Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Adapting NLP Tools and Frame-Semantic Resources for the Semantic Analysis of Ritual Descriptions

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Language Technology for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the use of standard natural language processing (NLP) tools and annotation methods for processing linguistic data from ritual science, which is concerned with the study of structure and variance of rituals. The work is embedded in an interdisciplinary project that addresses this study by applying empirical and quantitative computational linguistic analysis techniques to ritual descriptions from Indian rituals.We present motivation and prospects of such a computational approach to ritual structure research and sketch the overall project research plan. In particular, we motivate the choice of frame semantics as a theoretical framework for the semantic analysis of rituals. We discuss the special characteristics of the textual data and examine several domain adaptation strategies in order to use standard NLP resources and tools on the ritual domain. We also report on our workflows and methods for semi-automatic semantic annotation, which is used as a basis for the extraction of event chains. We close with some preliminary investigations on how to uncover regularities and differences of rituals.-

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bagga, A., Baldwin, B.: Algorithms for Scoring Coreference Chains. In: Proceedings of the LREC 1998 Linguistic Coreference Workshop, pp. 536–566. Granada, Spain (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barzilay, R., Lee, L.: Learning to Paraphrase: An Unsupervised Approach Using Multiple-Sequence Alignment. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL (HLT-NAACL ’03), pp. 16–23. Edmonton (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bögel, T., Funk, L., Kull, A.: ELAC: Ensemble Learning for ACR-Systems. Software project, University of Heidelberg, http://dakhma.net/elac (2010)

  4. Bortz, J.: Statistik für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler, 6. edn. Springer Medizin Verlag, Heidelberg (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Burchardt, A., Frank, A., Pinkal, M.: Building Text Meaning Representations from Contextually Related Frames – A Case Study. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS ’05) (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Burchardt, A., Pado, S., Spohr, D., Frank, A., Heid, U.: Constructing Integrated Corpus and Lexicon Models for Multi-Layer Annotations in OWL DL. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 1(1), 1–33 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chambers, N., Jurafsky, D.: Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Event Chains. In: Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT ’08), pp. 789–797 (2008). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P08/P08-1090

  8. Chambers, N., Jurafsky, D.: Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Schemas and their Participants. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP (ACL-IJCNLP ’09), pp. 602–610 (2009). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P09/P09-1068

  9. Charniak, E.: A Maximum-Entropy-Inspired Parser. In: Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL ’00) (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Daumé III, H.: Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’07), pp. 256–263 (2007). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P07-1033

  11. Denis, P.: New Learning Models for Robust Reference Resolution. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Erk, K., Kowalski, A., Padó, S.: The SALSA Annotation Tool. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Prospects and Advances in the Syntax/Semantics Interface (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Erk, K., Padó, S.: Shalmaneser – a Toolchain for Shallow Semantic Parsing. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC ’06) (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Fellbaum, C.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Fillmore, C.J., Johnson, C.R., Petruck, M.R.: Background to FrameNet. International Journal of Lexicography 16(3), 235–250 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Finkel, J.R., Manning, C.D.: Hierarchical Bayesian Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Human Language Technologies Conference of the NAACL (HLT-NAACL ’09), pp. 602–610 (2009). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N/N09/N09-1068

  17. Hellwig, O.: A Chronometric Approach to Indian Alchemical Literature. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4), 373–383 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  18. Hyland, K.: Hedging in Academic Writing and EAP Textbooks. English for Specific Purposes 13(3), 239–256 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Jiang, J., Zhai, C.: Instance Weighting for Domain Adaptation in NLP. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’07), pp. 264–271 (2007). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P07-1034

  20. Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., Palmer, M.: A Large-Scale Classification of English Verbs. Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1), 21–40 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Lappin, S., Leass, H.J.: An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution. Computational Linguistics 20(4), 535–561 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Light, M., Qiu, X.Y., Srinivasan, P.: The Language of Bioscience: Facts, Speculations, and Statements in Between. In: Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2004 Workshop on Linking Biological Literature, Ontologies and Databases (BioLINK ’04), pp. 17–24 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Medlock, B., Briscoe, T.: Weakly Supervised Learning for Hedge Classification in Scientific Literature. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’07), pp. 992–999 (2007). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P07/P07-1125

