Marina Santini - Automatic Genre Identification (AGI)

Marina Santini: Genre, Web Pages, Automatic Classification -- Research 2007-2010

Last Updated: May 2010 (this website is still under construction) Contact Me Visit me Previous home page (2003-2006) My CV Previous Teaching Experience: * Introduction to Computational Linguistics * Introduction to Corpus Linguistics Facebook, Sweden	Research Statement It is easy nowadays to collect large digital document collections in many different languages, but when these collections are not classified by any textual categories, their usefulness is seriously diminished, thus causing a waste of resources and loss of information. Documents can be classified into topical and non-topical text categories, that I call descriptors. Examples of topical descriptors are topic, content, subject matter or domain. Examples of non-topical descriptors are genre, register, style, sentiment/opinion, readability and vulgarisation, or layout structure (e.g. tables or lists). My current research interests focus on *automatic classification of web documents by non-topical descriptors. Combined with topical descriptors, non-topical descriptors can help profile documents in a more realistic, accurate and productive way. For this reason, they would be of great advantage for all the fields where language variation is important, and especially for research areas where language technology can be enhanced or refined by a more fine-grained document typology, e.g. corpus linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), automatic summarization, machine translation and information retrieval/extraction. Unfortunately, annotating documents by non-topical descriptors is not always an easy task. Like any manual annotation, also the annotation of documents by non-topical descriptors is time-consuming, controversial and prone to error, because human annotators get easily tired or confused by this tedious task. The automation of this activity would be a great advantage to avoid some of the predictable pitfalls associated with it. However, there are no large and agreed upon evaluation resources to test the efficiency and the performance of the automatic classification of many non-topical descriptors. My research goal is to create evaluation resources for genre and other non-topical descriptors. Another research goal* is to apply and evaluate supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised classification methods, as well as other statistical approaches to provide large unannotated corpora with non-topical descriptors. The ultimate goal is to propose methods to improve the overall classification performance and shed light into the relations among different descriptors. To date, the interaction and correlation among non-topical descriptors, and between topical and non-topical descriptors are still underexplored.
Practical Activities	Agile Web Development course at KYH GeoTimes project at About Time AB ** Teaching Italian as Foreign Language in Stockholm (Italiano con diletto)
Academic Activities 2010	The WebRider Project -- Work in progress. Mehler A., Sharoff S. and Santini M. (eds) (2010). Genres on the web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies. Springer Series: Text, Speech and Language Technology (Series Editors:Ide, Nancy, Véronis, Jean). Identificazione automatica dei generi testuali sul web: Stato dell’arte. Tavola Rotonda PAISA’ – CiC, Universita’ di Bologna, 9 aprile 2010.
Editorial and Organizational Activities 2009 Coordinator and co-editor with Alexander Mehler and Serge Sharoff of the forthcoming book “Genres on the Web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies”. Springer. Coordinator and co-editor with Georg Rehm, Serge Sharoff and Alexander Mehler of the Special Issue on Genre on the Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL), Volume 24, Number 1, 2009. 2008 Co-editor with Georg Rehm, Alexander Mehler and Serge Sharoff of the WebGenreWiki, <http://purl.org/net/webgenres>. 2007 Co-organizer and co-chair with Serge Sharoff of the Colloquium "Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres" (Friday, 27 July 2007) held in conjunction with Corpus Linguistics 2007, Birmingham, UK (http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/webgenres/colloquium/). Co-organizer and co-chair with Georg Rehm: Workshop "Towards Genre-Enabled Search Engines: The Impact of NLP" (Sunday, 30 Sept. 2007) held in conjunction with RANLP, Borovets, Bulgaria (http://www.sics.se/use/genre-ws/).	Talks 2009 Santini M. (2009). "Making sense of different genre taxonomies". Automated Document Genre Classification Workshop: Supporting Digital Curation, Information Retrieval, and Knowledge Extraction, 9 September 2009, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. 