id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
cmp-lg/9406021
A symbolic description of punning riddles and its computer implementation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Riddles based on simple puns can be classified according to the patterns of word, syllable or phrase similarity they depend upon. We have devised a formal model of the semantic and syntactic regularities underlying some of the simpler types of punning riddle. We have also implemented this preliminary theory in a comp...
cmp-lg/9406022
An implemented model of punning riddles
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we discuss a model of simple question-answer punning, implemented in a program, JAPE, which generates riddles from humour-independent lexical entries. The model uses two main types of structure: schemata, which determine the relationships between key words in a joke, and templates, which produce the su...
cmp-lg/9406023
A Spanish Tagset for the CRATER Project
cmp-lg cs.CL
This working paper describes the Spanish tagset to be used in the context of CRATER, a CEC funded project aiming at the creation of a multilingual (English, French, Spanish) aligned corpus using the International Telecommunications Union corpus. In this respect, each version of the corpus will be (or is currently) ta...
cmp-lg/9406024
Learning Fault-tolerant Speech Parsing with SCREEN
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes a new approach and a system SCREEN for fault-tolerant speech parsing. SCREEEN stands for Symbolic Connectionist Robust EnterprisE for Natural language. Speech parsing describes the syntactic and semantic analysis of spontaneous spoken language. The general approach is based on incremental immedia...
cmp-lg/9406025
Emergent Parsing and Generation with Generalized Chart
cmp-lg cs.CL
A new, flexible inference method for Horn logic program is proposed, which is a drastic generalization of chart parsing, partial instantiations of clauses in a program roughly corresponding to arcs in a chart. Chart-like parsing and semantic-head-driven generation emerge from this method. With a parsimonious instanti...
cmp-lg/9406026
The Very Idea of Dynamic Semantics
cmp-lg cs.CL
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or so, mostly in response to problems associated with donkey anaphora? In Dynamic ...
cmp-lg/9406027
Analyzing and Improving Statistical Language Models for Speech Recognition
cmp-lg cs.CL
In many current speech recognizers, a statistical language model is used to indicate how likely it is that a certain word will be spoken next, given the words recognized so far. How can statistical language models be improved so that more complex speech recognition tasks can be tackled? Since the knowledge of the wea...
cmp-lg/9406028
Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguity: the Case of New Subjects
cmp-lg cs.CL
I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and propose one which is based on the interaction of discourse and grammatical functio...
cmp-lg/9406029
A Computational Model of Syntactic Processing: Ambiguity Resolution from Interpretation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no difficulty coping with it. In fact, the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious. But it is not infallible, however, as example 1 demonstrates. 1. The horse raced past the barn fell. This sentence is perfectly grammatical, as ...
cmp-lg/9406030
The complexity of normal form rewrite sequences for Associativity
cmp-lg cs.CL
The complexity of a particular term-rewrite system is considered: the rule of associativity (x*y)*z --> x*(y*z). Algorithms and exact calculations are given for the longest and shortest sequences of applications of --> that result in normal form (NF). The shortest NF sequence for a term x is always n-drm(x), where n ...
cmp-lg/9406031
A Psycholinguistically Motivated Parser for CCG
cmp-lg cs.CL
Considering the speed in which humans resolve syntactic ambiguity, and the overwhelming evidence that syntactic ambiguity is resolved through selection of the analysis whose interpretation is the most `sensible', one comes to the conclusion that interpretation, hence parsing take place incrementally, just about every...
cmp-lg/9406032
Anytime Algorithms for Speech Parsing?
