A Fact-aligned Corpus of Numerical Expressions

Sandra Williams, Richard Power


Abstract
We describe a corpus of numerical expressions, developed as part of the NUMGEN project. The corpus contains newspaper articles and scientific papers in which exactly the same numerical facts are presented many times (both within and across texts). Some annotations of numerical facts are original: for example, numbers are automatically classified as round or non-round by an algorithm derived from Jansen and Pollmann (2001); also, numerical hedges such as ‘about’ or ‘a little under’ are marked up and classified semantically using arithmetical relations. Through explicit alignment of phrases describing the same fact, the corpus can support research on the influence of various contextual factors (e.g., document position, intended readership) on the way in which numerical facts are expressed. As an example we present results from an investigation showing that when a fact is mentioned more than once in a text, there is a clear tendency for precision to increase from first to subsequent mentions, and for mathematical level either to remain constant or to increase.
Anthology ID:
L10-1124
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/185_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sandra Williams and Richard Power. 2010. A Fact-aligned Corpus of Numerical Expressions. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Fact-aligned Corpus of Numerical Expressions (Williams & Power, LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/185_Paper.pdf