VU University Amsterdam

Department Member, Faculty of Arts

research assistant, computational linguist

VU University Amsterdam

About

Research interests

Lexicology, Terminology, Semantics, Cognitive linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics.
Research

Project DutchSemCor

Most NLP applications require large sense-tagged corpora along with lexical databases to reach satisfactory results in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tasks such as machine translation, question & answering, summarization and terminology extraction. The number of English language resources have increased in the past years, the data scarceness for other languages, however, is more than obvious. The situation is similar for the Dutch language: scarceness of semantically annotated corpus material to train WSD machines. In order to overcome the data bottleneck the DutchSemCor project is aiming to deliver a one-million word Dutch corpus that is fully sense-tagged with senses and domain tags from the Cornetto lexical database. 250K examples of this corpus are being manually tagged. The remainder will be automatically tagged using three different WSD systems and will be validated by human annotators. The corpus data is based on existing corpus material collected in the projects CGN, D-CoI and SoNaR. These corpora have already been parsed and tagged in previous projects and will be extended where necessary in order to find sufficient examples for different word senses that are less frequent and do not appear in the above corpora. When writing this essay, our project is in a preliminary phase, we have currently begun with the annotation of our corpus material for Dutch nouns.

Project Dutch Terminology Service Centre

The Dutch Terminology Service Centre (Steunpunt Nederlandstalige Terminologie) was founded in 2007 by the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), a Dutch-Flemish government institution. It functions as a non-commercial information center for all aspects of terminology and serves the entire Dutch-speaking community. We give advice on terminology research to anyone who is involved in terminology-related work (companies, organisations, translators, terminologists, teachers, scientists etc). Our organisation also maintains the website NedTerm (www.nedterm.org). NedTerm provides information on terminology activities and also includes a bibliography of terminological works, an overview of terminology training courses in the Netherlands and in Flanders, and information on standardisation issues. We are particularly keen on providing practical information on and links to on-line resources (terminological databases, information platforms) as well as promoting various language tools (esp. open source) which can be used for terminology work. We also organize terminology trainings and workshops for translators as well as master classes for scientists and language experts. Apart from organizing in-depth study days, we are also offering practical solutions to our targeted group. An example is the development of web courses for terminology management. The courses ad hoc terminology and systematic terminology management are both aimed at translators, translation agencies, terminologists, language professionals and master students and are available for free download on our website or can be consulted on-line.

International activities

Invited speaker on “Is there anything more we can do? A collaboration plan for Terminology Service Centres (TSCs) in Europe and beyond” at the 5th Terminology Summit, 12 November 2010, Budapest, Hungary.

Presentation on “DutchSemCor: from SoNaR to WSD” at the Stevin-day, 14 October 2010, Antwerp, Belgium.

Poster presentation on “Introducing the Dutch Terminology Service Centre: a centre of expertise on practical terminology work” at the 14th Euralex International Congress, 6-10 July 2010, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

Invited speaker on “Tools and Methods for Terminology Research” at the Symposium and Workshop “Terminology for Europeans and beyond”, 5-6 July, 2010, Euralex 2010, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

Poster presentation on “Computer assisted semantic annotation in the DutchSemCor project” at LREC, 19-21 May 2010, Valletta, Malta.

Invited speaker on “Web course Ad-hoc Terminology” at the 2nd Workshop Terminology for Translators, 3 April 2009, Antwerpen, Belgium.

Poster presentation on “Description of Terms from Cognitive Psychology: Work Method.” at the Conference Terminology, Computing and Translation, March 2004, Swansea, UK.
Scholarships and prizes

Other academic activities
Co-organizer of the 3rd TiNT day (Terminology in the Netherlands and Flanders), 9 December 2011, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Co-organizer of the 2nd TiNT day (Terminology in the Netherlands and Flanders), 5 December 2010, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Co-organizer of the Symposium and Workshop “Terminology for Europeans and beyond”, 5-6 July, 2010, Euralex 2010, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

Co-organizer of the 1st TiNT day (Terminology in the Netherlands and Flanders),11 December 2009, Antwerp, the Belgium.

Co-organizer of the 1st Workshop “Terminology for Translators”, 3 April 2009, Antwerpen, Belgium.

Co-organizer of the 2nd Workshop “Terminology for Translators”, 12 December 2008, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Publications

Vossen P., Görög, A., Laan, F., Van Gompel, M. (2012). Optimizing WSD through Active Learning. In: Proceedings of the Eighth conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), Istanbul, Turkey.

Vossen P., Görög, A., Laan, F., Van Gompel, M. (2011). DutchSemCor: building a semantically annotated corpus for Dutch. In: Proceedings of Electronic Lexicography in the 21st century: New Applications for new users (eLEX2011), Bled, Slovenia, November 10-12, 2011

Görög, A. and Van der Vliet, H. (2010). Introducing the Dutch Terminology Service Centre: a centre of expertise on practical terminology work. In: Proceedings of the 14th Euralex International Congress, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

Görög, A. and Vossen, P. (2010). Computer Assisted Semantic Annotation in the DutchSemCor Project. In:Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10),Valletta, Malta.

Görög, A. (2006). Description of Terms from Cognitive Psychology: Work Method. In: Terminology, Computing and Translation,Tübingen: Narr.

Contact Information