UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS)
UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS)
English Semantic Tagger
The UCREL semantic analysis system is a framework for undertaking
the automatic semantic analysis of text. The framework has been designed
and used across a number of research projects and this page collects
together various pointers to those projects and publications produced
since 1990.
The semantic tagset used by USAS was originally loosely based on Tom McArthur's Longman
Lexicon of Contemporary English
(McArthur, 1981).
It has a multi-tier structure with 21 major discourse fields (shown here on the right), subdivided,
and with the possibility of further fine-grained subdivision in
certain cases. We have written an
(PDF file)
with examples of prototypical words and multi-word units in each semantic field.
The full tagset is available on-line in
We also have a list of the .
You can also see the USAS semantic tagset in Russian as a
For other languages, see below.
showing the USAS tagset heirarchy is
now on-line, along with those for the
You can try out the .
Multilingual extension of Semantic Tagger Framework for other languages
Beginning in 2013, the USAS framework is being extended to cover many more languages including: Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Malay.
The Java software framework developed in the Benedict and ASSIST projects has been
modified to accommodate these languages, and semantic lexicons are compiled for them by automatically "translating" the English semantic
lexicon entries, with some manual improvement where possible. Due to the inevitable ambiguity of translations and part-of-speech
correspondence across and between languages, the automatically translated lexicons contain errors, which need to be cleared manually.
website interface is provided for users to test the semantic taggers. This is a beta release of the tools, which will be improved in future.
Please get in touch with
if you would like to be involved in further improvements of the tools.
In order to reference this further development of the multilingual USAS tagger, please cite our paper at NAACL-HLT 2015
which describes the initial bootstrapping method for six languages (Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Malay):
Piao, S., Bianchi, F., Dayrell, C., D'Egidio, A. and Rayson, P. (2015).
Development of the multilingual semantic annotation system.
In proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies
(NAACL HLT 2015), Denver, Colorado, United States, pp. .
(Poster: )
In 2015/16, we extended this work to cover twelve languages, as reported in the LREC 2016 paper:
Scott Piao, Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer, Francesca Bianchi, Carmen Dayrell, Mahmoud El-Haj, Ricardo-Mar&a Jim&nez,
Dawn Knight, Michal Kren, Laura L&fberg, Rao Muhammad Adeel Nawab, Jawad Shafi, Phoey Lee Teh and Olga Mudraya. (2016)
Lexical Coverage Evaluation of Large-scale Multilingual Semantic Lexicons for Twelve Languages.
In , Portoroz, Slovenia, pp. .
The lexical resources and other files can be downloaded from our GitHub repository .
The links below will be updated less often than the Github repository, so please use that for the latest versions.
Chinese Semantic Tagger ()
The Chinese semantic tagger has been developed by incorporating the
into the USAS Java framework.
The Chinese semantic lexicons have been automatically generated by translating the English semantic lexicons entries using a Chinese-English
Dictionary
and a LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) .
Due to the different Chinese POS tags used in the Stanford Chinese POS tagger and Xiao et al.'s dictionary, their POS tags are mapped
to be used internally by the software system. The Chinese lexicon also employs a set of
designed by
. The full tagset is available in Chinese
We are grateful for the assistance of
(Lancaster University, UK)
and Qian Yufang (Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, China) with this research.
Currently the Chinese single word and multi-word unit semantic lexicons contain over 64,000 and over 19,000 entries
respectively. As automatically generated lexicons, they contain errors.
The Chinese lexicons can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
This work is licensed under a .
Dutch Semantic Tagger ()
The Dutch semantic tagger has been developed using a similar process to that of the
Italian semantic tagger, using the Dutch version of TreeTagger. The Dutch lexicon has been compiled by translating the English semantic lexicon
entries using a Dutch-English dictionary developed by
As the Dictionary and TreeTagger use different POS tagsets,
they are both mapped into a
to be used by the software system. Currently Dutch semantic single
word lexicon contains 4,203 entries.
We are grateful for the assistance of Dr. Carole Tiberius (INL, Netherlands) with this research.
The Dutch lexicon can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
(b) The Dutch multiword lexicon is not available yet.