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper discusses to which extent the concept of ``anytime algorithms'' can be applied to parsing algorithms with feature unification. We first try to give a more precise definition of what an anytime algorithm is. We arque that parsing algorithms have to be classified as contract algorithms as opposed to (truly) ...
cmp-lg/9406033
Verb Semantics and Lexical Selection
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper will focus on the semantic representation of verbs in computer systems and its impact on lexical selection problems in machine translation (MT). Two groups of English and Chinese verbs are examined to show that lexical selection must be based on interpretation of the sentence as well as selection restricti...
cmp-lg/9406034
Decision Lists for Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Application to Accent Restoration in Spanish and French
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a statistical decision procedure for lexical ambiguity resolution. The algorithm exploits both local syntactic patterns and more distant collocational evidence, generating an efficient, effective, and highly perspicuous recipe for resolving a given ambiguity. By identifying and utilizing only the ...
cmp-lg/9406035
DISCO---An HPSG-based NLP System and its Application for Appointment Scheduling (Project Note)
cmp-lg cs.CL
The natural language system DISCO is described. It combines o a powerful and flexible grammar development system; o linguistic competence for German including morphology, syntax and semantics; o new methods for linguistic performance modelling on the basis of high-level competence grammars; o new methods for modellin...
cmp-lg/9406036
Text Analysis Tools in Spoken Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
This submission contains the postscript of the final version of the slides used in our ACL-94 tutorial.
cmp-lg/9406037
Multi-Paragraph Segmentation of Expository Text
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes TextTiling, an algorithm for partitioning expository texts into coherent multi-paragraph discourse units which reflect the subtopic structure of the texts. The algorithm uses domain-independent lexical frequency and distribution information to recognize the interactions of multiple simultaneous t...
cmp-lg/9406038
An Empirical Model of Acknowledgment for Spoken-Language Systems
cmp-lg cs.CL
We refine and extend prior views of the description, purposes, and contexts-of-use of acknowledgment acts through empirical examination of the use of acknowledgments in task-based conversation. We distinguish three broad classes of acknowledgments (other-->ackn, self-->other-->ackn, and self+ackn) and present a catal...
cmp-lg/9406039
Three studies of grammar-based surface-syntactic parsing of unrestricted English text. A summary and orientation
cmp-lg cs.CL
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for morphological (or part-of-speech) disambiguation of English, done within the Constra...
cmp-lg/9406040
Learning unification-based grammars using the Spoken English Corpus
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes a grammar learning system that combines model-based and data-driven learning within a single framework. Our results from learning grammars using the Spoken English Corpus (SEC) suggest that combined model-based and data-driven learning can produce a more plausible grammar than is the case when us...
cmp-lg/9407001
Morphology with a Null-Interface
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an integrated architecture for word-level and sentence-level processing in a unification-based paradigm. The core of the system is a CLP implementation of a unification engine for feature structures supporting relational values. In this framework an HPSG-style grammar is implemented. Word-level processing ...
cmp-lg/9407002
Syntactic Analysis by Local Grammars Automata: an Efficient Algorithm
cmp-lg cs.CL
Local grammars can be represented in a very convenient way by automata. This paper describes and illustrates an efficient algorithm for the application of local grammars put in this form to lemmatized texts.
cmp-lg/9407003
Compact Representations by Finite-State Transducers
cmp-lg cs.CL
Finite-state transducers give efficient representations of many Natural Language phenomena. They allow to account for complex lexicon restrictions encountered, without involving the use of a large set of complex rules difficult to analyze. We here show that these representations can be made very compact, indicate how...
cmp-lg/9407004
Japanese word sense disambiguation based on examples of synonyms
cmp-lg cs.CL
(This is not the abstract): The language is Japanese. If your printer does not have fonts for Japases characters, the characters in figures will not be printed out correctly. Dissertation for Bachelor's degree at Kyoto University(Nagao lab.),March 1994.
cmp-lg/9407005
A Corrective Training Algorithm for Adaptive Learning in Bag Generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
The sampling problem in training corpus is one of the major sources of errors in corpus-based applications. This paper proposes a corrective training algorithm to best-fit the run-time context domain in the application of bag generation. It shows which objects to be adjusted and how to adjust their probabilities. The...
