10th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium
February 21-22, 2014, De La Salle University, Manila
A1703, 17th Floor, Br. Andrew Gonzales Hall, De La Salle University
Co-organized by the Center for Language Technologies, De La Salle University (DLSU), and the Computing Society of the Philippines-Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing (CSP SIG-NLP) )
The 10th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium (NNLPRS) will take place on February 21-22, 2014 at De La Salle University. NNLPRS is a regular gathering of researchers working on the analysis, processing, and generation of human language by computing systems. This event marks a major milestone in the development of NLP research in the country, and intends to be the springboard towards more research and international networking. The past symposia have covered a wide range of topics in NLP and were graced by international invited speakers:
- Prof. Robert Dale of Macquari University, Australia in 2004
- Prof. Chu-Ren Huang from Institute of Linguistics in Academia Sinica of Taiwan in 2007
- Mr. Adam Pease of Articulate Software USA, and Prof. Gerald Nelson of the Chinese University of Hongkong both in 2009
- Prof. Dekai Wu from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2010, and
- Prof. Hwee Tou Ng from the National University of Singapore in 2011.
This symposium aims to encourage the submissions of current NLP research papers, to expose the attendees of selected institutions in the current trends and advances of NLP, and in exploring the challenges and prospects of conducting NLP research in academic settings. Specific objectives are:
- To establish as a mechanism for leveraging NLP research in academic institutions;
- To provide the faculty (and students) of participating academic institutions with orientation on NLP-based research and trainings on the use of various NLP tools; and
- To provide an avenue for faculty (and students) of academic institutions to get assistance in the conduct of NLP-based researches.
With the theme “Breaking new grounds in Natural Language Processing: Charting ahead”, this year’s symposium will be a venue for discussing the various challenges and opportunities that we face in all aspects of language processing. Topics include but not limited to the following:
- Phonology and morphology
- NLP-supported discourse analysis
- Semantics and ontology
- Language resources
- Text summarization and generation
- Sentiment analysis and opinion classification
- Machine learning for natural language
- Information retrieval
- Information extraction
- Machine translation
- Multilingual text processing
- Word sense disambiguation
- Sign language processing
- Spoken language processing
- NLP applications in vertical domains such as education and biomedicine
| Description | Date |
| Pre-Conference Activity* | January 24, 2014 |
| Paper Submission Deadline | February 01, 2014 |
| Acceptance Notification | February 12, 2014 |
| Pre-registration Deadline | February 13, 2014 |
| Camera-Ready Paper Deadline | February 17, 2014 |
| Day 1 | February 21, 2014 |
| Day 2 | February 22, 2014 |
*PRE-CONFERENCE ACTIVITY
CSP SIG-NLP Membership Launching for Viz-Min and NLP Research Talks
January 24, 2014, Friday
University of Cebu
Cebu, Philippines
| Description | Early Bird (on or before February 13, 2014) |
After Pre-Registration |
| Student (undergraduate) | PHP 300 | PHP 500 |
| Student (graduate) | PHP 500 | PHP 800 |
| Regular | PHP 1,500 | Php 2,500 |
Payment can be made through BDO bank deposit to the CSP account.
Account Name : Computing Society of the Philippines, Inc.
Bank Name : Banco de Oro
Branch : Loyola Heights – Katipunan, Quezon City
Savings Account #: 3570-0089-29
A scanned copy of the bank validation should be emailed to [email protected]
Participants may pre-register at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LRD6XZD
Registration fee is waived for all DLSU undergraduate students (except authors of accepted papers; attending DLSU undergraduate students who are authors of accepted papers must pay the discounted rate of PHP 300.00).
