Complex Word Identification (CWI) is a task of identifying complex words in text data and it is often viewed as a subtask of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) where the main task is making a complex text simpler. The ways in which a text should be simplified depend on the target readers such as second language learners or people with reading disabilities. In this thesis, we focus on Complex Word Identification for Swedish. First, in addition to exploring existing resources, we collect a new dataset for Swedish CWI. We continue by building several classifiers of Swedish simple and complex words. We then use the findings to analyze the characteristics of lexical complexity in Swedish and English. Our method for collecting training data based on second language learning material has shown positive evaluation scores and resulted in a new dataset for Swedish CWI. Additionally, the built complex word classifiers have an accuracy at least as good as similar systems for English. Finally, the analysis of the selected features confirms the findings of previous studies and reveals some interesting characteristics of lexical complexity.

Coreference is an important and frequent concept in any form of discourse, and Coreference Resolution (CR) a widely used task in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). In this thesis, we implement and explore two recent models that include the concept of coreference in Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based Language Models (LM). Entity and reference decisions are modeled explicitly in these models using attention mechanisms. Both models learn to save the previously observed entities in a set and to decide if the next token created by the LM is a mention of one of the entities in the set, an entity that has not been observed yet, or not an entity. After a theoretical analysis where we compare the two LMs to each other and to a state of the art Coreference Resolution system, we perform an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis. For this purpose, we train the two models and a classical RNN-LM as the baseline model on the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus with coreference annotation. While we do not reach the baseline in the perplexity metric, we show that the models’ relative performance on entity tokens has the potential to improve when including the explicit entity modeling. We show that the most challenging point in the systems is the decision if the next token is an entity token, while the decision which entity the next token refers to performs comparatively well. Our analysis in the context of a text generation task shows that a wide-spread error source for the mention creation process is the confusion of tokens that refer to related but different entities in the real world, presumably a result of the context-based word representations in the models. Our re-implementation of the DeepMind model by Yang et al. 2016 performs notably better than the re-implementation of the EntityNLM model by Ji et al. 2017 with a perplexity of 107 compared to a perplexity of 131.

In order to achieve state-of-the-art performance for part-of-speech(POS) tagging, the traditional systems require a significant amount of hand-crafted features and data pre-processing. In this thesis, we present a discriminative word embedding, character embedding and byte pair encoding (BPE) hybrid neural network architecture to implement a true end-to-end system without feature engineering and data pre-processing. The neural network architecture is a combination of bidirectional LSTM, CNNs, and CRF, which can achieve a state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of sequence labeling tasks. We evaluate our model on Universal Dependencies (UD) dataset for English, Spanish, and German POS tagging. It outperforms other models with 95.1%, 98.15%, and 93.43% accuracy on testing datasets respectively. Moreover, the largest improvements of our model appear on out-of-vocabulary corpora for Spanish and German. According to statistical significance testing, the improvements of English on testing and out-of-vocabulary corpora are not statistically significant. However, the improvements of the other more morphological languages are statistically significant on their corresponding corpora.

This thesis explores the foundations of text classification, using both empirical and deductive methods, with a focus on author identification and syntactic methods. We strive for a thorough theoretical understanding of what affects the effectiveness of classification in general.  To begin with, we systematically investigate the effects of some parameters on the accuracy of author identification. How is the accuracy affected by the number of candidate authors, and the amount of data per candidate? Are there differences in how methods react to the changes in parameters? Using the same techniques, we see indications that methods previously thought to be topic-independent might not be so, but that syntactic methods may be the best option for avoiding topic dependence. This means that previous studies may have overestimated the power of lexical methods. We also briefly look for ways of spotting which particular features might be the most effective for classification. Apart from author identification, we apply similar methods to identifying properties of the author, including age and gender, and attempt to estimate the number of distinct authors in a text sample. In all cases, the techniques are proven viable if not overwhelmingly accurate, and we see that lexical and syntactic methods give very similar results.  In the final parts, we see some results of automata theory that can be of use for syntactic analysis and classification. First, we generalise a known algorithm for finding a list of the best-ranked strings according to a weighted automaton, to doing the same with trees and a tree automaton. This result can be of use for speeding up parsing, which often runs in several steps, where each step needs several trees from the previous as input. Second, we use a compressed version of deterministic finite automata, known as failure automata, and prove that finding the optimal compression is NP-complete, but that there are efficient algorithms for finding good approximations. Third, we find and prove the derivatives of regular expressions with cuts. Derivatives are an operation on expressions to calculate the remaining expression after reading a given symbol, and cuts are an extension to regular expressions found in many programming languages. Together, these findings may be able to improve on the syntactic analysis which we have seen is a valuable tool for text classification.

Adding semantic analysis in the process of comparing news articles enables a deeper level of analysis than traditional keyword matching. In this bachelor’s thesis, we have compared, implemented, and evaluated three commonly used approaches for document-level similarity. The three similarity measurement selected were, keyword matching, TF-IDF vector distance, and Latent Semantic Indexing. Each method was evaluated on a coherent set of news articles where the majority of the articles were written about Donald Trump and the American election the 9th of November 2016, there were several control articles, about random topics, in the set of articles. TF-IDF vector distance combined with Cosine similarity and Latent Semantic Indexing gave the best results on the set of articles by separating the control articles from the Trump articles. Keyword matching and TF-IDF distance using Euclidean distance did not separate the Trump articles from the control articles. We implemented and performed sentiment analysis on the set of news articles in the classes positive, negative and neutral and then validated them against human readers classifying the articles. With the sentiment analysis (positive, negative, and neutral) implementation, we got a high correlation with human readers (100%).