cmp-lg/9407006
Interleaving Syntax and Semantics in an Efficient Bottom-Up Parser
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe an efficient bottom-up parser that interleaves syntactic and semantic structure building. Two techniques are presented for reducing search by reducing local ambiguity: Limited left-context constraints are used to reduce local syntactic ambiguity, and deferred sortal-constraint application is used to reduc...
cmp-lg/9407007
GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding
cmp-lg cs.CL
Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interle...
cmp-lg/9407008
Tricolor DAGs for Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Machine translation (MT) has recently been formulated in terms of constraint-based knowledge representation and unification theories, but it is becoming more and more evident that it is not possible to design a practical MT system without an adequate method of handling mismatches between semantic representations in t...
cmp-lg/9407009
Estimating Performance of Pipelined Spoken Language Translation Systems
cmp-lg cs.CL
Most spoken language translation systems developed to date rely on a pipelined architecture, in which the main stages are speech recognition, linguistic analysis, transfer, generation and speech synthesis. When making projections of error rates for systems of this kind, it is natural to assume that the error rates fo...
cmp-lg/9407010
Combining Knowledge Sources to Reorder N-Best Speech Hypothesis Lists
cmp-lg cs.CL
A simple and general method is described that can combine different knowledge sources to reorder N-best lists of hypotheses produced by a speech recognizer. The method is automatically trainable, acquiring information from both positive and negative examples. Experiments are described in which it was tested on a 1000...
cmp-lg/9407011
Discourse Obligations in Dialogue Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We show that in modeling social interaction, particularly dialogue, the attitude of obligation can be a useful adjunct to the popularly considered attitudes of belief, goal, and intention and their mutual and shared counterparts. In particular, we show how discourse obligations can be used to account in a natural man...
cmp-lg/9407012
Phoneme Recognition Using Acoustic Events
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a new approach to phoneme recognition using nonsequential sub--phoneme units. These units are called acoustic events and are phonologically meaningful as well as recognizable from speech signals. Acoustic events form a phonologically incomplete representation as compared to distinctive features. T...
cmp-lg/9407013
The Acquisition of a Lexicon from Paired Phoneme Sequences and Semantic Representations
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an algorithm that acquires words (pairings of phonological forms and semantic representations) from larger utterances of unsegmented phoneme sequences and semantic representations. The algorithm maintains from utterance to utterance only a single coherent dictionary, and learns in the presence of homonymy,...
cmp-lg/9407014
Abstract Machine for Typed Feature Structures
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes a first step towards the definition of an abstract machine for linguistic formalisms that are based on typed feature structures, such as HPSG. The core design of the abstract machine is given in detail, including the compilation process from a high-level specification language to the abstract mac...
cmp-lg/9407015
Specifying Intonation from Context for Speech Synthesis
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a theory and a computational implementation for generating prosodically appropriate synthetic speech in response to database queries. Proper distinctions of contrast and emphasis are expressed in an intonation contour that is synthesized by rule under the control of a grammar, a discourse model, a...
cmp-lg/9407016
The Role of Cognitive Modeling in Achieving Communicative Intentions
cmp-lg cs.CL
A discourse planner for (task-oriented) dialogue must be able to make choices about whether relevant, but optional information (for example, the "satellites" in an RST-based planner) should be communicated. We claim that effective text planners must explicitly model aspects of the Hearer's cognitive state, such as wh...
cmp-lg/9407017
Generating Context-Appropriate Word Orders in Turkish
cmp-lg cs.CL
Turkish has considerably freer word order than English. The interpretations of different word orders in Turkish rely on information that describes how a sentence relates to its discourse context. To capture the syntactic features of a free word order language, I present an adaptation of Combinatory Categorial Grammar...
cmp-lg/9407018
Generating Multilingual Documents from a Knowledge Base: The TECHDOC Project
cmp-lg cs.CL
TECHDOC is an implemented system demonstrating the feasibility of generating multilingual technical documents on the basis of a language-independent knowledge base. Its application domain is user and maintenance instructions, which are produced from underlying plan structures representing the activities, the particip...
