Papers by Rodolfo Delmonte
Bridging the gap between first-year students and Engineering: A novel application of mobile technologies for improving Mathematics and Physics learning
Mobile technologies and new methodologies may, when properly combined in a classroom environment,... more Mobile technologies and new methodologies may, when properly combined in a classroom environment, improve the teaching and learning process. This is particularly evident in a first-year Engineering course where, as it is very well known, an important percentage of students have significant difficulties to understand basic mathematics and physics concepts. The “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) concept has been gaining attraction and interest in recent years and, when combined with methodologies such as “Flipped Learning,” may completely change the educational environment and improve students' learning. This paper will describe the first steps of a research work that is being developed at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN) in Argentina, implementing the new platform qdex (http://qdexapps.com) developed by the Canadian company Quanser (www.quanser.com). This technology allows educational institutions to develop applications (apps) to implement ideas, such as those described in...
Proceedings of the Second Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2015
In this paper we present our approach to extract multi-word terms (MWTs) from an Italian-Arabic p... more In this paper we present our approach to extract multi-word terms (MWTs) from an Italian-Arabic parallel corpus of legal texts. Our approach is a hybrid model which combines linguistic and statistical knowledge. The linguistic approach includes Part Of Speech (POS) tagging of the corpus texts in the two languages in order to formulate syntactic patterns to identify candidate terms. After that, the candidate terms will be ranked by statistical association measures which here represent the statistical knowledge. After the creation of two MWTs lists, one for each language, the parallel corpus will be used to validate and identify translation equivalents. offerte dalle misure di associazione lessicale. In una seconda fase viene utilizzato il corpus parallelo per estrarre equivalenti di traduzione.
Rappresentazioni Lessicali e
X Editors'Foreword
Recent advances in natural language processing: selected papers from RANLP'95, 1997
Proceedings of the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2014 and of the Fourth International Workshop EVALITA 2014 9-11 December 2014, Pisa, 2014
English. We present results obtained by our system ITGetaruns for all tasks. It is a linguistic r... more English. We present results obtained by our system ITGetaruns for all tasks. It is a linguistic rule-based system in its bottom-up version that computes a complete parser of the input text. On top of that it produces semantics at different levels which is then used by the algorithm for sentiment and polarity detection. Our results are not remarkable apart from the ones related to Irony detection, where we ranked fourth over eight participants. The results were characterized by our intention to favour Recall over Precision and this is also testified by Recall values for Polarity which in one case rank highest of all.
Coping with semantic uncertainty with VENSES
Abstract As in the previous RTE Challenge, we present a linguistically-based approach for semanti... more Abstract As in the previous RTE Challenge, we present a linguistically-based approach for semantic inference which is built around a neat division of labour between two main components: a grammatically-driven subsystem which is responsible for the level of ...
Computers have played a significant role in second language learning as they can offer different ... more Computers have played a significant role in second language learning as they can offer different types of language activities and provide learners with immediate and appropriate feedbacks. In ICALL systems, learning is activated by focusing the learner's attention to the correct form and comparing it to the wrong one. Feedback offers an explicit explanation of the mistakes made by the student. The focus of this paper is a grammar checker designed for Italian native speakers learning German GI-tutor. The system's structure was taken from a previous study [28] and enforced to analyse a conspicuous number of sentences, with different sentence and phrase structures. The lexicon used has been manually organized at the beginning, with some 8,000 entries overall; then, an enlargement has been obtained through an adaptation of the lexicon made available by Hamburg University Constraint Dependency Grammar (JWCDG) and downloaded from their website. A corpus containing wrong sentences ...
Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading
Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics
This paper presents work carried out to transform glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LI... more This paper presents work carried out to transform glosses of a fable in Italian Sign Language (LIS) into a text which is then read by a TTS synthesizer from an SSML modified version of the same text. Whereas many systems exist that generate sign language from a text, we decided to do the reverse operation and generate text from LIS. For that purpose we used a version of the fable The Tortoise and the Hare, signed and made available on Youtube by ALBA cooperativa sociale, which was annotated manually by second author for her master’s thesis. In order to achieve our goal, we converted the multilayer glosses into linear Prolog terms to be fed to the generator. In the paper we focus on the main problems encountered in the transformation of the glosses into a semantically and pragmatically consistent representation. The main problems have been caused by the complexities of a text like a fable which requires coreference mechanisms and speech acts to be implemented in the representation wh...
In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interestin... more In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic elements in Spec XP projections at various levels of constituency. Then we introduce LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) as the theory that allows us to connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first one uses best online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second one uses Getarun, the system created at Ca Foscari Computational Linguistics Laborato...
Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics, Dec 1, 2019
Almost eight years after his untimely death, the scientific contribution of Emanuele Pianta still... more Almost eight years after his untimely death, the scientific contribution of Emanuele Pianta still appears significant to us, in particular for the variety of the topics he dealt with and for his capacity to move cross-disciplinarily between different areas of computational linguistics. Today, retracing the steps of Emanuele's scientific carrier has the meaning of rediscovering an important part of the scientific challenges that the Italian research community has faced over a period of more than twenty years. In recognition of the role he played, the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics entitled to Emanuele Pianta the annual award assigned to the best master's degree thesis in the context of Computational Linguistics, discussed in an Italian University.
EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020
In this paper 1 we present work carried out for the Ac-ComplIt task. ItVENSES is a system for syn... more In this paper 1 we present work carried out for the Ac-ComplIt task. ItVENSES is a system for syntactic and semantic processing that is based on the parser for Italian called ItGetaruns to analyse each sentence. In previous EVALITA tasks we only used semantics to produce the results. In this year EVALITA, we used both a statistically based approach and the semantic one used previously. The statistic approach is characterized by the use of trigrams of constituents computed by the system and checked against a trigram model derived from the constituency version of VIT-Venice Italian Treebank. Results measured in term of a correlation, are not particularly high, below 50% the Acceptability task and slightly over 30% the Complexity one.
ArXiv, 2018
In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interestin... more In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic elements in Spec XP projections at various levels of constituency. Then we introduce LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) as the theory that allows us to connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first one uses best online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second one uses Getarun, the system created at Ca Foscari Computational Linguistics Laborato...
English. In this paper we present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of English and Ita... more English. In this paper we present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of English and Italian poetry. The system can work on any type of poem and produces a set of parameters that are then used to compare poems with one another, of the same author or of different authors. In this paper, we will concentrate on the second module, which is a rule-based system to represent and analyze poetic devices. Evaluation of the system on the basis of a manually created dataset including poets from Shakespeare's time down to T.S.Eliot and Sylvia Plath has shown its high precision and accuracy approximating 90%. Italiano. In questo lavoro presentiamo SPARSAR, un sistema per l'analisi automatica di poesia inglese e italiana. Il sistema e in grado di lavorare su qualunque poesia e produce un insieme di parametri che vengono poi usati per confrontare poesie e autori tra di loro. In questo lavoro ci concentreremo sul secondo modulo che consiste in un sistema a regole per rappresentare e...
We present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of poetry(and text) style which makes use... more We present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of poetry(and text) style which makes use of NLP tools like tokenizers, sentence splitters, NER (Name Entity Recognition) tools, and taggers. Our system in addition to the tools listed above which aim at obtaining the same results of quantitative linguistics, adds a number of additional tools for syntactic and semantic structural analysis and prosodic modeling. We use a constituency parser to measure the structure of modifiers in NPs; and a dependency mapping of the previous parse to analyse the verbal complex and determine Polarity and Factuality. Another important component of the system is a phonological parser to account for OOVWs, in the process of grapheme to phoneme conversion of the poem. We also measure the prosody of the poem by associating mean durational values in msecs to each syllable from a database and created an algorithm to account for the evaluation of durational values for any possible syllable structure. Ev...
