Current Projects and Activities of Prof. Dr. Piek Th.J.M. Vossen

• DutchSemCor (2009-2011)

  Coordinator of "DutchSemCor: a NWO-project (380-70-011)

  The goal of DutchSemCor is to deliver a one-million word Dutch corpus that is fully sense-tagged with senses and domain tags from the Cornetto database (STEVIN project STE05039). 250K words of this corpus will be manually tagged. The remainder will be automatically tagged using three different word-sense-disambiguation systems (WSD), and will be validated by human annotators. The corpus data will be based on existing corpus material collected in the projects CGN, D-CoI and SoNaR. These corpora have already been automatically annotated with morpho-syntactic tags and structures. The corpora will be extended where necessary to find sufficient examples for meanings of words that are less frequent and do not appear in the above corpora. The resulting corpus, for which we aim to offer the same balance in types of text as these basic resources, will be extremely rich in terms of lexical semantic information. Its availability will enable many new lines of research and technology developments for the Dutch language. In particular, it will enable research into the relation between language form and language interpretation, and as such it will be applicable in the fields of cognitive science, (psycho-)linguistics, language learning and language teaching, semantic web applications, information retrieval, machine translation, text mining, and document interpretation (summarization, topic segmentation). We foresee that the corpus will create new directions of research and technology development on a par with current developments for English. (news VUA).

• KYOTO: Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization ICT-211423 (2008-2011)

  Coordinator of KYOTO: a 7th EU FrameWork project withing the area of Digital Libraries/Conceptual characterization of various genres in written and spoken media, across languages (IST-211423).

  The goal of KYOTO is to develop a content enabling system that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and the general public, covering a broad range of data from wide-spread sources in a number of culturally diverse languages. In this project we will target the languages: English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Chinese and Japanese. This powerful system crucially rests on an ontology linked to wordnets --lexical semantic databases--in a variety of languages. Concept extraction and data mining are applied through a chain of semantic processors that re-use the knowledge for different languages and for particular domains. The shared ontology guarantees a uniform interpretation for diverse types of information from different sources and languages. The system can be maintained by field specialists using a Wiki platform. KYOTO is a generic system offering knowledge transition for any domain of knowledge and information, across different target groups in society and across linguistic, cultural and geographic borders. KYOTO will be applied to the environmental domain and span global information across European and non-European languages. For more information see:

  • Short description
  • EU-site on Kyoto

• From sentiments and opinions in texts to positions of political parties (Text2Politics: 2009-2013)

  The research project Text2Politics combines contemporary theories and methods in linguistics and political science to develop an automated research tool for rich text-mining. The transdisciplinary relevance of the project is that a carefully constructed mining tool for language-meaning research can be applied to enhance the Kieskompas (Electoral Compass) and prove useful in the social sciences in general. The research will give new insights into the complexity of language use, the linguistic modeling of subjectivity and the representation of this knowledge in a lexicon. It will also shed new light on the complex dimensionality of competition between political parties. The work is carried out by three AIOs that are situated at the Faculty of Social Sciences Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and is funded by the Interfaculty research institute CAMeRA.

• FLaReNet

  Member of Flarenet which addresses the development and exploitation of Language Resources (LRs) and Language Technology (LT) that will enable easy and natural access to the wealth of information and knowledge encapsulated in (written, spoken, multimodal) digital documents. FLaReNet expectation is to achieve:
  • the largest network of LR and HLT players, ready to discuss information and knowledge on LRs and LT, and with appropriate mechanisms to share such information and disseminate it widely
    
  • an extended picture of LRs and a recasting of its definition in the light of recent scientific, methodological, technological, social developments
    
  • a consolidation of methods and approaches, common practices, frameworks and architectures
    
  • a roadmap identifying areas where consensus has been achieved or is emerging vs. areas where additional discussion and testing is required, together with an indication of priorities
    
  • a set of recommendations in the form of a plan of coherent actions for the EU and national organizations
    
  • a European model for the LRs of the next years.
    Bringing together the diverse approaches, efforts and technologies represented by its membership, FLaReNet will enable even greater progress toward community consensus.

• Semantics of History (2009-2013)

  The research project Semantics of History develops a historical ontology and a lexicon that are used in a new type of information system that can handle the time-based dynamics and varying perspectives in historical archives. The system will integrate new insights in the ontological and linguistic analysis of the data that will follow from empirical and fundamental research. The work is carried out by two AIOs that are situated at the Faculty of Exact Science and the Faculty of Arts and is funded by the Interfaculty research institute CAMeRA. History is typically a record of different realities in time and specifically focuses on the changes in reality. Even stronger, the perception of history can be different for different participants and for different cultural and linguistic groups. Finally, the reflection on the past can be different based on our different views: history has been and will be re-written many times. Information systems of historical archives should handle the dynamicity in time and represent all realities at an equal level while at the same time they should define the relations, the invariables and changes across the realities. The units of change are events and typically in history events can be organized at different levels of change. The most constant elements are locations, people and dates but nevertheless many different structures are still possible, which need to be related relative to these more constant elements. Such a system should also allow users to classify and structure reality from any possible perspective when accessing the archives. Vast amounts of historical data are available as free text. The text itself can be related in time just as the events. For direct reporting and communication in the same time-frame there will be little distance between the communication date and the event date. Historical documents on the other hand have a large distance between reporting and event date. We also expect that the linguistic expression for naming these events will be different; exhibiting high abstraction and others types of perspectives in historical reports as compared to actual news reports. A historical information system requires an innovative view on the semantics of events and the ways we can conceptualize these through language in different genres of documents.

• Global WordNet Grid (ongoing)

  In 2006 Vossen launched the Global Wordnet Grid: the building of a complete free worldwide wordnet grid. This grid will be build around a shared set of concepts, such as the Common Base Concepts used in many wordnet projects. These concepts will be expressed in terms of Wordnet synsets and SUMO definitions. People from all language communities are invited to upload synsets from their language to the Grid. Gradually, the Grid will then be represented by all languages. The Grid will be available to everybody and will be distributed completely free.

• Global Wordnet Association (ongoing)

  Vossen is Founder and President of the Global WordNet Association. He founded GWA (with Christiane Fellbaum of Princeton University) in 2000 as a public and non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting wordnets for all languages in the world. For more information see:
  • Global Wordnet Association
  • Fifth Global WordNet Conference 2010 in Mumbai, India, January 31 - February 4, 2010
  • Fourth Global WordNet Conference 2008 in Szeged, Hungary, January 22-25, 2008
  • Third Global Wordnet Conference 2006 in Jeju Island. Korea, January 22-26, 2006
  • Information on the Second Global Wordnet Conference 2004 in Brno, Czech Republic, January 20-23, 2004
  • Information on the First Global Wordnet Conference 2002 in Mysore, India, January 21-25, 2002