2008 Santini M. (2008). State of the Art in Automatic Genre Classification: Where do we go from here?. Seminar, Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/research/groups/oneevent.cfm?eventid=2559. Publications Forthcoming Santini M., Sharoff S. and Mehler A. "Riding the Rough Waves of the Web", Introduction. In Mehler A., Sharoff S and Santini M. (eds.), Genres on the web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies, Springer. Santini M. "Cross-testing a Genre Classification Model for the Web". In Mehler A., Sharoff S and Santini M. (eds.), Genres on the web: Computational Models and Empirical Studies, Springer. Santini M. and Sharoff S. "Web Genre Benchmark Under Construction". Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL) 2009, volume 25, number 1 -- Special Issue: Automatic Genre Identification: Issues, and Prospects", (http://ldv-forum.org/2009_Heft1/07Marina_Santini_and_Serge_Sharoff.pdf). Santini M., Rehm G., Sharoff S. and Mehler A. *Editorial* of the Special Issue: Automatic Genre Identification: Issues, and Prospects" (http://ldv-forum.org/2009_Heft1/Editorial.pdf) Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL) 2009, volume 25, number 1. Santini M. Classifying web genres automatically. Chapter in the book: Genre theory and new literacies. Applications to autonomous language learning, Springer. 2008 Santini M. (2008). Cross-testing a Genre Classification Model. The second Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC-008). November 20 - 21, 2008, Stockholm. Poster Paper. Proceedings. Santini M. and Rosso M. (2008). “Testing a Genre-Enabled Application: A Preliminary Assessment”, Proceedings of Future Direction in Information Access (FDIA-2008), BCS, London. Rehm G., Santini M., Mehler M., Braslavski P., Gleim R., Stubbe A., Symonenko S., Tavosanis M. and Vidulin V. (2008). “Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres for the Evaluation of Genre Identification Systems”, LREC 2008. Marrakech. Santini M. (2008). State of the Art in Automatic Genre Classification: Where do we go from here?. Talk. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/research/groups/oneevent.cfm?eventid=2559>. Santini M. (2008).“WebGenre and NLP: Identification of genres on the web through the processing of natural language. Position Paper. Processing Text-technological Resources Conference”, Bielefeld University, Germany. <http://coli.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Texttechnologie/Forschergruppe/PTTR/abstracts/Abstract-Santini.pdf>. Santini M. (2008). “Zero, Single, or Multi? Genres of Web Pages through the Users' Perspective”. Information Processing & Management. Volume 44, Issue 2, March 2008, pp. 702–737. 2007 Rehm G. and Santini M. (eds.) (2007). “Proceedings of the International Workshop Towards Genre-Enabled Search Engines: The Impact of NLP” (http://www.sics.se/use/genre-ws/RANLP-Genre-Workshop-Rehm-Santini_final.pdf). Santini M. (ed.) (2007). “Abstracts - Proceedings of the Colloquium Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres” (http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/webgenres/colloquium/Proceedings.pdf). Généreux M. and Santini M. (2007). Exploring the use of Linguistic Features in Sentiment Analysis. Corpus Linguistics 2007 - 27-30 July 2007, Birmingham. http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Michel.Genereux/CL2007.pdf Généreux M. and Santini M. (2007). Défi: Classification de Textes Français Subjectifs. 3ème DÉfi Fouille de Textes - 3rd July 2007, Grenoble. http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Michel.Genereux/deft2007-equipe3.pdf Santini M. (2007). “Characterizing Genres of Web Pages: Genre Hybridism and Individualization”. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Hawaii (USA).
Book Reviews	Review: Bateman J. Multimodal Documents and Genre LINGUIST List 21.1606 Fri April 02 2010 Review: Heyd T. (2008). Email Hoaxes - Form, Function, Genre Ecology LINGUIST List 21.75, Thu Jan 07 2010 Review: Hundt, Nesselhauf and Biewer (eds, 2006) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Corpora. Volume 4, Page 209-211 Review: Discourse on the move by D. Biber, U. Connor and T. Upton, Computational Linguistics, March 2009, Vol. 35, No. 1, Pages 105-107. Review:Bruce I. (2008). Academic Writing and Genre. A Systematic Analysis LINGUIST List 19.3079, Fri Oct 10 2008
Resources	WEBGENREWIKI: http://purl.org/net/webgenres
Other Interests and Hobbies	Guiding in Stockholm (Baltic Cruise Guide) Teaching Italian as Foreing Language at Folkuniversitet, Stockholm, www.folkuniversitetet.se/stockholm) and at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Stockholm (http://www.iicbelgrado.esteri.it/IIC_Stoccolma/Menu/Imparare_Italiano/I_corsi_di_lingua/Docenti_e_testi/) Conversazioni letterarie (Folkuniversitet, Stockholm): http://www.folkuniversitetet.se/templates/Arr.aspx?id=171650&LeftMenuPageId=111144
email Contacts	MarinaSantini.MS-->--gmail.com MarinaRomeStockholm-->--gmail.com marina.santini-->--folkuniversitetet.se marina.santini-->--student.kyh.se