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cmp-lg/9607002
Inducing Constraint Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
Constraint Grammar rules are induced from corpora. A simple scheme based on local information, i.e., on lexical biases and next-neighbour contexts, extended through the use of barriers, reached 87.3 percent precision (1.12 tags/word) at 98.2 percent recall. The results compare favourably with other methods that are u...
cmp-lg/9607003
Domain and Language Independent Feature Extraction for Statistical Text Categorization
cmp-lg cs.CL
A generic system for text categorization is presented which uses a representative text corpus to adapt the processing steps: feature extraction, dimension reduction, and classification. Feature extraction automatically learns features from the corpus by reducing actual word forms using statistical information of the ...
cmp-lg/9607004
Integrating Syntactic and Prosodic Information for the Efficient Detection of Empty Categories
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe a number of experiments that demonstrate the usefulness of prosodic information for a processing module which parses spoken utterances with a feature-based grammar employing empty categories. We show that by requiring certain prosodic properties from those positions in the input where the presence of an e...
cmp-lg/9607005
Head Automata and Bilingual Tiling: Translation with Minimal Representations
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a language model consisting of a collection of costed bidirectional finite state automata associated with the head words of phrases. The model is suitable for incremental application of lexical associations in a dynamic programming search for optimal dependency tree derivations. We also present a model and...
cmp-lg/9607006
Head Automata for Speech Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents statistical language and translation models based on collections of small finite state machines we call ``head automata''. The models are intended to capture the lexical sensitivity of N-gram models and direct statistical translation models, while at the same time taking account of the hierarchica...
cmp-lg/9607007
Parallel Replacement in Finite State Calculus
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper extends the calculus of regular expressions with new types of replacement expressions that enhance the expressiveness of the simple replace operator defined in Karttunen (1995). Parallel replacement allows multiple replacements to apply simultaneously to the same input without interfering with each other. ...
cmp-lg/9607008
From Submit to Submitted via Submission: On Lexical Rules in Large-Scale Lexicon Acquisition
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper deals with the discovery, representation, and use of lexical rules (LRs) during large-scale semi-automatic computational lexicon acquisition. The analysis is based on a set of LRs implemented and tested on the basis of Spanish and English business- and finance-related corpora. We show that, though the use ...
cmp-lg/9607009
Semantic-based Transfer
cmp-lg cs.CL
This article presents a new semantic-based transfer approach developed and applied within the Verbmobil Machine Translation project. We give an overview of the declarative transfer formalism together with its procedural realization. Our approach is discussed and compared with several other approaches from the MT lite...
cmp-lg/9607010
Efficient Implementation of a Semantic-based Transfer Approach
cmp-lg cs.CL
This article gives an overview of a new semantic-based transfer approach developed and applied within the Verbmobil Machine Translation project. We present the declarative transfer formalism and discuss its implementation.
cmp-lg/9607011
Pattern-Based Context-Free Grammars for Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes the use of ``pattern-based'' context-free grammars as a basis for building machine translation (MT) systems, which are now being adopted as personal tools by a broad range of users in the cyberspace society. We discuss major requirements for such tools, including easy customization for diverse dom...
cmp-lg/9607012
MBT: A Memory-Based Part of Speech Tagger-Generator
cmp-lg cs.CL
We introduce a memory-based approach to part of speech tagging. Memory-based learning is a form of supervised learning based on similarity-based reasoning. The part of speech tag of a word in a particular context is extrapolated from the most similar cases held in memory. Supervised learning approaches are useful whe...
cmp-lg/9607013
Unsupervised Discovery of Phonological Categories through Supervised Learning of Morphological Rules
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe a case study in the application of {\em symbolic machine learning} techniques for the discovery of linguistic rules and categories. A supervised rule induction algorithm is used to learn to predict the correct diminutive suffix given the phonological representation of Dutch nouns. The system produces rule...
cmp-lg/9607014
A Corpus Study of Negative Imperatives in Natural Language Instructions
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we define the notion of a preventative expression and discuss a corpus study of such expressions in instructional text. We discuss our coding schema, which takes into account both form and function features, and present measures of inter-coder reliability for those features. We then discuss the correla...
cmp-lg/9607015
Learning Micro-Planning Rules for Preventative Expressions
cmp-lg cs.CL
Building text planning resources by hand is time-consuming and difficult. Certainly, a number of planning architectures and their accompanying plan libraries have been implemented, but while the architectures themselves may be reused in a new domain, the library of plans typically cannot. One way to address this prob...