This work is licensed under a .
Finnish Semantic Tagger
In the Benedict project, we developed the Finnish Semantic Tagger as the first non-English tagger.
Laura L&fberg has continued to update the semantic lexical resources during and after her Ph.D. at
Lancaster University. Laura's final PhD thesis (2017) is also available and describes the process of designing, creating, and evaluating the Finnish lexicons:
The Finnish semantic lexicon can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
This work is licensed under a .
French Semantic Tagger
The French semantic tagger itself is under development, and we have
translated the .
The French tagger is being developed in collaboration with
Michael Gauthier (Universit& Lumi&re Lyon 2, France),
Emilie L'H&te (Paris Diderot University, France),
Julien Perrez, Pauline Heyvaert (Universit& de Li&ge, Belgium),
Min Reuchamps (Universit& catholique de Louvain, Belgium),
Verena Weiland (Heidelberg, Germany).
The French semantic lexicon can be accessed here (download as UTF-8): (a)
This work is licensed under a .
Italian Semantic Tagger ()
The Italian semantic tagger is being developed in collaboration with Dr Francesca Bianchi (Dip. di Studi Umanistici, Universita del
Salento, Italy) and Prof. Elena Semino (Dept. of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK). The original Java software
framework has been modified by incorporating the .
The English semantic lexicon entries have been automatically translated into Italian counterparts using
and other English-Italian Dictionaries with the help of Italian native
speakers. Although some lexicon entries were manually checked, most of the entries were automatically generated and therefore they
inevitably contain errors, which need to be cleared manually in future.
The full tagset is available in Italian
Currently, there are two Italian semantic lexicons: single word
lexicon (over 20,400 entries) and multi-word lexicon (over 4,100 entries which were manually checked).
The Italian lexicons can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
This work is licensed under a .
Malay Semantic Tagger
Via a small grant between Lancaster University and Sunway University, we are developing a Malay Semantic Tagger.
A lexicon has been created and reported in the LREC2016 paper above.
Thanks to Phoey Lee Teh, a
is available.
Portuguese Semantic Tagger ()
The Portuguese semantic tagger is being developed using a similar process to that of the Italian semantic tagger, using the
Portuguese TreeTagger. The Portuguese lexicons have been compiled by translating the English semantic lexicon entries using a
Portuguese-English dictionary developed by Davies and Preto-Bay (2007) and FreeLang Portuguese-English bilingual lexicon.
small section of the lexicons were manually checked, but most of the lexicon entries were automatically generated and
therefore contain errors, which need to be cleared manually in the future. As the POS tagger and lexical resources use
different POS tagsets, these tagsets are mapped into
to be used by the software. Currently, there are
two Portuguese semantic lexicons: single word lexicon (over 13,900 entries) and multi-word lexicon (over 1,780 entries). The
Portuguese lexicons are being created with the help of Carmen Dayrell (CASS, Lancaster University, UK).
These lexicons can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
This work is licensed under a .
Spanish Semantic Tagger ()
The Spanish semantic tagger is in an early stage of development, following a similar process to that of the Italian semantic
tagger, using the Spanish TreeTagger. Currently Spanish tagger has a single-word semantic lexicon compiled by
translating the English semantic lexicon entries using a Spanish-English dictionary compiled by Mark Davies (2006). Initially generated
by an automatic process, the lexicon contains errors and it requires further cleaning manually in the future. Because the POS tagger and
the dictionary employ different POS tagset, these tagsets are mapped into a
to be used by the software.
The Spanish lexicon is being created in collaboration with
Ricardo-Mar&a Jim&nez, faculty member of UICbarcelona (Universitat Internacional de Catalu&a, Barcelona, Spain).
PhD student Hugo Sanjurjo Gonz&lez (University of Le&n, Spain) also contributed to editing of new lexicon entries while he was a visitor to
Lancaster University in 2016.
During his visit to Lancaster in 2017, PhD student Carlos Herrero Zorita (Autonomous University of Madrid) contributed the first version of the MWE list and added a large number of entries to the single word list including modals and named entities.
The Spanish semantic lexicons can be accessed here (download as UTF-8): (a)
This work is licensed under a .
Swedish Semantic Tagger
The Swedish semantic tagger is under development, and Lisa Sj&sten has
translated the .
The Swedish tagger is being developed in collaboration with
Anna Gustafsson and Johan Frid (Lund University, Sweden).
This work is licensed under a .
Turkish Semantic Tagger
The Turkish semantic tagger itself has not been developed yet, but we have
a translation of the .
The translation was carried out by Duygu Candarli from Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester.
This work is licensed under a .
Urdu Semantic Tagger
The Urdu semantic tagger is under development by Jawad Shafi, a PhD student at Lancaster University from
The Urdu semantic lexicon can be accessed here (download as UTF-8):
and there is a mapping between the
Welsh Semantic Tagger
The Welsh semantic tagger is under development in the
project, and so far we have
a translation of the .
The translation was carried out by colleagues on the CorCenCC project.
This work is licensed under a .
Funded projects
The software and linguistic resources underpinning the semantic analysis
have been designed and produced during five projects:
(CorCenCC)
The ACASD and ACAMRIT projects led to the initial design and implementation
of the tools and applied them in the area of interview transcripts.
The REVERE project applied the tools in the domain of software engineering
documentation using a web front end called .
In Benedict, we have re-implemented the English semantic tagging (EST) tool in Java,
and improved the linguistic resources in the tool. In addition we developed a
Finnish Semantic Tagging (FST) tool.
In the ASSIST project, we extended the existing USAS framework to construct
a Russian Semantic Tagger (RST). In 2013, the
funded initial development of the
Italian, Dutch and Chinese lexicons.
In 2015, a Lancaster University - Sunway University small grant funded the development
of the Malay semantic tagger. Starting in 2016, with funding from the CorCenCC project, we are
undertaking the development of the Welsh semantic tagger.
Andrew Wilson
was the RA in Linguistics on the first two projects
was the RA in Computing on all five projects.
Dawn Archer were the RAs on the Benedict project.
Olga Mudraya was the RA
in Linguistics and Scott Piao
was the Computing RA on the Assist project.
is the Computing RA on the initial development of the Italian, Dutch, Chinese and other taggers and on the CorCenCC project.
The grant holders and supervisors were
(Computing),
(Linguistics)
(Linguistics, now at Bangor).
was the principal investigator for Benedict.
For ASSIST,
were the grant holders.
Availability
The English version of the USAS framework can be accessed in the web-based corpus
The Russian lexicon and MWE list are available for download here. Future updates will also be released here.
We provide a
containing
three files: a single word lexicon, a proper name lexicon and a MWE lexicon.
The current versions (14th December 2006) contain 13,153 single words,
4,444 proper names, and 713 MWE templates.
For each word in the files, we include a part-of-speech tag based on the
tagset for Russian
and a list of possible semantic tags, all of which have been manually checked.
For more details about the Russian resources, see Mudraya et al (2006).
These Russian lexical resources are licensed under a .
The Italian, Chinese and Dutch resources are available and linked above.
Publications describing the system (or extensions of the system)
Wilson, A. and Rayson, P. (1993).
Automatic Content Analysis of Spoken Discourse.
In: C. Souter and E. Atwell (eds), Corpus Based Computational Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp215-226
Wilson, A. (1993).
Towards an Integration of Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis: The
Automatic Linkage of Key Relations in Text.
UCREL Technical Paper 3, Linguistics Department, Lancaster University.
Rayson, P., and Wilson, A. (1996).
The ACAMRIT semantic tagging system: progress report.
In L. J. Evett, and T. G. Rose (eds)
Language Engineering for Document Analysis and Recognition,
LEDAR, AISB96
Workshop proceedings, pp 13-20. Brighton, England.
Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Nottingham Trent University, UK.
ISBN 0 905 488628
Wilson, A. and Thomas, J.A. (1997) Semantic annotation,
in Garside, R., Leech, G., and McEnery, A. (eds.)
Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora.
Longman, London, pp. 53-65.
Garside, R., and Rayson, P. (1997).
Higher-level annotation tools.
In. R. Garside, G. Leech, and A. McEnery (eds.)
Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora.
Longman, London. pp 179 - 193.
Paul Rayson (2002).
USAS: UCREL semantic analysis system.
Invited talk at , Tokyo, Japan.
February 2002.
Dawn Archer, Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson (2002).
Introduction to the USAS category system.
Benedict project report, October 2002.
Dawn Archer, Tony McEnery, Paul Rayson, Andrew Hardie (2003).
Developing an automated semantic analysis system for Early Modern English.
Dawn Archer, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson and Tony McEnery (eds.)
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL technical paper
number 16. UCREL, Lancaster University, pp. 22 - 31.
Laura L&fberg, Dawn Archer, Scott Piao, Paul Rayson, Tony McEnery,
Krista Varantola, Jukka-Pekka Juntunen (2003).
Porting an English semantic tagger to the Finnish language.
Dawn Archer, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson and Tony McEnery (eds.)
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL technical paper
number 16. UCREL, Lancaster University, pp. 457 - 464.
Scott S. L. Piao, Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer, Andrew Wilson and Tony McEnery (2003).
Extracting Multiword Expressions with a Semantic Tagger.
In proceedings of the ,
41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
Sapporo, Japan, July 12, 2003,
pp. 49-56.
Piao, Scott S. L., Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer, Tony McEnery
(2004). Evaluating Lexical Resources for A Semantic Tagger.
In proceedings of
, May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, Volume II, pp. 499-502.
ISBN 2--6.
Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S. L., McEnery, T. (2004).
The UCREL semantic analysis system.
In proceedings of
the workshop on
in association with
, 25th May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 7-12.
Archer, D., Rayson, P., Piao, S., McEnery, T. (2004).
Comparing the UCREL Semantic Annotation Scheme with Lexicographical Taxonomies.
In Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX
, Lorient, France, 6-10 July 2004. Universit& de Bretagne Sud.
Volume III, pp. 817-827. ISBN 2-.
Paul Rayson, Scott Piao, Dawn Archer (2004).
Modern and Historical Aspects of the UCREL Semantic Analysis System.
Invited talk at the University of Sheffield, UK,
16th November 2004.
Rayson, P. (2005)
Right from the word go: identifying multi-word-expressions for semantic tagging.
Invited talk at BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG / OTA Workshop:
Thursday 21st April 2005, Oxford University Computing Services.
Scott S.L. Piao, Dawn Archer, Olga Mudraya, Paul Rayson,
Roger Garside, Tony McEnery, Andrew Wilson (2005)
A Large Semantic Lexicon for Corpus Annotation.
In proceedings of the
conference,
July 14-17, Birmingham, UK.
Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series on-line e-journal,
Vol. 1, no. 1, ISSN .
Piao, S., Rayson, P., Archer, D., McEnery, T. (2005)
Comparing and combining a semantic tagger and a statistical tool for MWE extraction.
(Special issue on Multiword expressions), Volume 19, issue 4, pp. 378 - 397, Elsevier.
Mudraya, O., Babych, B., Piao, S., Rayson, P., Wilson, A. (2006).
Developing a Russian semantic tagger for automatic semantic annotation.
In proceedings of ,
St. Petersburg, from 10-14 October 2006.
Qian, Yufang and Scott Piao (2009).
The Development of A Semantic Annotation Scheme for Chinese Kinship. Corpora, Vol. 4 (2), Edinburgh
University Press. pp. 189-208.
Piao, S., Bianchi, F., Dayrell, C., D'Egidio, A. and Rayson, P. (2015).
Development of the multilingual semantic annotation system.
In proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies
(NAACL HLT 2015), Denver, Colorado, United States, pp. .
Scott Piao, Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer, Francesca Bianchi, Carmen Dayrell, Mahmoud El-Haj, Ricardo-Mar&a Jim&nez,
Dawn Knight, Michal Kren, Laura L&fberg, Rao Muhammad Adeel Nawab, Jawad Shafi, Phoey Lee Teh and Olga Mudraya. (2016)
Lexical Coverage Evaluation of Large-scale Multilingual Semantic Lexicons for Twelve Languages.