TENTATIVE PROGRAM
| 08:00 – 09:00 | Registration | |
| Morning Session Session Chair: Mr. Dalos Miguel, St. Louis University |
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| 09:00 – 09:30 | Opening Ceremonies | |
| Welcome Remarks | Dr. Merlin Teodosia C. Suarez Dean, College of Computer Studies, DLSU |
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| Opening Remarks | Dr. Allan A. Sioson President, Computing Society of the Philippines |
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| Announcements | Dr. Rachel Edita O. Roxas Chair, CSP SIG-NLP and Senior Researcher, Center for Language Technologies, DLSU |
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| 09:30 – 10:30 | Invited Talk Toward an Optimal Multilingual Natural Language Generator: Deeper Source Analysis and Shallower Target Analysis | Dr. Tod J. Allman Texas, USA |
| 10:30 – 10:45 | Morning Break | |
| 10:45 – 12:00 | Invited Talk: Introducing the Philippine Parallel to the Brown Corpus: Compilation Issues and Initial Findings |
Dr. Ariane Borlongan DLSU |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch | |
| Afternoon Session Session Chair: Ms. Ria Sagum, Polytechnic University of the Philippines |
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| 13:00 – 15:00 | Symposium on Interdisciplinary Research: Parallel Language Resources | Proponents
Dr. Joel P. Ilao, Computer Technology Department Discussants Dr. Shirley Dita, Department of English and Applied Linguistics, DLSU |
| 15:00 – 16:15 | Paper Presentations
Composer Classification of Filipino Song Lyrics Using Machine Learning Oliver Isaac Chan, Patrick Joseph Sadornas, Rafael Cabredo and Charibeth Cheng Developing a Semantic Ontology for the Alex Interactive Storytelling System Rancelli Jane Roxas, Dolleen Lour Huang, Bruce Elmer Peralta, Sashmir Yap and Ethel Ong Approaches to Story Planning using Causal Links, Agents and Commonsense Ontology Jasmine Irene Ng and Ethel Ong Building a Simple Linguist’s Assistant for Tagalog Mark Anthony Castilo, Matthew Phillip Go, Alron Jan Lam, Oliver Brian Syson, Peigen Xu, Ethel Ong and Stephen Beale Some Observations on the Sociophonetics of Kapampangan Anne Grace Peralta and Layton Jan Tee |
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| 16:15 – 17:00 | Research Writing Workshop
Classifying Typhoon Related Tweets Alron Jan Lam, Ivan Paner, Jules Matthew Macatangay and Duke Danielle Delos Santos ExamItemAnalyzer – Question comparison through Semantic Matching with difficulty factors Mozart Sim Rocha, Alyssa Bianca Mercado, Ron Kingsly Amoroso and Charmaine Ponay FiliTeNor: Text Normalization Tool for Filipino Ceflyn Guingab, Karen Alexandra Palma, Jerome Layron, Ria Sagum and Ferdonico Tamayo |
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| 17:00 – 17:30 | Poster Presentations
Disaster-Related Tweet Classification Using Support Vector Machines Lemuel John Beduya and Kurt Junshean Espinosa Community Structure Detection and Analysis in Disaster Related Tweet Harriet Angelie Gonzales and Kurt Junshean Espinosa “Ala Eh!” Some Remarks on Batangan Tagalog Intonation Laura Clarissa Katigbak Towards the Development of an Art-based Digital Archive: Using Language Modeling and Data Association as Guide in Named Entity Recognition Leif Syliongka and Nathaniel Oco DIETFIX:Implementation of Set Partitioning in Text Aggregation and Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Text Generation in the Development of Parallel Multi-Expert System Dietary Fitness Coach and Planner Paul Cedrick Artigo, Angelo James Faller, Julius Macadangdang and Arianne Martizano Normalization of Filipino Shortcut Texts Using the Dictionary Substitution Approach Nicco Nocon, Gems Cuevas, Jedd Gopez and Peter Suministrado Vowel Space and Prosody in Hiligaynon and Kana Christel Anne Chu-Santos and Gillie May Salomon News Recommender System based on Social Media Status Updates Isabella Pauline Quijano and Kurt Junshean Espinosa |
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| 09:00 – 09:30 | Registration | |
| Morning Session Session Chair: Dr. Shirley Dita, De La Salle University |
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| 09:30 – 10:30 | Invited Talk: Robust Contrast and Categorical Differentiation–A Prosody Account of What Makes Speech More Expressive |
Dr. Chiu-Yu Tseng Academia Sinica, Taiwan |
| 10:30 – 10:45 | Morning Break | |
| Parallel Session 10:45 – 12:00 |
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| Venue: A1506 | Paper Presentations Session Chair: Mr. Emmanuel Cayabyab, Manila Tytana CollegesSome Remarks on Ilokano Vowel Space, Rhotics, and Geminates Alyzza Mae Corbillon and Kevin Brandon Saure SAPFO: Sentiment Analysis for Product Feature Opinions ELEXSIM: An Unsupervised English Lexical Simplification System with Multiword Expressions Handling What is Conyo ba? A Look on Acoustic Features of ‘Conyo’ |
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| Venue: A1703 | Symposium on Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison of Manual and NLP-Supported Discourse Analysis of Twitter-Based Comments on the May 2013 Elections | Proponents
Dr. Rachel Edita O. Roxas, Software Technology Department Discussants Dr. Francisco Magno, Department of Political Science |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch | |
| Afternoon Session Session Chair: Mr. Allan Borra, De La Salle University |
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| 13:00 – 14:30 | Invited Talk | Dr. Rodolfo Raga, Jr. Jose Rizal University |
| 14:30 – 15:30 | Invited Talk: NLP in Practice | Mr. Allan Tan IdeyaTech, Philippines |
| 15:30 – 16:30 | Closing Ceremonies | |
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Tod Allman (Ph.D. & MA in Linguistics, and an MS and BS in Engineering) is an Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Linguistics, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX. He has been working in the field of Natural Language Generation for the past twenty years. He and his colleagues have designed and developed a linguistically based natural language generator named Translator’s Assistant (TA). TA produces high quality draft translations in a wide variety of languages, particularly minority and endangered languages. Linguists may use TA to simultaneously document a language, and also produce initial draft translations of significant texts in the language. When experienced mother-tongue translators edit the drafts produced by this system into publishable texts, their productivity is typically quadrupled without any loss of quality. TA incorporates extensive typological, semantic, syntactic, and discourse research into its semantic representational system and its transfer and synthesizing grammars. Tod has worked with linguists and mother-tongue speakers in order to develop lexicons and grammars for a variety of languages including Korean, Kewa (Papua New Guinea), Jula (Cote d’Ivoire), Angas (Nigeria), and Chinantec (Mexico). He hopes that the texts generated by TA will empower the speakers of these languages by providing them with vital information which helps them live longer, healthier, and more productive lives, and also enables them to participate in the larger world.