cmp-lg/9407019
Tracking Point of View in Narrative
cmp-lg cs.CL
Third-person fictional narrative text is composed not only of passages that objectively narrate events, but also of passages that present characters' thoughts, perceptions, and inner states. Such passages take a character's ``psychological point of view''. A language understander must determine the current psychologi...
cmp-lg/9407020
A Sequential Algorithm for Training Text Classifiers
cmp-lg cs.CL
The ability to cheaply train text classifiers is critical to their use in information retrieval, content analysis, natural language processing, and other tasks involving data which is partly or fully textual. An algorithm for sequential sampling during machine learning of statistical classifiers was developed and tes...
cmp-lg/9407021
K-vec: A New Approach for Aligning Parallel Texts
cmp-lg cs.CL
Various methods have been proposed for aligning texts in two or more languages such as the Canadian Parliamentary Debates(Hansards). Some of these methods generate a bilingual lexicon as a by-product. We present an alternative alignment strategy which we call K-vec, that starts by estimating the lexicon. For example,...
cmp-lg/9407022
Comparative Discourse Analysis of Parallel Texts
cmp-lg cs.CL
A quantitative representation of discourse structure can be computed by measuring lexical cohesion relations among adjacent blocks of text. These representations have been proposed to deal with sub-topic text segmentation. In a parallel corpus, similar representations can be derived for versions of a text in various ...
cmp-lg/9407023
Multi-Tape Two-Level Morphology: A Case Study in Semitic Non-linear Morphology
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an implemented multi-tape two-level model capable of describing Semitic non-linear morphology. The computational framework behind the current work is motivated by Kay (1987); the formalism presented here is an extension to the formalism reported by Pulman and Hepple (1993). The objectives of the c...
cmp-lg/9407024
PRINCIPAR---An Efficient, Broad-coverage, Principle-based Parser
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an efficient, broad-coverage, principle-based parser for English. The parser has been implemented in C++ and runs on SUN Sparcstations with X-windows. It contains a lexicon with over 90,000 entries, constructed automatically by applying a set of extraction and conversion rules to entries from machine reada...
cmp-lg/9407025
Recovering From Parser Failures: A Hybrid Statistical/Symbolic Approach
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe an implementation of a hybrid statistical/symbolic approach to repairing parser failures in a speech-to-speech translation system. We describe a module which takes as input a fragmented parse and returns a repaired meaning representation. It negotiates with the speaker about what the complete meaning of t...
cmp-lg/9407026
Tagging and Morphological Disambiguation of Turkish Text
cmp-lg cs.CL
Automatic text tagging is an important component in higher level analysis of text corpora, and its output can be used in many natural language processing applications. In languages like Turkish or Finnish, with agglutinative morphology, morphological disambiguation is a very crucial process in tagging, as the structu...
cmp-lg/9407027
Parsing as Tree Traversal
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a unified approach to parsing, in which top-down, bottom-up and left-corner parsers are related to preorder, postorder and inorder tree traversals. It is shown that the simplest bottom-up and left-corner parsers are left recursive and must be converted using an extended Greibach normal form. With ...
cmp-lg/9407028
Automated Postediting of Documents
cmp-lg cs.CL
Large amounts of low- to medium-quality English texts are now being produced by machine translation (MT) systems, optical character readers (OCR), and non-native speakers of English. Most of this text must be postedited by hand before it sees the light of day. Improving text quality is tedious work, but its automatio...
cmp-lg/9407029
Building a Large-Scale Knowledge Base for Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT) systems have achieved excellent results in constrained domains, but have not yet scaled up to newspaper text. The reason is that knowledge resources (lexicons, grammar rules, world models) must be painstakingly handcrafted from scratch. One of the hypotheses being tested in ...