  24. Needleman, S.B., Wunsch, C.D.: A General Method Applicable to the Search for Similarities in the Amino Acid Sequence of Two Proteins. Journal of Molecular Biology 48, 443–453 (1970)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Poesio, M., Kabadjov, M.A.: A General-Purpose, Off-the-Shelf Anaphora Resolution Module: Implementation and Preliminary Evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC ’04) (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Pradhan, S., Ward, W., Martin, J.H.: Towards Robust Semantic Role Labeling. Computational Linguistics, Special Issue on Semantic Role Labeling 34(2), 289–310 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Pradhan, S.S., Ward, W., Hacioglu, K., Martin, J.H., Jurafsky, D.: Shallow Semantic Parsing using Support Vector Machines. In: Proceedings of the 2004 Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL (HLT-NAACL ’04) (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  28. R Development Core Team: R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Wien (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Recasens, M., Martí, T., Taulé, M., Màrquez, L., Sapena, E.: SemEval-2010 Task 1: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages. In: Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2009 Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (SEW ’09), pp. 70–75 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Regneri, M., Koller, A., Pinkal, M.: Learning script knowledge with web experiments. In: Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’10), pp. 979–988. Uppsala, Sweden (2010). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P10-1100

  31. Reiter, N., Hellwig, O., Mishra, A., Frank, A., Burkhardt, J.: Using NLP methods for the Analysis of Rituals. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC ’10) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Reiter, N., Hellwig, O., Mishra, A., Gossmann, I., Larios, B.M., Rodrigues, J., Zeller, B., Frank, A.: Adapting Standard NLP Tools and Resources to the Processing of Ritual Descriptions. In: Proceedings of ECAI 2010 Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH ’10) (2010). URL http://www.cl.uni-heidelberg.de/~reiter/publications/Reiter2010b.pdf

  33. Ruppenhofer, J., Sporleder, C., Morante, R., Baker, C., Palmer, M.: SemEval-2010 Task 10: Linking Events and Their Participants in Discourse. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (SEW ’09), pp. 106–111 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Sang, E.F.T.K., Buchholz, S.: Introduction to the CoNLL-2000 Shared Task: Chunking. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Learning Language in Logic and the 4th conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL ’00 and LLL ’00) (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Soon, W.M., Lim, D.C.Y., Ng, H.T.: A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases. Computational Linguistics 27(4), 521–544 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Szarvas, G., Vincze, V., Farkas, R., Csirik, J.: The BioScope Corpus: Annotation for Negation, Uncertainty and their Scope in Biomedical Texts. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP ’08), pp. 38–45 (2008). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W08/W08-0606

  37. Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G., Gibson, T.J.: CLUSTAL W: Improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix cxshoice. Nucleic Acids Research 22(22), 4673–4680 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Toutanova, K., Klein, D., Manning, C., Singer, Y.: Feature-Rich Part-of-Speech Tagging with a Cyclic Dependency Network. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technologies Conference of the NAACL (HLT-NAACL ’03), pp. 252–259 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Verhagen, M., Pustejovsky, J.: Temporal Processing with the TARSQI Toolkit. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Demonstration Papers (COLING ’08), pp. 189–192. Manchester, UK (2008). URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C08-3012

  40. Versley, Y., Ponzetto, S.P., Poesio, M., Eidelman, V., Jern, A., Smith, J., Yang, X., Moschitti, A.: BART: A Modular Toolkit for Coreference Resolution. In: Companion Volume of the Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’08), pp. 9–12 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Vilain, M., Burger, J., Aberdeen, J., Connolly, D., Hirschman, L.: A Model-Theoretic Coreference Scoring Scheme. In: Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Message Understanding (MUC6 ’95), pp. 45–52. Morristown, NJ, USA (1995)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center on ritual dynamics (Sonderforschungsbereich SFB-619, Ritualdynamik).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Nils Reiter, Anette Frank, Irina Gossmann, Julio Rodrigues & Britta Zeller

  2. South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Oliver Hellwig & Borayin Maitreya Larios

Authors
  1. Nils Reiter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Oliver Hellwig
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Anette Frank
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Irina Gossmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Borayin Maitreya Larios
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Julio Rodrigues
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Britta Zeller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nils Reiter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Computational Linguistics / MMCI, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, 66041, Germany

    Caroline Sporleder

  2. Fac. Humanities, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands

    Antal van den Bosch

  3. Tilburg School for Humanities, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communi, University of Tilburg, Tilburg, 5000, Netherlands

    Kalliopi Zervanou

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Reiter, N. et al. (2011). Adapting NLP Tools and Frame-Semantic Resources for the Semantic Analysis of Ritual Descriptions. In: Sporleder, C., van den Bosch, A., Zervanou, K. (eds) Language Technology for Cultural Heritage. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_10

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20226-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20227-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation