Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of en/MainTopics


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May 12, 2014, 11:24:42 AM (10 years ago)
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xkocinc
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  • en/MainTopics

    v1 v1  
     1= What do we work on in the NLP Lab? = #What_do_we_work_on_in_the_NLP_Lab.3F
     2Try some of our language tools:
     3 * [http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/ The Online Language Handbook]
     4 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/cz_accent/ CZ accent][[BR]]''for adding diacritics''
     5 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/~xpopelk/xplain/ X-Plain][[BR]]''the Activity game with a computer''
     6 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/wwwajka/ Ajka][[BR]]''morphological analyzer''
     7 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/wwwsynt/query.cgi Synt] and [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/set/ SET][[BR]]''syntactic analyzers''
     8
     9The [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/nlplab Natural Language Processing Centre] focuses on obtaining practical results in the field of information technologies and linguistics. Results of the projects are frequently published at various conferences, the NLP Centre also cooperates with similarly oriented institutes in Czech Republic and abroad, and offers students the possibility to participate in student exchange with partner universities abroad.
     10
     11More detailed information follows below, grouped into chapters according to their topic:
     12
     13|| [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#corp Corpora] ||
     14|| [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#dict Dictionaries] ||
     15|| [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#morph Morphology] ||
     16|| [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#syntan Syntactic Analysis] ||
     17|| [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#semant Semantics] ||
     18
     19
     20== Corpora == #Corpora
     21Corpus is a collection of text data in electronic form. As a significant source of linguistic data, corpora make it possible to investigate many frequency-related phenomena in language, and nowadays they are an indispensable tool in NLP. In addition to corpora containing general texts, corpora for specific purposes are also produced, such as annotated, domain-specific, spoken or error corpora.
     22
     23Corpora are used for investigation and development of natural language grammars. They are further helpful when developing a grammar checker, choosing entries for a dictionary or as a data source for automatic text categorization based on machine learning. Parallel corpora comprise of identical texts in various languages. They are used especially in word sense disambiguation and machine translation.
     24
     25Nowadays the main source of corpus texts is the World Wide Web. To obtain quality data on a larger scale, pre-processing tools for filtering undesired content need to be used: notably the '''jusText''' tool for removing boilerplate, the'''onion''' tool for removing duplicate text parts, or the '''chared''' utility for detecting text encoding. Very useful is also the popular '''gensim''' framework for extracting semantic topics from documents.
     26
     27The NLP Centre has produced a complete set of tools for creating and managing corpora, the '''Corpus Architect'''. It can store and manage corpora containing 100+ billion word tokens.
     28
     29''Related projects:''
     30
     31 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/bonito/ Bonito]
     32
     33
     34 * [http://ske.fi.muni.cz/ Corpus Architect]
     35
     36
     37 * [http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ Word Sketch Engine]
     38
     39
     40 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/cpa/ CPA]
     41
     42
     43 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/justext/ jusText]
     44
     45
     46 * [http://code.google.com/p/onion/ onion]
     47
     48
     49 * [http://code.google.com/p/chared/ chared]
     50
     51
     52 * [http://radimrehurek.com/gensim/index.html Gensim]
     53
     54
     55
     56([https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#guidepost back to the list of topics]) [[BR]]
     57
     58
     59== Dictionaries == #Dictionaries
     60Dictionaries have always been a fundamental part of every linguist's basic equipment. However, handling paper dictionaries is rather inconvenient. Therefore, one of the first projects of the NLP Centre was to digitize classic dictionaries of Czech and develop a set of advanced tools for processing lexicographic data, a so-called lexicographer's workbench. This term refers to a system that enables each expert user to easily access various linguistic resources and provides them with an application interface for searching and editing data.
     61
     62One of our projects related to dictionaries is the development of '''the DEB platform''', offering all the above mentioned features, thanks to its client-server architecture. One of the client applications is the '''DEBDict''' dictionary viewer, which contains apart from digitized dictionaries also several encyclopediae, and an onomastic and phraseological dictionary. Applications for DEB are developed in the XUL language and are available as extensions for the Firefox web browser. 