In this paper we will define narrative structure as characterized by a basic element, the narreme... more In this paper we will define narrative structure as characterized by a basic element, the narreme, which is here described as the basic unit of narrative structure, the smallest possible unit of the story. We annotated a full novel – "The Solid Mandala" (1966) by Nobel laureate Patrick White – combining two approaches: one is related to sentiment and opinion mining, including deeper aspects connected to event factuality and subjectivity, and the other focuses on evaluative features derived from the Appraisal Theory framework. After characterizing the style, we will show the main significant events of the plot as they emerge from the distribution of deep semantic features. Narreme boundaries will be identified by presence of specific speech acts, change of point of view, and movement in spatio-temporal coordinates through flashbacks. An experiment with our system of text understanding, GETARUNS, has been carried out to test its ability to automatically identify narremes.
We created an application specialized in prosodic tutoring, called the Prosodic Module(PM). The P... more We created an application specialized in prosodic tutoring, called the Prosodic Module(PM). The PM is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing with prosodic problems at word syllabic level, the second one dealing with prosodic problems at phonological phrase and utterance level. The PM is able to detect significant deviations from a master's word/ phrase/ utterance and offers visual aids and a written diagnosis of the problem as well as indications on how to overcome and correct the error. This is achieved by means of a comparison between the two signals, the master and the student one; elements of comparison are constituted by the acoustic correlates of well-known prosodic elements such as intonational contour, sentence accent and word stress, duration at syllable, word and sentence level. We argue that the use of Automatic Speech Recognition as Teaching Aid should be targeted to narrowly focussed spoken exercises, for intermediate or higher ...
This work describes the annotation of the novel "The Solid Mandala" (Patrick White, 196... more This work describes the annotation of the novel "The Solid Mandala" (Patrick White, 1966), carried out combining sentiment and opinion mining on character level with the Appraisal Theory framework, here used to identify evaluative statements and their contribution to the social dimension of the text. Our approach was inspired by research on the correlation between White’s style and the personality of his main characters. The annotation was manually executed by second author using an XML standard markup system and double-checked by first author. In this paper we comment on the selected features, focusing on the ones acquiring specialized meaning in the context of the novel, and provide results in terms of quantitative data. Comparing them, we are able to extract story units in which special or significant events take place, and to predict the presence or similar units in the narrative by detecting concentrations of features. Eventually collecting all annotations has made av...
We present a system that couples techniques belonging to Information Extraction and deep linguist... more We present a system that couples techniques belonging to Information Extraction and deep linguistic processing for Question Answering. The system presented in the paper has undergone extensive testing and the parser has been trained on available testsuites. The system uses text entailment processing to select best sentences to match with each question. Both sentences and questions need to parsed syntactically and semantically and a logical form has to be produced with predicate argument structures and propositional level analysis. In order to pick the right answer from a set of five, after extracting the best sentence/s from the text, we organized different strategies according to question type and semantic propositional type. The system has access to a wide range of computational lexica, ontologies and datasets to carry out the task: for common sense knowledge we used ConceptNet.
In this paper we will be dealing with different levels of complexity in the processing of Italian... more In this paper we will be dealing with different levels of complexity in the processing of Italian, a Romance language inheriting many properties from Latin which make it an almost free word order language . The paper is concerned with syntactic complexity as measurable on the basis of the cognitive parser that incrementally builds up a syntactic representation to be used by the semantic component. The theory behind will be LFG and parsing preferences will be used to justify one choice both from a principled and a processing point of view. LFG is a transformationless theory in which there is no deep structure separate from surface syntactic structure. This is partially in accordance with constructional theories in which noncanonical structures containing non-argument functions FOCUS/TOPIC are treated as multifunctional constituents. Complexity is computed on a processing basis following suggestions made by Blache and demonstrated by Kluender and Chesi
Uploads
Papers by Rodolfo Delmonte