cmp-lg/9407030
Computing FIRST and FOLLOW Functions for Feature-Theoretic Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes an algorithm for the computation of FIRST and FOLLOW sets for use with feature-theoretic grammars in which the value of the sets consists of pairs of feature-theoretic categories. The algorithm preserves as much information from the grammars as possible, using negative restriction to define equiv...
cmp-lg/9408001
The Correct and Efficient Implementation of Appropriateness Specifications for Typed Feature Structures
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we argue that type inferencing incorrectly implements appropriateness specifications for typed feature structures, promote a combination of type resolution and unfilling as a correct and efficient alternative, and consider the expressive limits of this alternative approach. Throughout, we use feature c...
cmp-lg/9408002
Computational Analyses of Arabic Morphology
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper demonstrates how a (multi-tape) two-level formalism can be used to write two-level grammars for Arabic non-linear morphology using a high level, but computationally tractable, notation. Three illustrative grammars are provided based on CV-, moraic- and affixational analyses. These are complemented by a pro...
cmp-lg/9408003
Typed Feature Structures as Descriptions
cmp-lg cs.CL
A description is an entity that can be interpreted as true or false of an object, and using feature structures as descriptions accrues several computational benefits. In this paper, I create an explicit interpretation of a typed feature structure used as a description, define the notion of a satisfiable feature struc...
cmp-lg/9408004
Parsing with Principles and Probabilities
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper is an attempt to bring together two approaches to language analysis. The possible use of probabilistic information in principle-based grammars and parsers is considered, including discussion on some theoretical and computational problems that arise. Finally a partial implementation of these ideas is presen...
cmp-lg/9408005
A Modular and Flexible Architecture for an Integrated Corpus Query System
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper describes the architecture of an integrated and extensible corpus query system developed at the University of Stuttgart and gives examples of some of the modules realized within this architecture. The modules form the core of a corpus workbench. Within the proposed architecture, information required for the...
cmp-lg/9408006
LHIP: Extended DCGs for Configurable Robust Parsing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present LHIP, a system for incremental grammar development using an extended DCG formalism. The system uses a robust island-based parsing method controlled by user-defined performance thresholds.
cmp-lg/9408007
Emergent Linguistic Rules from Inducing Decision Trees: Disambiguating Discourse Clue Words
cmp-lg cs.CL
We apply decision tree induction to the problem of discourse clue word sense disambiguation with a genetic algorithm. The automatic partitioning of the training set which is intrinsic to decision tree induction gives rise to linguistically viable rules.
cmp-lg/9408008
Statistical versus symbolic parsing for captioned-information retrieval
cmp-lg cs.CL
We discuss implementation issues of MARIE-1, a mostly symbolic parser fully implemented, and MARIE-2, a more statistical parser partially implemented. They address a corpus of 100,000 picture captions. We argue that the mixed approach of MARIE-2 should be better for this corpus because its algorithms (not data) are s...
cmp-lg/9408009
Tagging accurately -- Don't guess if you know
cmp-lg cs.CL
We discuss combining knowledge-based (or rule-based) and statistical part-of-speech taggers. We use two mature taggers, ENGCG and Xerox Tagger, to independently tag the same text and combine the results to produce a fully disambiguated text. In a 27000 word test sample taken from a previously unseen corpus we achieve...
cmp-lg/9408010
On Using Selectional Restriction in Language Models for Speech Recognition
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we investigate the use of selectional restriction -- the constraints a predicate imposes on its arguments -- in a language model for speech recognition. We use an un-tagged corpus, followed by a public domain tagger and a very simple finite state machine to obtain verb-object pairs from unrestricted En...
cmp-lg/9408011
Distributional Clustering of English Words
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe and experimentally evaluate a method for automatically clustering words according to their distribution in particular syntactic contexts. Deterministic annealing is used to find lowest distortion sets of clusters. As the annealing parameter increases, existing clusters become unstable and subdivide, yield...