cmp-lg/9607016
Beyond Word N-Grams
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe, analyze, and evaluate experimentally a new probabilistic model for word-sequence prediction in natural language based on prediction suffix trees (PSTs). By using efficient data structures, we extend the notion of PST to unbounded vocabularies. We also show how to use a Bayesian approach based on recursiv...
cmp-lg/9607017
Natural Language Processing: Structure and Complexity
cmp-lg cs.CL
We introduce a method for analyzing the complexity of natural language processing tasks, and for predicting the difficulty new NLP tasks. Our complexity measures are derived from the Kolmogorov complexity of a class of automata --- {\it meaning automata}, whose purpose is to extract relevant pieces of information f...
cmp-lg/9607018
TSNLP - Test Suites for Natural Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
The TSNLP project has investigated various aspects of the construction, maintenance and application of systematic test suites as diagnostic and evaluation tools for NLP applications. The paper summarizes the motivation and main results of the project: besides the solid methodological foundation, TSNLP has produced su...
cmp-lg/9607019
Mental State Adjectives: the Perspective of Generative Lexicon
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper focusses on mental state adjectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, instead of enumerating the various syntactic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is possible to give them a rich typed semantic...
cmp-lg/9607020
A Divide-and-Conquer Strategy for Parsing
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we propose a novel strategy which is designed to enhance the accuracy of the parser by simplifying complex sentences before parsing. This approach involves the separate parsing of the constituent sub-sentences within a complex sentence. To achieve that, the divide-and-conquer strategy first disambiguat...
cmp-lg/9607021
Morphological Analysis as Classification: an Inductive-Learning Approach
cmp-lg cs.CL
Morphological analysis is an important subtask in text-to-speech conversion, hyphenation, and other language engineering tasks. The traditional approach to performing morphological analysis is to combine a morpheme lexicon, sets of (linguistic) rules, and heuristics to find a most probable analysis. In contrast we pr...
cmp-lg/9607022
A Machine Learning Approach to the Classification of Dialogue Utterances
cmp-lg cs.CL
The purpose of this paper is to present a method for automatic classification of dialogue utterances and the results of applying that method to a corpus. Superficial features of a set of training utterances (which we will call cues) are taken as the basis for finding relevant utterance classes and for extracting rule...
cmp-lg/9607023
Phonological modeling for continuous speech recognition in Korean
cmp-lg cs.CL
A new scheme to represent phonological changes during continuous speech recognition is suggested. A phonological tag coupled with its morphological tag is designed to represent the conditions of Korean phonological changes. A pairwise language model of these morphological and phonological tags is implemented in Korea...
cmp-lg/9607024
Applying Winnow to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction
cmp-lg cs.CL
Multiplicative weight-updating algorithms such as Winnow have been studied extensively in the COLT literature, but only recently have people started to use them in applications. In this paper, we apply a Winnow-based algorithm to a task in natural language: context-sensitive spelling correction. This is the task of f...
cmp-lg/9607025
New Methods, Current Trends and Software Infrastructure for NLP
cmp-lg cs.CL
The increasing use of `new methods' in NLP, which the NeMLaP conference series exemplifies, occurs in the context of a wider shift in the nature and concerns of the discipline. This paper begins with a short review of this context and significant trends in the field. The review motivates and leads to a set of require...
cmp-lg/9607026
Building Knowledge Bases for the Generation of Software Documentation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Automated text generation requires a underlying knowledge base from which to generate, which is often difficult to produce. Software documentation is one domain in which parts of this knowledge base may be derived automatically. In this paper, we describe \drafter, an authoring support tool for generating user-centre...
cmp-lg/9607027
Learning Translation Rules From A Bilingual Corpus
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes a mechanism for learning pattern correspondences between two languages from a corpus of translated sentence pairs. The proposed mechanism uses analogical reasoning between two translations. Given a pair of translations, the similar parts of the sentences in the source language must correspond the ...
cmp-lg/9607028
The Grammar of Sense: Is word-sense tagging much more than part-of-speech tagging?
cmp-lg cs.CL
This squib claims that Large-scale Automatic Sense Tagging of text (LAST) can be done at a high-level of accuracy and with far less complexity and computational effort than has been believed until now. Moreover, it can be done for all open class words, and not just carefully selected opposed pairs as in some recent w...
