Text clustering divides a set of texts into groups, so that texts within each group are similar in content. It may be used to uncover the structure and content of unknown text sets as well as to give new perspectives on known ones. The contributions of this thesis are an investigation of text representation for Swedish and an evaluation method that uses two or more manual categorizations. Text clustering, at least such as it is treated here, is performed using the vector space model, which is commonly used in information retrieval. This model represents texts by the words that appear in them and considers texts similar in content if they share many words. Languages differ in what is considered a word. We have investigated the impact of some of the characteristics of Swedish on text clustering. Since Swedish has more morphological variation than for instance English we have used a stemmer to strip suffixes. This gives moderate improvements and reduces the number of words in the representation. Swedish has a rich production of solid compounds. Most of the constituents of these are used on their own as words and in several different compounds. In fact, Swedish solid compounds often correspond to phrases or open compounds in other languages.In the ordinary vector space model the constituents of compounds are not accounted for when calculating the similarity between texts. To use them we have employed a spell checking program to split compounds. The results clearly show that this is beneficial. The vector space model does not regard word order. We have tried to extend it with nominal phrases in different ways. Noneof our experiments have shown any improvement over using the ordinary model. Evaluation of text clustering results is very hard. What is a good partition of a text set is inherently subjective. Automatic evaluation methods are either intrinsic or extrinsic. Internal quality measures use the representation in some manner. Therefore they are not suitable for comparisons of different representations. External quality measures compare a clustering with a (manual) categorization of the same text set. The theoretical best possible value for a measure is known, but it is not obvious what a good value is -- text sets differ in difficulty to cluster and categorizations are more or less adapted to a particular text set. We describe an evaluation method for cases where a text set has more than one categorization. In such cases the result of a clustering can be compared with the result for one of the categorizations, which we assume is a good partition. We also describe the kappa coefficient as a clustering quality measure in the same setting. / Textklustring delar upp en mängd texter i grupper, så att texterna inom dessa liknar varandra till innehåll. Man kan använda textklustring för att uppdaga strukturer och innehåll i okända textmängder och för att få nya perspektiv på redan kända. Bidragen i denna avhandling är en undersökning av textrepresentationer för svenska texter och en utvärderingsmetod som använder sig av två eller fler manuella kategoriseringar. Textklustring, åtminstonde som det beskrivs här, utnyttjar sig av den vektorrumsmodell, som används allmänt inom området. I denna modell representeras texter med orden som förekommer i dem och texter som har många gemensamma ord betraktas som lika till innehåll. Vad som betraktas som ett ord skiljer sig mellan språk. Vi har undersökt inverkan av några av svenskans egenskaper på textklustring. Eftersom svenska har större morfologisk variation än till exempel engelska har vi tagit bort suffix med hjälp av en stemmer. Detta ger lite bättre resultat och minskar antalet ord i representationen. I svenska används och skapas hela tiden fasta sammansättningar. De flesta delar av sammansättningar används som ord på egen hand och i många olika sammansättningar. Fasta sammansättningar i svenska språket motsvarar ofta fraser och öppna sammansättningar i andra språk. Delarna i sammansättningar används inte vid likhetsberäkningen i vektorrumsmodellen. För att utnyttja dem har vi använt ett rättstavningsprogram för att dela upp sammansättningar. Resultaten visar tydligt att detta är fördelaktigt I vektorrumsmodellen tas ingen hänsyn till ordens inbördes ordning. Vi har försökt utvidga modellen med nominalfraser på olika sätt. Inga av våra experiment visar på någon förbättring jämfört med den vanliga enkla modellen. Det är mycket svårt att utvärdera textklustringsresultat. Det ligger i sakens natur att vad som är en bra uppdelning av en mängd texter är subjektivt. Automatiska utvärderingsmetoder är antingen interna eller externa. Interna kvalitetsmått utnyttjar representationen på något sätt. Därför är de inte lämpliga att använda vid jämförelser av olika representationer. Externa kvalitetsmått jämför en klustring med en (manuell) kategorisering av samma mängd texter. Det teoretiska bästa värdet för måtten är kända, men vad som är ett bra värde är inte uppenbart -- mängder av texter skiljer sig åt i svårighet att klustra och kategoriseringar är mer eller mindre lämpliga för en speciell mängd texter. Vi beskriver en utvärderingsmetod som kan användas då en mängd texter har mer än en kategorisering. I sådana fall kan resultatet för en klustring jämföras med resultatet för en av kategoriseringarna, som vi antar är en bra uppdelning. Vi beskriver också kappakoefficienten som ett kvalitetsmått för klustring under samma förutsättningar. / QC 20101220