cmp-lg/9408012
Approximate N-Gram Markov Model for Natural Language Generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes an Approximate n-gram Markov Model for bag generation. Directed word association pairs with distances are used to approximate (n-1)-gram and n-gram training tables. This model has parameters of word association model, and merits of both word association model and Markov Model. The training knowled...
cmp-lg/9408013
Training and Scaling Preference Functions for Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an automatic method for weighting the contributions of preference functions used in disambiguation. Initial scaling factors are derived as the solution to a least-squares minimization problem, and improvements are then made by hill-climbing. The method is applied to disambiguating sentences in the ATIS (Ai...
cmp-lg/9408014
Qualitative and Quantitative Models of Speech Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and pointing out which of its characteristics are best preserved or eliminated in movin...
cmp-lg/9408015
Experimentally Evaluating Communicative Strategies: The Effect of the Task
cmp-lg cs.CL
Effective problem solving among multiple agents requires a better understanding of the role of communication in collaboration. In this paper we show that there are communicative strategies that greatly improve the performance of resource-bounded agents, but that these strategies are highly sensitive to the task requi...
cmp-lg/9408016
On Implementing an HPSG theory -- Aspects of the logical architecture, the formalization, and the implementation of head-driven phrase structure grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper presents some aspects involved in the formalization and implementation of HPSG theories. As basis, the logical setups of Carpenter (1992) and King (1989, 1994) are briefly compared regarding their usefulness as basis for HPSGII (Pollard and Sag 1994). The possibilities for expressing HPSG theories in the HP...
cmp-lg/9408017
Reaping the Benefits of Interactive Syntax and Semantics
cmp-lg cs.CL
Semantic feedback is an important source of information that a parser could use to deal with local ambiguities in syntax. However, it is difficult to devise a systematic communication mechanism for interactive syntax and semantics. In this article, I propose a variant of left-corner parsing to define the points at wh...
cmp-lg/9408018
Uniform Representations for Syntax-Semantics Arbitration
cmp-lg cs.CL
Psychological investigations have led to considerable insight into the working of the human language comprehension system. In this article, we look at a set of principles derived from psychological findings to argue for a particular organization of linguistic knowledge along with a particular processing strategy and ...
cmp-lg/9408019
Building a Parser That can Afford to Interact with Semantics
cmp-lg cs.CL
Natural language understanding programs get bogged down by the multiplicity of possible syntactic structures while processing real world texts that human understanders do not have much difficulty with. In this work, I analyze the relationships between parsing strategies, the degree of local ambiguity encountered by t...
cmp-lg/9408020
Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Autonomy and Interaction in a Model of Sentence Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
Is the human language understander a collection of modular processes operating with relative autonomy, or is it a single integrated process? This ongoing debate has polarized the language processing community, with two fundamentally different types of model posited, and with each camp concluding that the other is wro...
cmp-lg/9408021
A Unified Process Model of Syntactic and Semantic Error Recovery in Sentence Understanding
cmp-lg cs.CL
The development of models of human sentence processing has traditionally followed one of two paths. Either the model posited a sequence of processing modules, each with its own task-specific knowledge (e.g., syntax and semantics), or it posited a single processor utilizing different types of knowledge inextricably in...
cmp-lg/9409001
Integrating Knowledge Bases and Statistics in MT
cmp-lg cs.CL
We summarize recent machine translation (MT) research at the Information Sciences Institute of USC, and we describe its application to the development of a Japanese-English newspaper MT system. Our work aims at scaling up grammar-based, knowledge-based MT techniques. This scale-up involves the use of statistical meth...
cmp-lg/9409002
Conceptual Association for Compound Noun Analysis
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes research toward the automatic interpretation of compound nouns using corpus statistics. An initial study aimed at syntactic disambiguation is presented. The approach presented bases associations upon thesaurus categories. Association data is gathered from unambiguous cases extracted from a corpus...