cmp-lg/9607029
Design and Implementation of a Tactical Generator for Turkish, a Free Constituent Order Language
cmp-lg cs.CL
This thesis describes a tactical generator for Turkish, a free constituent order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic, focus,...
cmp-lg/9607030
Using Multiple Sources of Information for Constraint-Based Morphological Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This thesis presents a constraint-based morphological disambiguation approach that is applicable to languages with complex morphology--specifically agglutinative languages with productive inflectional and derivational morphological phenomena. For morphologically complex languages like Turkish, automatic morphological...
cmp-lg/9607031
Compositional Semantics in Verbmobil
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper discusses how compositional semantics is implemented in the Verbmobil speech-to-speech translation system using LUD, a description language for underspecified discourse representation structures. The description language and its formal interpretation in DRT are described as well as its implementation togeth...
cmp-lg/9607032
A Lexical Semantic Database for Verbmobil
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes the development and use of a lexical semantic database for the Verbmobil speech-to-speech machine translation system. The motivation is to provide a common information source for the distributed development of the semantics, transfer and semantic evaluation modules and to store lexical semantic i...
cmp-lg/9607033
Multiple Discourse Relations on the Sentential Level in Japanese
cmp-lg cs.CL
In the German government (BMBF) funded project Verbmobil, a semantic formalism Language for Underspecified Discourse Representation Structures (LUD) is used which describes several DRSs and allows for underspecification. Dealing with Japanese poses challenging problems. In this paper, a treatment of multiple discours...
cmp-lg/9607034
Using textual clues to improve metaphor processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we propose a textual clue approach to help metaphor detection, in order to improve the semantic processing of this figure. The previous works in the domain studied the semantic regularities only, overlooking an obvious set of regularities. A corpus-based analysis shows the existence of surface regulari...
cmp-lg/9607035
Completeness of Compositional Translation for Context-Free Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
A machine translation system is said to be *complete* if all expressions that are correct according to the source-language grammar can be translated into the target language. This paper addresses the completeness issue for compositional machine translation in general, and for compositional machine translation of cont...
cmp-lg/9607036
Connected Text Recognition Using Layered HMMs and Token Passing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a novel approach to lexical error recovery on textual input. An advanced robust tokenizer has been implemented that can not only correct spelling mistakes, but also recover from segmentation errors. Apart from the orthographic considerations taken, the tokenizer also makes use of linguistic expectations ex...
cmp-lg/9607037
Automatic Construction of Clean Broad-Coverage Translation Lexicons
cmp-lg cs.CL
Word-level translational equivalences can be extracted from parallel texts by surprisingly simple statistical techniques. However, these techniques are easily fooled by {\em indirect associations} --- pairs of unrelated words whose statistical properties resemble those of mutual translations. Indirect associations po...
cmp-lg/9608001
Storage of Natural Language Sentences in a Hopfield Network
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper look at how the Hopfield neural network can be used to store and recall patterns constructed from natural language sentences. As a pattern recognition and storage tool, the Hopfield neural network has received much attention. This attention however has been mainly in the field of statistical physics due to...
cmp-lg/9608002
Controlling Functional Uncertainty
cmp-lg cs.CL
There have been two different methods for checking the satisfiability of feature descriptions that use the functional uncertainty device, namely~\cite{Kaplan:88CO} and \cite{Backofen:94JSC}. Although only the one in \cite{Backofen:94JSC} solves the satisfiability problem completely, both methods have their merits. Bu...
cmp-lg/9608003
Stylistic Variation in an Information Retrieval Experiment
cmp-lg cs.CL
Texts exhibit considerable stylistic variation. This paper reports an experiment where a corpus of documents (N= 75 000) is analyzed using various simple stylistic metrics. A subset (n = 1000) of the corpus has been previously assessed to be relevant for answering given information retrieval queries. The experiment s...
cmp-lg/9608004
Patterns of Language - A Population Model for Language Structure
cmp-lg cs.CL
A key problem in the description of language structure is to explain its contradictory properties of specificity and generality, the contrasting poles of formulaic prescription and generative productivity. I argue that this is possible if we accept analogy and similarity as the basic mechanisms of structural definiti...
cmp-lg/9608005
CLEARS - An Education and Research Tool for Computational Semantics
cmp-lg cs.CL
The CLEARS (Computational Linguistics Education and Research for Semantics) tool provides a graphical interface allowing interactive construction of semantic representations in a variety of different formalisms, and using several construction methods. CLEARS was developed as part of the FraCaS project which was desig...