Det svenska språket ska finnas tillgängligt för alla som bor och verkar i Sverige. Därförär det viktigt att det finns lättlästa alternativ för dem som har svårighet att läsa svensktext. Detta arbete bygger vidare på att visa att det är möjligt att skapa ett automatisktomskrivningsprogram som gör texter mer lättlästa. Till grund för arbetet liggerCogFLUX som är ett verktyg för automatisk omskrivning till lätt svenska. CogFLUXinnehåller funktioner för att syntaktiskt skriva om texter till mer lättläst svenska.Omskrivningarna görs med hjälp av omskrivningsregler framtagna i ett tidigare projekt.I detta arbete implementeras ytterligare omskrivningsregler och även en ny modul förhantering av synonymer. Med dessa nya regler och modulen ska arbetet undersöka omdet är det är möjligt att skapa system som ger en mer lättläst text enligt etableradeläsbarhetsmått som LIX, OVIX och Nominalkvot. Omskrivningsreglerna ochsynonymhanteraren testas på tre olika texter med en total lägnd på ungefär hundra tusenord. Arbetet visar att det går att sänka både LIX-värdet och Nominalkvoten signifikantmed hjälp av omskrivningsregler och synonymhanterare. Arbetet visar även att det finnsfler saker kvar att göra för att framställa ett riktigt bra program för automatiskomskrivning till lätt svenska.

Språkrådet besvarar språkfrågor på internet via sin webbaserade frågelåda, men den ger inte så många svar som den skulle kunna. Jag har undersökt hur frågelådan bjuder in besökarna till dialog och hur den upprätthåller dialogen i enlighet med inbjudan. Jag har också undersökt hur den tekniska plattform som frågelådan vilar på bidrar till kommunikationen. Det visade sig att en del av frågelådans erbjudande är nästan omöjligt att ta del av på grund av tekniska och språkliga begränsningar, men också att det bör vara möjligt att med relativt enkla språkteknologiska medel minska det glapp som finns mellan frågelådan och dess sökare.

The use for a readability classification model is mainly as an integrated part of an information retrieval system. By matching the user's demands of readability to the documents with the corresponding readability, the classification model can further improve the results of, for example, a search engine. This thesis presents a new solution for classification into readability levels for Swedish. The results from the thesis are a number of classification models. The models were induced by training a Support Vector Machines classifier on features that are established by previous research as good measurements of readability. The features were extracted from a corpus annotated with three readability levels. Natural Language Processing tools for tagging and parsing were used to analyze the corpus and enable the extraction of the features from the corpus. Empirical testings of different feature combinations were performed to optimize the classification model. The classification models render a good and stable classification. The best model obtained a precision score of 90.21\% and a recall score of 89.56\% on the test-set, which is equal to a F-score of 89.88. / Uppsatsen beskriver utvecklandet av en klassificeringsmodell för Svenska texter beroende på dess läsbarhet. Användningsområdet för en läsbaretsklassificeringsmodell är främst inom informationssökningssystem. Modellen kan öka träffsäkerheten på de dokument som anses relevanta av en sökmotor genom att matcha användarens krav på läsbarhet med de indexerade dokumentens läsbarhet. Resultatet av uppsatsen är ett antal modeller för klassificering av text beroende på läsbarhet. Modellerna har tagits fram genom att träna upp en Support Vector Machines klassificerare, på ett antal särdrag som av tidigare forskning har fastslagits vara goda mått på läsbarhet. Särdragen extraherades från en korpus som är annoterad med tre läsbarhetsnivåer. Språkteknologiska verktyg för taggning och parsning användes för att möjliggöra extraktionen av särdragen. Särdragen utvärderades empiriskt i olika särdragskombinationer för att optimera modellerna. Modellerna testades och utvärderades med goda resultat. Den bästa modellen hade en precision på 90,21 och en recall på 89,56, detta ger en F-score som är 89,88. Uppsatsen presenterar förslag på vidareutveckling samt potentiella användningsområden.

