Word-Level Alignment of Paper Documents with their Electronic Full-Text Counterparts

We describe a simple procedure for the automatic creation of word-level alignments between printed documents and their respective full-text versions. The procedure is unsupervised, uses standard, off-the-shelf components only, and reaches an F-score of 85.01 in the basic setup and up to 86.63 when using pre- and post-processing. Potential areas of application are manual database curation (incl. document triage) and biomedical expression OCR.

Semantic Matching of Documents from Heterogeneous Collections: A Simple and Transparent Method for Practical Applications

We present a very simple, unsupervised method for the pairwise matching of documents from heterogeneous collections. We demonstrate our method with the Concept-Project matching task, which is a binary classification task involving pairs of documents from heterogeneous collections. Although our method only employs standard resources without any domain- or task-specific modifications, it clearly outperforms the more complex system of the original authors. In addition, our method is transparent, because it provides explicit information about how a similarity score was computed, and efficient, because it is based on the aggregation of (pre-computable) word-level similarities.

Transparent, Efficient, and Robust Word Embedding Access with WOMBAT

We present WOMBAT, a Python tool which supports NLP practitioners in accessing word embeddings from code. WOMBAT addresses common research problems, including unified access, scaling, and robust and reproducible preprocessing. Code that uses WOMBAT for accessing word embeddings is not only cleaner, more readable, and easier to reuse, but also much more efficient than code using standard in-memory methods: a Python script using WOMBAT for evaluating seven large word embedding collections (8.7M embedding vectors in total) on a simple SemEval sentence similarity task involving 250 raw sentence pairs completes in under ten seconds end-to-end on a standard notebook computer.