cmp-lg/9608006
Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion using Multiple Unbounded Overlapping Chunks
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present in this paper an original extension of two data-driven algorithms for the transcription of a sequence of graphemes into the corresponding sequence of phonemes. In particular, our approach generalizes the algorithm originally proposed by Dedina and Nusbaum (D&N) (1991), which had originally been promoted as...
cmp-lg/9608007
Centering in Italian
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper explores the correlation between centering and different forms of pronominal reference in Italian, in particular zeros and overt pronouns in subject position. Such correlations, that I had proposed in earlier work (COLING 90), are verified through the analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring texts. In t...
cmp-lg/9608008
The discourse functions of Italian subjects: a centering approach
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper examines the discourse functions that different types of subjects perform in Italian within the centering framework. I build on my previous work (COLING90) that accounted for the alternation of null and strong pronouns in subject position. I extend my previous analysis in several ways: for example, I refin...
cmp-lg/9608009
Centering theory and the Italian pronominal system
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, I give an account of some phenomena of pronominalization in Italian in terms of centering theory. After a general introduction to the Italian pronominal system, I will review centering, and then show how the original rules have to be extended or modified. Finally, I will show that centering does not ac...
cmp-lg/9608010
Fishing for Exactness
cmp-lg cs.CL
Statistical methods for automatically identifying dependent word pairs (i.e. dependent bigrams) in a corpus of natural language text have traditionally been performed using asymptotic tests of significance. This paper suggests that Fisher's exact test is a more appropriate test due to the skewed and sparse data sampl...
cmp-lg/9608011
Punctuation in Quoted Speech
cmp-lg cs.CL
Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not adequate for ...
cmp-lg/9608012
Multilingual Text Analysis for Text-to-Speech Synthesis
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a model of text analysis for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis based on (weighted) finite-state transducers, which serves as the text-analysis module of the multilingual Bell Labs TTS system. The transducers are constructed using a lexical toolkit that allows declarative descriptions of lexicons, morphologica...
cmp-lg/9608013
A Word Grammar of Turkish with Morphophonemic Rules
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this thesis, morphological description of Turkish is encoded using the two-level model. This description is made up of the phonological component that contains the two-level morphophonemic rules, and the lexicon component which lists the lexical items and encodes the morphotactic constraints. The word grammar is e...
cmp-lg/9608014
Classifiers in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes an analysis of classifiers into four major types: UNIT, METRIC, GROUP and SPECIES, based on properties of both Japanese and English. The analysis makes possible a uniform and straightforward treatment of noun phrases headed by classifiers in Japanese-to-English machine translation, and has been im...
cmp-lg/9608015
Morphological Productivity in the Lexicon
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we outline a lexical organization for Turkish that makes use of lexical rules for inflections, derivations, and lexical category changes to control the proliferation of lexical entries. Lexical rules handle changes in grammatical roles, enforce type constraints, and control the mapping of subcategorizat...
cmp-lg/9608016
A Sign-Based Phrase Structure Grammar for Turkish
cmp-lg cs.CL
This study analyses Turkish syntax from an informational point of view. Sign based linguistic representation and principles of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) theory are adapted to Turkish. The basic informational elements are nested and inherently sorted feature structures called signs. In the implemen...
cmp-lg/9608017
Automatic Alignment of English-Chinese Bilingual Texts of CNS News
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we address a method to align English-Chinese bilingual news reports from China News Service, combining both lexical and satistical approaches. Because of the sentential structure differences between English and Chinese, matching at the sentence level as in many other works may result in frequent matchin...
cmp-lg/9608018
Algorithms for Speech Recognition and Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
Speech processing requires very efficient methods and algorithms. Finite-state transducers have been shown recently both to constitute a very useful abstract model and to lead to highly efficient time and space algorithms in this field. We present these methods and algorithms and illustrate them in the case of speech...
cmp-lg/9608019
Using sentence connectors for evaluating MT output
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper elaborates on the design of a machine translation evaluation method that aims to determine to what degree the meaning of an original text is preserved in translation, without looking into the grammatical correctness of its constituent sentences. The basic idea is to have a human evaluator take the sentence...
cmp-lg/9608020
Phonetic Ambiguity : Approaches, Touchstones, Pitfalls and New Approaches
cmp-lg cs.CL
Phonetic ambiguity and confusibility are bugbears for any form of bottom-up or data-driven approach to language processing. The question of when an input is ``close enough'' to a target word pervades the entire problem spaces of speech recognition, synthesis, language acquisition, speech compression, and language rep...