As our lives become more and more digital, our exposure to certain phenomena increases, one of which is hate speech. Thus, automatic hate speech identification is needed. This thesis explores three strategies for hate speech detection for cross­-domain scenarios: using a model trained on annotated data for a previous domain, a model trained on data from a novel methodology of automatic data derivation (with cross­-domain scenarios in mind), and using ChatGPT as a domain-­agnostic classifier. Results showed that cross-­domain scenarios remain a challenge for hate speech detection, results which are discussed out of both technical and ethical considera­tions. / I takt med att våra liv blir allt mer digitala ökar vår exponering för vissa fenomen, varav ett är näthat. Därför behövs automatisk identifikation av näthat. Denna uppsats utforskar tre strategier för att upptäcka hatretorik för korsdomänscenarion: att använda inferenserna av en modell trä­nad på annoterad data för en tidigare domän, att använda inferenserna av en modell tränad på data från en ny metodologi för automatisk dataderivatisering som föreslås (för denna avhandling), samt att använda ChatGPT som klassifierare. Resultaten visade att korsdomänscenarion fort­farande utgör en utmaning för upptäckt av näthat, resultat som diskuteras utifrån både tekniska och etiska överväganden.

A selectional preference is the relation between a head-word and plausible arguments of that head-word. Estimation of the association feature between these words is important to natural language processing applications such as Word Sense Disambiguation. This study presents a novel approach to selectional preference induction within a Random Indexing word space. This is a spatial representation of meaning where distributional patterns enable estimation of the similarity between words. Using only frequency statistics about words to estimate how strongly one word selects another, the aim of this study is to develop a flexible method that is not language dependent and does not require any annotated resourceswhich is in contrast to methods from previous research. In order to optimize the performance of the selectional preference model, experiments including parameter tuning and variation of corpus size were conducted. The selectional preference model was evaluated in a pseudo-word evaluation which lets the selectional preference model decide which of two arguments have a stronger correlation to a given verb. Results show that varying parameters and corpus size does not affect the performance of the selectional preference model in a notable way. The conclusion of the study is that the language modelused does not provide the adequate tools to model selectional preferences. This might be due to a noisy representation of head-words and their arguments.

In the subject of search engine optimization, many methods exist and many aspects are important to keep in mind. This thesis studies the relation between keywords and website ranking in Google Search, and how one can create the biggest positive impact. Keywords with smaller search volume are called "long tail" keywords, and they bear the potential to expand visibility of the website to a larger crowd by increasing the rank of the website for the large fraction of keywords that might not be as common on their own, but together make up for a large amount of the total web searches. This thesis will analyze where on the web page these keywords should be placed, and a case study will be performed in which the goal is to increase the rank of a website with knowledge from previous tests in mind.

In this thesis I explore how compound processing can be used to improve phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) between English and German/Swedish. Both German and Swedish generally use closed compounds, which are written as one word without spaces or other indicators of word boundaries. Compounding is both common and productive, which makes it problematic for PBSMT, mainly due to sparse data problems. The adopted strategy for compound processing is to split compounds into their component parts before training and translation. For translation into Swedish and German the parts are merged after translation. I investigate the effect of different splitting algorithms for translation between English and German, and of different merging algorithms for German. I also apply these methods to a different language pair, English--Swedish. Overall the studies show that compound processing is useful, especially for translation from English into German or Swedish. But there are improvements for translation into English as well, such as a reduction of unknown words. I show that for translation between English and German different splitting algorithms work best for different translation directions. I also design and evaluate a novel merging algorithm based on part-of-speech matching, which outperforms previous methods for compound merging, showing the need for information that is carried through the translation process, rather than only external knowledge sources such as word lists. Most of the methods for compound processing were originally developed for German. I show that these methods can be applied to Swedish as well, with similar results.