cmp-lg/9409003
A Probabilistic Model of Compound Nouns
cmp-lg cs.CL
Compound nouns such as example noun compound are becoming more common in natural language and pose a number of difficult problems for NLP systems, notably increasing the complexity of parsing. In this paper we develop a probabilistic model for syntactically analysing such compounds. The model predicts compound noun s...
cmp-lg/9409004
An Experiment on Learning Appropriate Selectional Restrictions from a Parsed Corpus
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a methodology to extract Selectional Restrictions at a variable level of abstraction from phrasally analyzed corpora. The method relays in the use of a wide-coverage noun taxonomy and a statistical measure of the co-occurrence of linguistic items. Some experimental results about the performance of the meth...
cmp-lg/9409005
Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised sev...
cmp-lg/9409006
Situated Modeling of Epistemic Puzzles
cmp-lg cs.CL
Situation theory is a mathematical theory of meaning introduced by Jon Barwise and John Perry. It has evoked great theoretical and practical interest and motivated the framework of a few `computational' systems. PROSIT is the pioneering work in this direction. Unfortunately, there is a lack of real-life applications ...
cmp-lg/9409007
Treating `Free Word Order' in Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
In `free word order' languages, every sentence is embedded in its specific context. Among others, the order of constituents is determined by the categories `theme', `rheme' and `contrastive focus'. This paper shows how to recognise and to translate these categories automatically on a sentential basis, so that sentenc...
cmp-lg/9409008
Parsing of Spoken Language under Time Constraints
cmp-lg cs.CL
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not only analyse the incoming speech in a time-synchroneous and incremental manner, ...
cmp-lg/9409009
Linguistics Computation, Automatic Model Generation, and Intensions
cmp-lg cs.CL
Techniques are presented for defining models of computational linguistics theories. The methods of generalized diagrams that were developed by this author for modeling artificial intelligence planning and reasoning are shown to be applicable to models of computation of linguistics theories. It is shown that for exten...
cmp-lg/9409010
Inducing Probabilistic Grammars by Bayesian Model Merging
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars from corpora of positive samples. First, samples are {\em incorporated} by adding ad-hoc rules to a working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or nonterminals) are {\em merged} to achieve generalization and a more compact representa...
cmp-lg/9409011
Aligning Noisy Parallel Corpora Across Language Groups : Word Pair Feature Matching by Dynamic Time Warping
cmp-lg cs.CL
We propose a new algorithm called DK-vec for aligning pairs of Asian/Indo-European noisy parallel texts without sentence boundaries. DK-vec improves on previous alignment algorithms in that it handles better the non-linear nature of noisy corpora. The algorithm uses frequency, position and recency information as feat...
cmp-lg/9409012
Towards an Automatic Dictation System for Translators: the TransTalk Project
cmp-lg cs.CL
Professional translators often dictate their translations orally and have them typed afterwards. The TransTalk project aims at automating the second part of this process. Its originality as a dictation system lies in the fact that both the acoustic signal produced by the translator and the source text under translati...
cmp-lg/9410001
Improving Language Models by Clustering Training Sentences
cmp-lg cs.CL
Many of the kinds of language model used in speech understanding suffer from imperfect modeling of intra-sentential contextual influences. I argue that this problem can be addressed by clustering the sentences in a training corpus automatically into subcorpora on the criterion of entropy reduction, and calculating se...
cmp-lg/9410002
Lexikoneintraege fuer deutsche Adverbien (Dictionary Entries for German Adverbs)
cmp-lg cs.CL
Modifiers in general, and adverbs in particular, are neglected categories in linguistics, and consequently, their treatment in Natural Language Processing poses problems. In this article, we present the dictionary information for German adverbs which is necessary to deal with word order, degree modifier scope and oth...
cmp-lg/9410003
Principle Based Semantics for HPSG
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The advantages of the formlism are shown with respect to a grammar for a fragment of German that deals with (i) quantifier scope ambiguities triggered by scrambling and/or movement and (ii) ambiguities that arise from the collective/distributive disti...