cmp-lg/9608021
Isolated-Word Confusion Metrics and the PGPfone Alphabet
cmp-lg cs.CL
Although the confusion of individual phonemes and features have been studied and analyzed since (Miller and Nicely, 1955), there has been little work done on extending this to a predictive theory of word-level confusions. The PGPfone alphabet is a good touchstone problem for developing such word-level confusion metri...
cmp-lg/9609001
Corrections and Higher-Order Unification
cmp-lg cs.CL
We propose an analysis of corrections which models some of the requirements corrections place on context. We then show that this analysis naturally extends to the interaction of corrections with pronominal anaphora on the one hand, and (in)definiteness on the other. The analysis builds on previous unification--based ...
cmp-lg/9609002
Inferring Acceptance and Rejection in Dialogue by Default Rules of Inference
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient,...
cmp-lg/9609003
Cue Phrase Classification Using Machine Learning
cmp-lg cs.CL
Cue phrases may be used in a discourse sense to explicitly signal discourse structure, but also in a sentential sense to convey semantic rather than structural information. Correctly classifying cue phrases as discourse or sentential is critical in natural language processing systems that exploit discourse structure,...
cmp-lg/9609004
A Principled Framework for Constructing Natural Language Interfaces To Temporal Databases
cmp-lg cs.CL
Most existing natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) were designed to be used with ``snapshot'' database systems, that provide very limited facilities for manipulating time-dependent data. Consequently, most NLIDBs also provide very limited support for the notion of time. The database community is becoming...
cmp-lg/9609005
Centering in Japanese Discourse
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the centering algorithm. Previous analyses have stipulated that a zero pronoun and its...
cmp-lg/9609006
Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called {\sc centering}, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the...
cmp-lg/9609007
Discourse Coherence and Shifting Centers in Japanese Texts
cmp-lg cs.CL
In languages such as Japanese, the use of {\it zeros}, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in utterances that shift the topic involves a risk that the meaning intended by the speaker may not be transparent to the hearer. However, this potentially undesirable conversational strategy often occurs in the course of natura...
cmp-lg/9609008
Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds
cmp-lg cs.CL
The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an architecture for natural language analysis in which probabilities are given t...
cmp-lg/9609009
A Geometric Approach to Mapping Bitext Correspondence
cmp-lg cs.CL
The first step in most corpus-based multilingual NLP work is to construct a detailed map of the correspondence between a text and its translation. Several automatic methods for this task have been proposed in recent years. Yet even the best of these methods can err by several typeset pages. The Smooth Injective Map R...
cmp-lg/9609010
Automatic Detection of Omissions in Translations
cmp-lg cs.CL
ADOMIT is an algorithm for Automatic Detection of OMIssions in Translations. The algorithm relies solely on geometric analysis of bitext maps and uses no linguistic information. This property allows it to deal equally well with omissions that do not correspond to linguistic units, such as might result from word-proce...
cmp-lg/9610001
Death and Lightness: Using a Demographic Model to Find Support Verbs
cmp-lg cs.CL
Some verbs have a particular kind of binary ambiguity: they can carry their normal, full meaning, or they can be merely acting as a prop for the nominal object. It has been suggested that there is a detectable pattern in the relationship between a verb acting as a prop (a \term{support verb}) and the noun it supports...
cmp-lg/9610002
Gathering Statistics to Aspectually Classify Sentences with a Genetic Algorithm
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a method for large corpus analysis to semantically classify an entire clause. In particular, we use cooccurrence statistics among similar clauses to determine the aspectual class of an input clause. The process examines linguistic features of clauses that are relevant to aspectual classification. ...
cmp-lg/9610003
Stochastic Attribute-Value Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
Probabilistic analogues of regular and context-free grammars are well-known in computational linguistics, and currently the subject of intensive research. To date, however, no satisfactory probabilistic analogue of attribute-value grammars has been proposed: previous attempts have failed to define a correct parameter...
cmp-lg/9610004
A Faster Structured-Tag Word-Classification Method
cmp-lg cs.CL
Several methods have been proposed for processing a corpus to induce a tagset for the sub-language represented by the corpus. This paper examines a structured-tag word classification method introduced by McMahon (1994) and discussed further by McMahon & Smith (1995) in cmp-lg/9503011 . Two major variations, (1) non-r...
