New tool for the detection of discourse markers in Spanish

For a long time we were in the need for some tool that could detect and classify discourse markers (DMs) in Spanish according to the taxonomy of Martín Zorraquino & Portolés (1999), as this taxonomy is the one we use with our students of Text Grammars. We collected a large sample of DMs both manually and automatically, but the collection we now publish has been manually curated. It is published here in its entirety (if you spot some mistake please let us know). In this demo you can paste a text in Spanish and the program will detect and classify DMs according to said taxonomy. http://tecling.com/marzopo The documentation is still pending.

We presented lots of papers at Wopatec 2020

Our team presented various communications at the Fifth Edition of Wopatec, which was this time co-organized with the Third International Congress of Computational and Corpus Linguistics, held in October 21-23, 2020 and hosted by Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. Members of our team who presented their research were Javier Obreque, Ana Castro, Valentina Ravest, Benjamín López, Nicolás Acosta and Rogelio Nazar. Six presentations in total... yeah we sort of invaded the program. Check the web site for more details: https://cilcc20.wordpress.com/english/

New web demo for modality detection in Spanish

Yeah, we know. We are crazy. We should focus on one thing at a time and try to make a piece of software that really works. Instead of that, we keep biting off more than we can chew. We can't help it! It's in our nature. We are now launching a new web demo based on modality detection in Spanish. It takes a text as input and it detects and classifies instances of modality. It's pretty cool. Come on, give it a try: http://tecling.com/modal And, you guessed it: the documentation is still pending. Update: [October 23, 2020]: we added some documentation.

We have implemented different types of applications and most of them can be tested online. Take a look.

+ Bifid: a parallel corpus aligner

+ Dsele: a model dictionary for ELE learners

+ Deixis: a tool for the identification of deixis in Spanish texts

+ EMaD: automatic categorization of Spanish discouse markers

+ Estilector: computer assisted writing for Spanish

+ GeNom: a program to detect the gender of proper nouns

+ HAT: a project for the treatment of polysemy in lexical taxonomies

+ Jaguar: a tool for statistic corpus analysis

+ Kind: a taxonomy induction algorithm

+ Kwico: a concordancer for big corpora

+ Marzopo: a program to detect discourse markers in Spanish

+ Modal: a program to detect modality in Spanish

+ Neven: a program to detect eventive nouns

+ Termout: a terminology extraction system

+ POL: named entity recognition and classification

+ Poppins: a supervised text classifier

+ Porcus: an interface for various taggers and parsers for Spanish

+ pullPOS: a project for the detection of plurals in Spanish

+ Sapo: a program to detect similarities between documents

+ Sicam: a program to separate a Spanish Word in syllables

+ Verbario: corpus pattern analysis in Spanish

Upcoming Events

October 21-22, 2020: Wopatec is back! The 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing will take place in Antioquía, Colombia, in conjunction with the 3rd International Congress of Computational and Corpus Linguistics. For the first time, the event will be held completely online.

November 30, 2020: Rogelio Nazar will be gest editor of the special issue on Computational Linguistics of the journal Anales de lingüística, founded by the great Catalan linguist Joan Corominas in 1941, at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina.
If you would like to have your paper published in this issue, send it by email to rogelio dot nazar at pucv dot cl before the deadline indicated in the heading.
Here is the call for papers (at the moment only available in Spanish).
And here the instructions for authors.

Latest ideas & research projects

We are developing new projects in computational linguistics and natural language processing:

+ Fondecyt Regular (2019-2021): "Polisemia regular de los sustantivos del español: análisis semiautomático de corpus, caracterización y tipología" (Regular polysemy of nouns in Spanish: semiautomatic analysis of corpus, characterization and tipology). Lead researcher: Irene Renau. Ref.: 1191204.

+ Fondecyt Regular (2019-2021): "Inducción automática de taxonomías de marcadores discursivos a partir de corpus multilingües" (Automatic induction of taxonomies of discourse markers from multilingual corpora). Lead researcher: Rogelio Nazar. Ref.: 1191481.

+ Ecos-Sud (International Project between Chile and France): "Inducción automática de taxonomías del español y el francés mediante técnicas cuantitativas y estadística de corpus". Lead researcher: Irene Renau. Ref.: C16H02.

+ Fondecyt Regular: "Desarrollo de la competencia terminológica a lo largo de la inserción disciplinar". Lead Researcher: Sabela Fernández. Co-researcher: Rogelio Nazar. Ref.: 11121597.

+ See more.

Recent publications

+ Nazar, R.; Balvet, A.; Ferraro, G.; Marín, R.; Renau, I. (2020). "Pruning and repopulating a lexical taxonomy: experiments in Spanish, English and French". Journal of Intelligent Systems, (forthcoming...).

+ Nazar, R.; Obreque, J.; Renau, I. (2020). "Tarántula –> araña –> animal : asignación de hiperónimos de segundo nivel basada en métodos de similitud distribucional". Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, núm 64, pp. 29-36. PDF

+ Renau, I.; Nazar, R.; Lecaros, V. (2020). "La evolución de las marcas ortográficas y tipográficas en los procesos de lexicalización de neologismos: un estudio en el vocabulario de la crisis económica en prensa española". Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, vol. 33, núm. 1, pp. 227-277.

+ See more.

Solutions for text processing

It is critical for organizations to have the ability to process information automatically, and very often that information is contained in documents to be read by humans rather than machines. We have different methods for text processing depending on the goal.

We can be helpful teaching people how to automatize their text processing routines. We can batch-process thousands of documents to extract information from them or to derive different types of statistics. We can also change these document, or generate databases or email correspondence based on information extracted from them. Anything that involves intelligent management of information can benefit from different degrees of automatization, and by doing that we can free time, effort and resources.