (xls)

  Publications

  • Gertjan van Noord, Ineke Schuurman, Vincent Vandeghinste. Syntactic Annotation of Large Corpora in STEVIN. In: LREC 2006. [pdf]
  • Gosse Bouma and Geert Kloosterman. Mining Syntatically Annotated Corpora with XQuery. In: LAW 2007, Prague. [pdf]
  • Gertjan van Noord. Using Self-Trained Bilexical Preferences to Improve Disambiguation Accuracy. In: IWPT2007, Prague. [pdf]
  • Gosse Bouma, Jori Mur, Gertjan van Noord, Lonneke van der Plas, Jörg Tiedemann. Question Answering with Joost at CLEF 2008. CLEF 2008 Working Notes. Aarhus Denmark. [pdf]
  • Barbara Plank and Gertjan van Noord. Exploring An Auxiliary Distribution based approach to Domain Adaptation of a Syntactic Disambiguation Model. In: Coling Workhop 'Cross Framework and Cross Domain Parser Evaluation'. [pdf]
  • Nelleke Oostdijk, Martin Reynaert, Paola Monachesi, Gertjan van Noord, Roland Ordelman, Ineke Schuurman, Vincent Vandeghinste. From D-Coi to SoNaR: A reference corpus for Dutch. In: LREC 2008. [pdf]
  • Gosse Bouma, Geert Kloosterman, Jori Mur, Gertjan van Noord, Lonneke van der Plas, and Jörg Tiedemann. Question Answering with Joost at CLEF 2007. In: Carol Peters, Valentin Jijkoun, Thomas Mandl, Henning Mueller, Douglas W. Oard, Anselmo Penas, Vivien Petras, Diana Santos (editors), Advances in Multilingual and Multimodal Information Retrieval, 8th workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Form, CLEF 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 19-21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5152, Springer 2008. pp 257-260.
  • Gertjan van Noord. Huge Parsed Corpora in LASSY. In: Frank van Eynde, Anette Frank, Koenraad de Smedt, Gertjan van Noord (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 7). January 23-24, 2009, Groningen, The Netherlands. LOT Occasional Series. [LOT site]
  • Frank van Eynde, Anette Frank, Koenraad de Smedt, Gertjan van Noord (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 7). January 23-24, 2009, Groningen, The Netherlands. LOT Occasional Series. [LOT site]
  • Gertjan van Noord. Self-trained Bilexical Preferences to Improve Disambiguation Accuracy. To appear in a book on parsing technology, based on selected papers from the IWPT 2007, CONNL 2007, and IWPT 2005 workshops, edited by Harry Bunt, Paola Merlo and Joakim Nivre, published by Springer. [draft pdf]
  • Gosse Bouma and Jennifer Spenader. The Distribution of Weak and Strong Object Reflexives in Dutch. In: Frank van Eynde, Anette Frank, Koenraad de Smedt, Gertjan van Noord (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 7). January 23-24, 2009, Groningen, The Netherlands. LOT Occasional Series. [LOT site]
  • Erik Tjong Kim Sang. To Use a Treebank or Not - Which Is Better for Hypernym Extraction? In: Frank van Eynde, Anette Frank, Koenraad de Smedt, Gertjan van Noord (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 7). January 23-24, 2009, Groningen, The Netherlands. LOT Occasional Series. [LOT site]
  • Ineke Schuurman, Veronique Hoste and Paola Monachesi. Cultivating Trees: Adding Several Semantic Layers to the Lassy Treebank in SoNaR. In: Frank van Eynde, Anette Frank, Koenraad de Smedt, Gertjan van Noord (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 7). January 23-24, 2009, Groningen, The Netherlands. LOT Occasional Series. [LOT site]
  • Gertjan van Noord and Gosse Bouma. Parsed Corpora for Linguistics. In: Proceedings of EACL Workshop The Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous? Athens, 2009. pp 33-39. [pdf]
  • Gertjan van Noord, Learning Efficient Parsing. In: EACL 2009. The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 30 March - 3 April 2009, Athens, Greece. pp 817-825. [pdf]
  • Daniël de Kok, Jianqiang Ma and Gertjan van Noord, A generalized method for iterative error mining in parsing results. In: ACL2009 Workshop Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF), Singapore, 2009. [pdf]
  • Anna Lobanova, Jennifer Spenader, Tim van de Cruys, Tom van der Kleij and Erik Tjong Kim Sang. Automatic Relation Extraction - Can Synonym Extraction Benefit from Antonym Knowledge? In: Proceedings of WordNets and other Lexical Semantic Resources - between Lexical Semantics, Lexicography, Terminology and Formal Ontologies (NODALIDA2009 workshop), Odense, Denmark, May 2009. [pdf]
  • Erik Tjong Kim Sang and Katja Hofmann, Lexical Patterns or Dependency Patterns: Which Is Better for Hypernym Extraction? In: Proceedings of CoNLL-2009, Boulder, CO, USA, June 2009. [pdf]