cmp-lg/9610005
Learning string edit distance
cmp-lg cs.CL
In many applications, it is necessary to determine the similarity of two strings. A widely-used notion of string similarity is the edit distance: the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. In this report, we provide a stochastic model for string edi...
cmp-lg/9610006
A Morphology-System and Part-of-Speech Tagger for German
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an integrated tool for German morphology and statistical part-of-speech tagging which aims at making some well established methods widely available. The software is very user friendly, runs on any PC and can be downloaded as a complete package (including lexicon and documentation) from the World W...
cmp-lg/9611001
OT SIMPLE - a construction-kit approach to Optimality Theory implementation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper details a simple approach to the implementation of Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993) on a computer, in part reusing standard system software. In a nutshell, OT's GENerating source is implemented as a BinProlog program interpreting a context-free specification of a GEN structural grammar acc...
cmp-lg/9611002
Unsupervised Language Acquisition
cmp-lg cs.CL
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based heavily on concepts borrowed from machine learning and statistical estimation. In ...
cmp-lg/9611003
Data-Oriented Language Processing. An Overview
cmp-lg cs.CL
During the last few years, a new approach to language processing has started to emerge, which has become known under various labels such as "data-oriented parsing", "corpus-based interpretation", and "tree-bank grammar" (cf. van den Berg et al. 1994; Bod 1992-96; Bod et al. 1996a/b; Bonnema 1996; Charniak 1996a/b; Go...
cmp-lg/9611004
Nonuniform Markov models
cmp-lg cs.CL
A statistical language model assigns probability to strings of arbitrary length. Unfortunately, it is not possible to gather reliable statistics on strings of arbitrary length from a finite corpus. Therefore, a statistical language model must decide that each symbol in a string depends on at most a small, finite numb...
cmp-lg/9611005
Integrating HMM-Based Speech Recognition With Direct Manipulation In A Multimodal Korean Natural Language Interface
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a HMM-based speech recognition engine and its integration into direct manipulation interfaces for Korean document editor. Speech recognition can reduce typical tedious and repetitive actions which are inevitable in standard GUIs (graphic user interfaces). Our system consists of general speech reco...
cmp-lg/9611006
A Framework for Natural Language Interfaces to Temporal Databases
cmp-lg cs.CL
Over the past thirty years, there has been considerable progress in the design of natural language interfaces to databases. Most of this work has concerned snapshot databases, in which there are only limited facilities for manipulating time-varying information. The database community is becoming increasingly interest...
cmp-lg/9612001
Comparative Experiments on Disambiguating Word Senses: An Illustration of the Role of Bias in Machine Learning
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes an experimental comparison of seven different learning algorithms on the problem of learning to disambiguate the meaning of a word from context. The algorithms tested include statistical, neural-network, decision-tree, rule-based, and case-based classification techniques. The specific problem tes...
cmp-lg/9612002
Specialized Language Models using Dialogue Predictions
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper analyses language modeling in spoken dialogue systems for accessing a database. The use of several language models obtained by exploiting dialogue predictions gives better results than the use of a single model for the whole dialogue interaction. For this reason several models have been created, each one f...
cmp-lg/9612003
Metrics for Evaluating Dialogue Strategies in a Spoken Language System
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we describe a set of metrics for the evaluation of different dialogue management strategies in an implemented real-time spoken language system. The set of metrics we propose offers useful insights in evaluating how particular choices in the dialogue management can affect the overall quality of the man-...
cmp-lg/9612004
Dialogos: a Robust System for Human-Machine Spoken Dialogue on the Telephone
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents Dialogos, a real-time system for human-machine spoken dialogue on the telephone in task-oriented domains. The system has been tested in a large trial with inexperienced users and it has proved robust enough to allow spontaneous interactions both to users which get good recognition performance and ...
cmp-lg/9612005
Maximum Entropy Modeling Toolkit
cmp-lg cs.CL
The Maximum Entropy Modeling Toolkit supports parameter estimation and prediction for statistical language models in the maximum entropy framework. The maximum entropy framework provides a constructive method for obtaining the unique conditional distribution p*(y|x) that satisfies a set of linear constraints and maxi...
cmp-lg/9701001
Exploiting Context to Identify Lexical Atoms -- A Statistical View of Linguistic Context
cmp-lg cs.CL
Interpretation of natural language is inherently context-sensitive. Most words in natural language are ambiguous and their meanings are heavily dependent on the linguistic context in which they are used. The study of lexical semantics can not be separated from the notion of context. This paper takes a contextual appr...