Toward an Optimal Multilingual Natural Language Generator: Deeper Source Analysis and Shallower Target Analysis
Translator’s Assistant (TA) is a large scale multilingual natural language generator (NLG) designed and developed entirely from a linguist’s perspective. TA has been tested with English, Korean, Kewa (Papua New Guinea), and Jula (Cote d’Ivoire), and proof of concept grammars have been developed for a variety of other languages. TA has generated initial draft translations of texts in each of the test languages, and when experienced mother-tongue translators edit those drafts into publishable texts, their productivity is typically quadrupled when compared with manual translation.
An optimal NLG will be able to generate high quality texts in a wide variety of languages with minimal knowledge of the target language grammars. In order to increase the quality of the drafts generated by TA, deep source analysis techniques have been adopted. And in order to minimize the target language knowledge that is required to generate the drafts, a new approach to grammar development has been designed into LA’s synthesizing grammar. This paper will describe several of the source analysis conventions that have been adopted during the development of TA’s semantic representations, and it will also present examples of the new type of synthesizing rule that was added to TA’s grammar. The adoption of deep source analysis techniques combined with shallow target analysis has proven to be a very efficient model.
Chiu-yu Tseng (Ph.D. in Linguistics, Brown University, U.S.A., 1981) is a Research Fellow and Director at the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She was trained in phonetics, but her close collaboration with speech scientists since the early 1980’s has led an interdisciplinary orientation that integrates corpus linguistics and computational modeling into acoustic investigations. To facilitate the corpus and computational end in her research orientation, she has constructed two sets of corpora. The Sinica COSPRO (Mandarin Continuous Speech Corpora) and Toolkit (10.58GB total, 7.9GB annotated) which was released it in 2006. The AESOP-ILAS, an international collaboration of the AESOP (Asian English Speech cOrpus Project) consortium (2009—present) of L2 English by Taiwan Mandarin speakers (13.9GB total, 540 speakers, 815 hours). She has been an active contributor to international and regional communities in Chinese Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Speech Databases and Assessment and Corpus Linguistics, Spoken Language Processing and Speech Communication. She was a founding and life member of IACL, ACLCLP (Association of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Spoken Language Processing) and LST (Linguistic Society of Taiwan), and elected as an Ex officio member for many terms. She also served as Vice Chairperson for for SIG-CSLP, ISCA (Special Interest Group-Chinese Spoken Language Processing, the International Speech Communication Association) for 2 terms (2004-08), and Chairperson for 2 terms (2008-12). She served as the Convener of Oriental-COCOSDA (The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques) for 6 years (2006-12) was awarded the Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2012 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of language resources and language technology evaluation within human language technologies. Currently, she is serving a 4-yr term (2011-14) as an IAC (International Advisory Council) member of ISCA (The International Speech Communication Association), a 1-yr term (2013-14) as the Vice President of IACL (The International Association of Chinese Linguistics). She will serve a 1-yr term (2015-16) as the President of IACL.
Allan Tan the President and CEO of Ideyatech, Inc. – A premier software development firm in Philippines that specializes in enterprise Java applications. Driven by his passion to contribute and innovate, he founded Ideyatech with the vision of building creative software applications. For the past seven years, he has maintained the commitment to pursue research and development work on advance algorithms involving artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Aside from being an active member of the Philippines Software Industry Association, Allan has also been involved in various automation projects for the Philippine Government including Supreme Court and Office of the President.