cmp-lg/9410004
Spelling Correction in Agglutinative Languages
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an approach to spelling correction in agglutinative languages that is based on two-level morphology and a dynamic programming based search algorithm. Spelling correction in agglutinative languages is significantly different than in languages like English. The concept of a word in such languages is...
cmp-lg/9410005
A Centering Approach to Pronouns
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein (1986), the process of centering attention on entities in the discourse gi...
cmp-lg/9410006
Evaluating Discourse Processing Algorithms
cmp-lg cs.CL
In order to take steps towards establishing a methodology for evaluating Natural Language systems, we conducted a case study. We attempt to evaluate two different approaches to anaphoric processing in discourse by comparing the accuracy and coverage of two published algorithms for finding the co-specifiers of pronoun...
cmp-lg/9410007
A Formal Look at Dependency Grammars and Phrase-Structure Grammars, with Special Consideration of Word-Order Phenomena
cmp-lg cs.CL
The central role of the lexicon in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other dependency-based linguistic theories cannot be replicated in linguistic theories based on context-free grammars (CFGs). We describe Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) as a system that arises naturally in the process of lexicalizing CFGs. A TAG grammar c...
cmp-lg/9410008
Recognizing Text Genres with Simple Metrics Using Discriminant Analysis
cmp-lg cs.CL
A simple method for categorizing texts into predetermined text genre categories using the statistical standard technique of discriminant analysis is demonstrated with application to the Brown corpus. Discriminant analysis makes it possible use a large number of parameters that may be specific for a certain corpus or ...
cmp-lg/9410009
Lexical Functions and Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations.
cmp-lg/9410010
XTAG system - A Wide Coverage Grammar for English
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents the XTAG system, a grammar development tool based on the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism that includes a wide-coverage syntactic grammar for English. The various components of the system are discussed and preliminary evaluation results from the parsing of various corpora are given. Results ...
cmp-lg/9410011
Dilemma - An Instant Lexicographer
cmp-lg cs.CL
Dilemma is intended to enhance quality and increase productivity of expert human translators by presenting to the writer relevant lexical information mechanically extracted from comparable existing translations, thus replacing - or compensating for the absence of - a lexicographer and stand-by terminologist rather th...
cmp-lg/9410012
Does Baum-Welch Re-estimation Help Taggers?
cmp-lg cs.CL
In part of speech tagging by Hidden Markov Model, a statistical model is used to assign grammatical categories to words in a text. Early work in the field relied on a corpus which had been tagged by a human annotator to train the model. More recently, Cutting {\it et al.} (1992) suggest that training can be achieved ...
cmp-lg/9410013
Automatic Error Detection in Part of Speech Tagging
cmp-lg cs.CL
A technique for detecting errors made by Hidden Markov Model taggers is described, based on comparing observable values of the tagging process with a threshold. The resulting approach allows the accuracy of the tagger to be improved by accepting a lower efficiency, defined as the proportion of words which are tagged....
cmp-lg/9410014
A Freely Available Syntactic Lexicon for English
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a syntactic lexicon for English that was originally derived from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, and then modified and augmented by hand. There are more than 37,000 syntactic entries from all 8 parts of speech. An X-windows based too...
cmp-lg/9410015
Lexicalization and Grammar Development
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a representative of the class of lexicalized grammars. We illustrate the advanta...
cmp-lg/9410016
Dutch Cross Serial Dependencies in HPSG
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an analysis of Dutch cross serial dependencies in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Arguably, our analysis differs from other analyses in that we do not refer to `additional' mechanisms (e.g., sequence union, head wrapping): just standard structure sharing, an immediate dominance schema and a linear pr...
cmp-lg/9410017
Concurrent Lexicalized Dependency Parsing: The ParseTalk Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
A grammar model for concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing is introduced. Complete lexical distribution of grammatical knowledge is achieved building upon the head-oriented notions of valency and dependency, while inheritance mechanisms are used to capture lexical generalizations. The underlying concurr...