cmp-lg/9701002
Hybrid language processing in the Spoken Language Translator
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rule...
cmp-lg/9701003
Generating Information-Sharing Subdialogues in Expert-User Consultation
cmp-lg cs.CL
In expert-consultation dialogues, it is inevitable that an agent will at times have insufficient information to determine whether to accept or reject a proposal by the other agent. This results in the need for the agent to initiate an information-sharing subdialogue to form a set of shared beliefs within which the ag...
cmp-lg/9701004
An Efficient Implementation of the Head-Corner Parser
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes an efficient and robust implementation of a bi-directional, head-driven parser for constraint-based grammars. This parser is developed for the OVIS system: a Dutch spoken dialogue system in which information about public transport can be obtained by telephone. After a review of the motivation f...
cmp-lg/9702001
SCREEN: Learning a Flat Syntactic and Semantic Spoken Language Analysis Using Artificial Neural Networks
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we describe a so-called screening approach for learning robust processing of spontaneously spoken language. A screening approach is a flat analysis which uses shallow sequences of category representations for analyzing an utterance at various syntactic, semantic and dialog levels. Rather than using a d...
cmp-lg/9702002
Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization from Corpora
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe a novel technique and implemented system for constructing a subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Each dictionary entry encodes the relative frequency of occurrence of a comprehensive set of subcategorization classes for English. An initial experiment, on a sample of 14 verbs which exhibit mu...
cmp-lg/9702003
A Robust Text Processing Technique Applied to Lexical Error Recovery
cmp-lg cs.CL
This thesis addresses automatic lexical error recovery and tokenization of corrupt text input. We propose a technique that can automatically correct misspellings, segmentation errors and real-word errors in a unified framework that uses both a model of language production and a model of the typing behavior, and which...
cmp-lg/9702004
An Annotation Scheme for Free Word Order Languages
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe an annotation scheme and a tool developed for creating linguistically annotated corpora for non-configurational languages. Since the requirements for such a formalism differ from those posited for configurational languages, several features have been added, influencing the architecture of the scheme. The ...
cmp-lg/9702005
Software Infrastructure for Natural Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We classify and review current approaches to software infrastructure for research, development and delivery of NLP systems. The task is motivated by a discussion of current trends in the field of NLP and Language Engineering. We describe a system called GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering) that provides...
cmp-lg/9702006
Information Extraction - A User Guide
cmp-lg cs.CL
This technical memo describes Information Extraction from the point-of-view of a potential user of the technology. No knowledge of language processing is assumed. Information Extraction is a process which takes unseen texts as input and produces fixed-format, unambiguous data as output. This data may be used directly...
cmp-lg/9702007
Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents
cmp-lg cs.CL
Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. We describe COSMA, a ful...
cmp-lg/9702008
Sequential Model Selection for Word Sense Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Statistical models of word-sense disambiguation are often based on a small number of contextual features or on a model that is assumed to characterize the interactions among a set of features. Model selection is presented as an alternative to these approaches, where a sequential search of possible models is conducted...
cmp-lg/9702009
Fast Statistical Parsing of Noun Phrases for Document Indexing
cmp-lg cs.CL
Information Retrieval (IR) is an important application area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) where one encounters the genuine challenge of processing large quantities of unrestricted natural language text. While much effort has been made to apply NLP techniques to IR, very few NLP techniques have been evaluated o...
cmp-lg/9702010
Selective Sampling of Effective Example Sentence Sets for Word Sense Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes an efficient example selection method for example-based word sense disambiguation systems. To construct a practical size database, a considerable overhead for manual sense disambiguation is required. Our method is characterized by the reliance on the notion of the training utility: the degree to w...
cmp-lg/9702011
How much has information technology contributed to linguistics?
cmp-lg cs.CL
Information technology should have much to offer linguistics, not only through the opportunities offered by large-scale data analysis and the stimulus to develop formal computational models, but through the chance to use language in systems for automatic natural language processing. The paper discusses these possibil...
cmp-lg/9702012
Design and Implementation of a Computational Lexicon for Turkish
cmp-lg cs.CL
All natural language processing systems (such as parsers, generators, taggers) need to have access to a lexicon about the words in the language. This thesis presents a lexicon architecture for natural language processing in Turkish. Given a query form consisting of a surface form and other features acting as restrict...