NLP in Practice
What does it take to bring NLP research into commercial products? Who have made it successfully out to market? How can I bring my research out to the market? While many of the NLP research shows promising results, we face great challenges as we bring these results into commercial use.
Ariane Borlongan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Applied Linguistics, De La Salle University, Manila,Philippines. His interests are on Philippine English and world Englishes, English linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and learning. He wrote A Grammar of the Verb in Philippine English for his dissertation in his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from De La Salle University. He is the principal compiler of the Philippine parallel to the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English.
Introducing the Philippine Parallel to the Brown Corpus: Compilation Issues and Initial Findings
The compilation of the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PH) in 2004 by Ma. Lourdes Bautista, Jenifer Loy Lising, and Danilo Dayag at De La Salle University has made possible synchronic, apparent-time analyses of Philippine English, and also in comparison with other Englishes; works of this kind can be found in Bautista (2011) and summarized in Borlongan (2013) and Borlongan and Lim (2012). Recently, Ariane Borlongan also at De La Salle University (partially) completed the compilation of the Philippine parallel (Phil-Brown) to the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English (Brown). The said parallel corpus, representing Philippine English of the 1960s, allows for a diachronic analysis of Philippine English as well as diachronic comparable corpus linguistic analysis (Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith, 2009) of American, British, and Philippine Englishes. This paper provides an overview of the Phil-Brown. It presents the methodology of the compilation, the features of the corpus, differences from the Brown corpus, and its limitations. This paper also surveys the recent studies conducted that made use of Phil-Brown. Finally, the paper previews prospects and challenges for Phil-Brown, further development of the corpus, and further research on diachronic changes in Philippine English.
PAPER SUBMISSION (CLOSED)
NOTE: Paper submission is now closed.
Long papers
Submissions should describe substantial, completed, and original work. Authors intending to submit should follow the two-column ACM format. Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, including references and appendices.
Short papers
We also invite short papers on preliminary works describing the challenges and opportunities faced by the authors in the topics covered. Short papers should also follow the two-column ACM format and may consist of up to six (6) pages of content, including references and appendices.
Format
Authors intending to submit long papers (8 pages long) or short papers (6 pages long) describing their work in NLP must use the template at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/pubform.doc. No page number should appear in the paper. Submissions will be judged based on relevance, technical strength, significance and opportunities, and interest to the attendees. As the reviewing will be blind, authors must not indicate their names and affiliations in the papers.
Papers must be submitted through the Easy Chair Conference System.
URL: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=10nnlprs
Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the NNLPRS committee and will be included in a conference proceeding volume with ISSN to be distributed in CD format.
VENUE
De La Salle University is a Catholic coeducational institution founded in 1911 by the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The University is a hub for higher education training renowned for its academic excellence, prolific and relevant research, and involved community service.
More information can be obtained from: www.dlsu.edu.ph
PARTNERS
The organizers would like to thank our consistent partners:
Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, De La Salle University
External Relations and Internationalization Office, De La Salle University
Department of Science and Technology
Commission on Higher Education
National Commission for Culture and the Arts
Ideyatech
Neuron Global
| Rachel Edita O. Roxas, PhD | De La Salle University | Chair |
| Rodolfo Raga, Jr., PhD | Jose Rizal University | Co-Chair |
| Nathaniel Oco | De La Salle University | Member |
| Tod J. Allman, PhD | Visiting Scholar, Texas, USA |
| Don Erick Bonus | Jose Rizal University |
| Rhandley Cajote, PhD | University of the Philippines Diliman |
| Emmanuel Cayabyab | Manila Tytana Colleges |
| Charibeth Cheng | De La Salle University |
| Joey Stephanie Chua | De La Salle University |
| Shirley Dita, PhD | De La Salle University |
| Joel P. Ilao, PhD | De La Salle University |
| Nathalie Rose Lim-Cheng | De La Salle University |
| Nathaniel Oco | De La Salle University |
| Ethel Ong | De La Salle University |
| Rodolfo Raga, Jr., PhD | Jose Rizal University |
| Ralph Vincent Regalado | De La Salle University |
| Rachel Edita O. Roxas, PhD | De La Salle University |
| Ria Sagum | Polytechnic University of the Philippines |
| Raquel Sison-Buban, PhD | De La Salle University |
| Dolores Taylan, PhD | De La Salle University |
CONTACT INFORMATION
Rachel Edita O. Roxas
Chairman, CSP SIG-NLP
[email protected]
Rodolfo Raga, Jr.
Vice Chairman, CSP SIG-NLP
[email protected]