In , Portoroz, Slovenia, pp. .
Publications describing applications of the system
Wilson, A. and Leech, G.N. (1993). Automatic Content Analysis
and the Stylistic Analysis of Prose Literature.
Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines 29: 219-234.
Thomas, J., and Wilson, A. (1996).
Methodologies for studying a corpus of doctor-patient interaction.
In J. Thomas and M. Short (eds) Using corpora for language research.
Longman, London, pp 92-109.
Rayson, P., Garside, R., and Sawyer, P. (1999).
Recovering Legacy Requirements.
In Proceedings of
Fifth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering:
Foundations of Software Quality, June 14-15 1999, Heidelberg, Germany.
Published by University of Namur, pp. 49-54. ISBN 2 .
Rayson, P., Garside, R., and Sawyer, P. (2000).
Assisting requirements engineering with semantic document analysis.
In Proceedings of Content-based multimedia information access
(Recherche
d'Informations Assistie par Ordinateur, Computer-Assisted
Information Retrieval) International Conference, College de France,
France, April 12-14, 2000. C.I.D., Paris, pp. 1363 - 1371. ISBN 2--X
Rayson, P., Emmet, L., Garside, R., and Sawyer, P. (2000).
The REVERE Project: Experiments with the application of
probabilistic NLP to Systems Engineering.
In proceedings of
5th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to
Information Systems
Versailles, France, June 28-30th, 2000.
Rayson, P., Garside, R., and Sawyer, P. (2000).
Assisting Requirements Recovery from Legacy Documents.
In Henderson, P. (ed.)
Systems Engineering for Business Process Change: collected papers
from the EPSRC research programme.
Springer-Verlag, London, pp. 251 - 263.
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Michael Oakes & Paul Rayson (2001).
Annotated Corpora for Assistance with English-Polish Translation.
Paper presented at ,
Lancaster University, UK, March 30-April 2, 2001.
S. Sharoff, P. Rayson, O. Mudraya, A. Wilson and T. McEnery (2004).
A tool for assisting translators using automatic semantic annotation.
Presented at Corpus Use
and Learning to Translate
Barcelona, January 22nd-24th 2004.
Marilyn Deegan, Harold Short, Dawn Archer, Paul Baker,
Tony McEnery, Paul Rayson (2004)
Computational Linguistics Meets Metadata, or the Automatic Extraction of
Key Words from Full Text Content.
Jones, M., Rayson, P. and Leech, G. (2004)
Key category analysis of a spoken corpus for EAP.
Presented at The 2nd Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies
International Conference on "Analyzing Discourse in Context"
The Graduate School of Education, Queen抯 University, Belfast, Northern
Ireland, 25 - 26 June, 2004.
L鰂berg L, Juntunen J-P,
Nykanen A, Varantola K,
Rayson P, Archer D. (2004).
Using a semantic tagger as dictionary search tool.
In Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX
, Lorient, France, 6-10 July 2004. Universit& de Bretagne Sud.
Volume I, pp. 127-134. ISBN 2-.
Archer, D. and Rayson, P. (2004)
Using an historical semantic tagger as a diagnostic tool for variation in spelling.
Presented at
Thirteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics
University of Vienna, Austria
23-29 August, 2004.
Sharoff, S., Babych, B., Rayson, P., Mudraya, P. and Piao, S. (2006)
ASSIST: Automated Semantic Assistance for Translators.
In companion proceedings to the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(), Trento, Italy, April 3-7, 2006,
pp. 139 - 142. ISBN 1--4.
Piao, S. L., Rayson, P., Mudraya, O., Wilson, A. and Garside, R. (2006)
Measuring MWE compositionality using semantic annotation.
In proceedings of , July 23, 2006, Sydney, Australia.
Andrew Wilson, Olga Moudraia (2006)
Quantitative or Qualitative Content Analysis?
Experiences from a cross-cultural comparison of female students' attitudes to shoe fashions in Germany, Poland and Russia.
In Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Dawn Archer (eds.) Corpus Linguistics around the world. Rodopi, Amsterdam.
For more recent applications of the English Semantic Tagger, see the list on the}