     63
     64''Related projects:''
     65
     66 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/deb2/ DEB II]
     67
     68
     69   * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/deb2/debdict/ DEBDict]
     70
     71
     72   * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/deb2/#debvisdic DEBVisDic]
     73
     74
     75 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/publications/slovko2005_ydana_hales/slovko2005_ydana_hales.pdf Verbalex]
     76
     77
     78 * [http://metatrans.fi.muni.cz/ MetaTrans]
     79
     80
     81 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/cpa/ CPA]
     82
     83
     84
     85([https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#guidepost back to the list of topics]) [[BR]]
     86
     87
     88== Morphology == #Morphology
     89Morphological analysis gives a basic insight into natural language by studying how to distinguish and generate grammatical forms of words arising through inflection (ie. declension and conjugation). This involves considering a set of tags describing the grammatical categories of the word form concerned, most notably, its base form (lemma) and paradigm. Automatic analysis of word forms in free text can be used for instance in grammar checker development, and can aid corpus tagging, or semi-automatic dictionary compiling.
     90
     91The NLP Centre has produced a general morphological analyzer for Czech, '''ajka''', which covers vocabulary of over 6 million word forms. It further served as a base for a similar analyzer for Slovak, the '''fispell'''grammar-checker, the '''czaccent''' converter of ascii text to text with diacritics, and an interactive interface for the IM Jabber protocol.
     92
     93''Related projects:''
     94
     95 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/ajka/ Ajka]
     96
     97
     98 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/ma/free.html Fajka (the analyzer with free data)]
     99
     100
     101 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/cz_accent/ CZ accent]
     102
     103
     104
     105([https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#guidepost back to the list of topics]) [[BR]]
     106
     107
     108== Syntactic Analysis == #Syntactic_Analysis
     109The goal of syntactic analysis is to determine whether the text string on input is a sentence in the given (natural) language. If it is, the result of the analysis contains a description of the syntactic structure of the sentence, for example in the form of a derivation tree. Such formalizations are aimed at making computers "understand" grammar of natural languages. Syntactic analysis can be utilized for instance when developing a punctuation corrector, dialogue systems with a natural language interface, or as a building block in a machine translation system. Czech is a language exhibiting rich inflection and free word order and thus belongs to the languages that are very hard to analyze, as it requires more grammar rules than most other languages.
     110
     111The NLP Centre is developing several syntactic analyzers. The '''synt''' syntactic analyzer is based on a handcraftedCzech meta-grammar enhanced by semantic actions and contextual constraints. '''SET''' is a popular lightweightsyntactic analyzer based on set of patterns. Both '''synt''' and '''SET''' perform syntactic analysis of Czech sentences with an accuracy close to 90%. For educational purposes we have a simple syntactic analyzer '''Zuzana'''.
     112
     113''Related projects:''
     114
     115 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/wwwsynt/ Synt]
     116
     117
     118 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/set/ SET]
     119
     120
     121 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/zuzana/ Zuzana]
     122
     123
     124
     125([https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#guidepost back to the list of topics]) [[BR]]
     126
     127
     128== Semantics == #Semantics
     129Semantic and pragmatic analysis make up the most complex phase of language processing as they build up on results of all the above mentioned disciplines. The ultimate touchstone on this level is machine translation, which hasn't been implemented for Czech with satisfactory results yet.
     130
     131One of the long-term projects of the NLP Centre is the use of'''Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL)''' as a semantic representation of knowledge and subsequently as a transfer language in automatic machine translation. At the current stage, it is realistic to process knowledge in a simpler form - considerably less complex tasks have been addressed, such as machine translation for a restricted domain (eg. official documents and weather reports), or semi-automatic machine translation between close languages. The resources exploited in these applications are corpora, semantic nets, and electronic dictionaries.
     132
     133In the field of representation of meaning and knowledge we shall mention the notable contribution of NLP Centre members to the '''EuroWordNet''' and '''Balkanet''' projects, which were aimed at building a multilingual '''WordNet'''-like semantic net. 
     134
     135''Related projects:''
     136
     137 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/deb2/#debvisdic DEBVisDic]
     138
     139
     140 * [http://www.fi.muni.cz/~hales/disert/ Logical Analysis of Czech Sentences in TIL]
     141
     142
     143 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/vizualni_lexikon/ Visual Browser]
     144
     145
     146 * [http://radimrehurek.com/gensim/index.html Gensim]
     147
     148
     149
     150''Animated demonstration of the Visual Browser:''
     151
     152 * [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics/VlDemoGif in GIF format (simplified)]
     153
     154
     155
     156([https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/main_topics#guidepost back to the list of topics]) [[BR]]
     157
     158== Further information == #Further_information
     159
     160 * [http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/ List of selected NLPlab projects]
     161
     162
     163 * [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/nlpis/baliky.php?lang=en&type=free Currently offered thesis topics]
     164
     165
     166 * [https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/nlplab NLP lab homepage]