<p>In this work, speaker characteristic modeling has been applied in the fields of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speaker verification (ASV). In ASR, a key problem is that acoustic mismatch between training and test conditions degrade classification per- formance. In this work, a child exemplifies a speaker not represented in training data and methods to reduce the spectral mismatch are devised and evaluated. To reduce the acoustic mismatch, predictive modeling based on spectral speech transformation is applied. Follow- ing this approach, a model suitable for a target speaker, not well represented in the training data, is estimated and synthesized by applying vocal tract predictive modeling (VTPM). In this thesis, the traditional static modeling on the utterance level is extended to dynamic modeling. This is accomplished by operating also on sub-utterance units, such as phonemes, phone-realizations, sub-phone realizations and sound frames.</p><p>Initial experiments shows that adaptation of an acoustic model trained on adult speech significantly reduced the word error rate of ASR for children, but not to the level of a model trained on children’s speech. Multi-speaker-group training provided an acoustic model that performed recognition for both adults and children within the same model at almost the same accuracy as speaker-group dedicated models, with no added model complexity. In the analysis of the cause of errors, body height of the child was shown to be correlated to word error rate.</p><p>A further result is that the computationally demanding iterative recognition process in standard VTLN can be replaced by synthetically extending the vocal tract length distribution in the training data. A multi-warp model is trained on the extended data and recognition is performed in a single pass. The accuracy is similar to that of the standard technique.</p><p>A concluding experiment in ASR shows that the word error rate can be reduced by ex- tending a static vocal tract length compensation parameter into a temporal parameter track. A key component to reach this improvement was provided by a novel joint two-level opti- mization process. In the process, the track was determined as a composition of a static and a dynamic component, which were simultaneously optimized on the utterance and sub- utterance level respectively. This had the principal advantage of limiting the modulation am- plitude of the track to what is realistic for an individual speaker. The recognition error rate was reduced by 10% relative compared with that of a standard utterance-specific estimation technique.</p><p>The techniques devised and evaluated can also be applied to other speaker characteristic properties, which exhibit a dynamic nature.</p><p>An excursion into ASV led to the proposal of a statistical speaker population model. The model represents an alternative approach for determining the reject/accept threshold in an ASV system instead of the commonly used direct estimation on a set of client and impos- tor utterances. This is especially valuable in applications where a low false reject or false ac- cept rate is required. In these cases, the number of errors is often too few to estimate a reli- able threshold using the direct method. The results are encouraging but need to be verified on a larger database.</p> / Pf-Star / KOBRA

<p>This licentiate thesis deals with automatic syntactic analysis, or parsing, of natural languages. A parser constructs the syntactic analysis, which it learns by looking at correctly analyzed sentences, known as training data. The general topic concerns manipulations of the training data in order to improve the parsing accuracy.</p><p>Several studies using constituency-based theories for natural languages in such automatic and data-driven syntactic parsing have shown that training data, annotated according to a linguistic theory, often needs to be adapted in various ways in order to achieve an adequate, automatic analysis. A linguistically sound constituent structure is not necessarily well-suited for learning and parsing using existing data-driven methods. Modifications to the constituency-based trees in the training data, and corresponding modifications to the parser output, have successfully been applied to increase the parser accuracy. The topic of this thesis is to investigate whether similar modifications in the form of tree transformations to training data, annotated with dependency-based structures, can improve accuracy for data-driven dependency parsers. In order to do this, two types of tree transformations are in focus in this thesis.</p><p>%This is a topic that so far has been less studied.</p><p>The first one concerns non-projectivity. The full potential of dependency parsing can only be realized if non-projective constructions are allowed, which pose a problem for projective dependency parsers. On the other hand, non-projective parsers tend, among other things, to be slower. In order to maintain the benefits of projective parsing, a tree transformation technique to recover non-projectivity while using a projective parser is presented here.</p><p>The second type of transformation concerns linguistic phenomena that are possible but hard for a parser to learn, given a certain choice of dependency analysis. This study has concentrated on two such phenomena, coordination and verb groups, for which tree transformations are applied in order to improve parsing accuracy, in case the original structure does not coincide with a structure that is easy to learn.</p><p>Empirical evaluations are performed using treebank data from various languages, and using more than one dependency parser. The results show that the benefit of these tree transformations used in preprocessing and postprocessing to a large extent is language, treebank and parser independent.</p>