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of computationally identifying and labeling poly- semous words in context with their correct meaning, known as a sense. WSD is riddled with various obstacles that must be overcome in order to reach its full potential. One of these problems is the aspect of the representation of word meaning. Traditional WSD algorithms make the assumption that a word in a given context has only one meaning and therfore can return only one discrete sense. On the other hand, a novel approach is that a given word can have multiple senses. Studies on graded word sense assignment (Erk et al., 2009) as well as in cognitive science (Hampton, 2007; Murphy, 2002) support this theory. It has therefore been adopted in a novel, paraphrasing system which performs word sense disambiguation by returning a probability distribution over potential paraphrases (in this case synonyms) of a given word. However, it is unknown how well this type of algorithm fares against the traditional one. The current study thus examines if and how it is possible to make a comparison of the two. A method of comparison is evaluated and subsequently rejected. Reasons for this as well as suggestions for a fair and accurate comparison are presented.

This study describes the English verb ’consider’ and the characteristics of some of its senses. An investigation of this kind may be useful, since a machine translation program, SYSTRAN, has invariably translated ’consider’ with the Swedish verbs ’betrakta’ (Eng: ’view’, regard’) and ’anse’ (Eng: ’regard’). This handling of ’consider’ is not satisfactory in all contexts. Since ’consider’ is a cogitative verb, it is fascinating to observe that both the theory of semantic primes and universals and conceptual semantics are concerned with cogitation in various ways. Anna Wierzbicka, who is one of the advocates of semantic primes and universals, argues that THINK should be considered as a semantic prime. Moreover, one of the prime issues of conceptual semantics is to describe how thoughts are constructed by virtue of e.g. linguistic components, perception and experience. In order to define and clarify the distinctions between the different senses, we have taken advantage of the theory of mental spaces. This thesis has been structured in accordance with the meanings that have been indicated in WordNet as to ’consider’. As a consequence, the senses that ’consider’ represents have been organized to form the subsequent groups: ’Observation’, ’Opinion’ together with its sub-group ’Likelihood’ and ’Cogitation’ followed by its sub-group ’Attention/Consideration’. A concordance tool, http://www.nla.se/culler, provided us with 90 literary quotations that were collected in a corpus. Afterwards, these citations were distributed between the groups mentioned above and translated into Swedish by SYSTRAN. Furthermore, the meanings as to ’consider’ have also been related to the senses, recorded by the FrameNet scholars. Here, ’consider’ is regarded as a verb of ’Cogitation’ and ’Categorization’. When this study was accomplished, it could be inferred that certain senses are connected to specific syntactic constructions. In other cases, however, the distinctions between various meanings can only be explained by virtue of semantics. To conclude, it appears to be likely that an implementation is facilitated if a specific syntactic construction can be tied to a particular sense. This may be the case concerning some meanings of ’consider’. Machine translation is presumably a much more laborious task, if one is solely governed by semantic conditions.

This study evaluates methods for clustering web users via vector space models, for the purpose of web page prefetching for possible applications of server optimization. An experiment using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is deployed to investigate whether LSA can reproduce the encouraging results obtained from previous research with Random Indexing (RI) and a chaos based optimization algorithm (CAS-C). This is not only motivated by LSA being yet another vector space model, but also by a study indicating LSA to outperform RI in a task similar to the web user clustering and prefetching task. The prefetching task was used to verify the applicability of LSA, where both RI and CAS-C have shown promising results. The original data set from the RI web user clustering and prefetching task was modeled using weighted (tf-idf) LSA. Clusters were defined using a common clustering algorithm (k-means). The least scattered cluster configuration for the model was identified by combining an internal validity measure (SSE) and a relative criterion validity measure (SD index). The assumed optimal cluster configuration was used for the web page prefetching task.   Precision and recall of the LSA based method is found to be on par with RI and CAS-C, in as much that it solves the web user clustering and web task with similar characteristics as unweighted RI. The hypothesized inherent gains to precision and recall by using LSA was neither confirmed nor conclusively disproved. The effects of different weighting functions for RI are discussed and a number of methodological factors are identified for further research concerning LSA based clustering and prefetching.

This thesis explores the possibility of assessing the degree of readability of writtenSwedish using machine learning. An application using four levels of linguistic analysishas been implemented and tested with four different established algorithmsfor machine learning. The new approach has then been compared to establishedreadability metrics for Swedish. The results indicate that the new method workssignificantly better for readability classification of both sentences and documents.The system has also been tested with so called soft classification which returns aprobability for the degree of readability of a given text. This probability can thenbe used to rank texts according to probable degree of readability. / Detta examensarbete utforskar möjligheterna att bedöma svenska texters läsbarhet med hjälp av maskininlärning. Ett system som använder fyra nivåer av lingvistisk analys har implementerats och testats med fyra olika etablerade algoritmer för maskininlärning. Det nya angreppssättet har sedan jämförts med etablerade läsbarhetsmått för svenska. Resultaten visar att den nya metoden fungerar markant bättre för läsbarhetsklassning av både meningar och hela dokument. Systemet har också testats med så kallad mjuk klassificering som ger ett sannolikhetsvärde för en given texts läsbarhetsgrad. Detta sannolikhetsvärde kan användas för rangordna texter baserad på sannolik läsbarhetsgrad.

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. 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. %This is a topic that so far has been less studied. 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. 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. 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.