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cmp-lg/9505041
On Descriptive Complexity, Language Complexity, and GB
cmp-lg cs.CL
We introduce $L^2_{K,P}$, a monadic second-order language for reasoning about trees which characterizes the strongly Context-Free Languages in the sense that a set of finite trees is definable in $L^2_{K,P}$ iff it is (modulo a projection) a Local Set---the set of derivation trees generated by a CFG. This provides a ...
cmp-lg/9505042
Robust Parsing Based on Discourse Information: Completing partial parses of ill-formed sentences on the basis of discourse information
cmp-lg cs.CL
In a consistent text, many words and phrases are repeatedly used in more than one sentence. When an identical phrase (a set of consecutive words) is repeated in different sentences, the constituent words of those sentences tend to be associated in identical modification patterns with identical parts of speech and ide...
cmp-lg/9505043
Using Decision Trees for Coreference Resolution
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes RESOLVE, a system that uses decision trees to learn how to classify coreferent phrases in the domain of business joint ventures. An experiment is presented in which the performance of RESOLVE is compared to the performance of a manually engineered set of rules for the same task. The results show ...
cmp-lg/9505044
Automatic Evaluation and Uniform Filter Cascades for Inducing N-Best Translation Lexicons
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper shows how to induce an N-best translation lexicon from a bilingual text corpus using statistical properties of the corpus together with four external knowledge sources. The knowledge sources are cast as filters, so that any subset of them can be cascaded in a uniform framework. A new objective evaluation m...
cmp-lg/9505045
Hybrid Transfer in an English-French Spoken Language Translator
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper argues the importance of high-quality translation for spoken language translation systems. It describes an architecture suitable for rapid development of high-quality limited-domain translation systems, which has been implemented within an advanced prototype English to French spoken language translator. The...
cmp-lg/9506001
Ma(r)king concessions in English and German
cmp-lg cs.CL
In order to generate cohesive discourse, many of the relations holding between text segments need to be signalled to the reader by means of cue words, or {\em discourse markers}. Programs usually do this in a simplistic way, e.g., by using one marker per relation. In reality, however, language offers a very wide rang...
cmp-lg/9506002
Weak subsumption Constraints for Type Diagnosis: An Incremental Algorithm
cmp-lg cs.CL
We introduce constraints necessary for type checking a higher-order concurrent constraint language, and solve them with an incremental algorithm. Our constraint system extends rational unification by constraints x$\subseteq$ y saying that ``$x$ has at least the structure of $y$'', modelled by a weak instance relation...
cmp-lg/9506003
Syllable parsing in English and French
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper I argue that Optimality Theory provides for an explanatory model of syllabic parsing in English and French. The argument is based on psycholinguistic facts that have been mysterious up to now. This argument is further buttressed by the computational implementation developed here. This model is important...
cmp-lg/9506004
Using Higher-Order Logic Programming for Semantic Interpretation of Coordinate Constructs
cmp-lg cs.CL
Many theories of semantic interpretation use lambda-term manipulation to compositionally compute the meaning of a sentence. These theories are usually implemented in a language such as Prolog that can simulate lambda-term operations with first-order unification. However, for some interesting cases, such as a Combinat...
cmp-lg/9506005
A Support Tool for Tagset Mapping
cmp-lg cs.CL
Many different tagsets are used in existing corpora; these tagsets vary according to the objectives of specific projects (which may be as far apart as robust parsing vs. spelling correction). In many situations, however, one would like to have uniform access to the linguistic information encoded in corpus annotations...
cmp-lg/9506006
Automatic Extraction of Tagset Mappings from Parallel-Annotated Corpora
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes some of the recent work of project AMALGAM (automatic mapping among lexico-grammatical annotation models). We are investigating ways to map between the leading corpus annotation schemes in order to improve their resuability. Collation of all the included corpora into a single large annotated corp...
cmp-lg/9506007
Features and Agreement
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper compares the consistency-based account of agreement phenomena in `unification-based' grammars with an implication-based account based on a simple feature extension to Lambek Categorial Grammar (LCG). We show that the LCG treatment accounts for constructions that have been recognized as problematic for `uni...
cmp-lg/9506008
CLiFF Notes: Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania
cmp-lg cs.CL
Short abstracts by computational linguistics researchers at the University of Pennsylvania describing ongoing individual and joint projects.
cmp-lg/9506009
Filling Knowledge Gaps in a Broad-Coverage Machine Translation System
cmp-lg cs.CL
Knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT) techniques yield high quality in domains with detailed semantic models, limited vocabulary, and controlled input grammar. Scaling up along these dimensions means acquiring large knowledge resources. It also means behaving reasonably when definitive knowledge is not yet avail...
cmp-lg/9506010
Two-level, Many-Paths Generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Large-scale natural language generation requires the integration of vast amounts of knowledge: lexical, grammatical, and conceptual. A robust generator must be able to operate well even when pieces of knowledge are missing. It must also be robust against incomplete or inaccurate inputs. To attack these problems, we h...
cmp-lg/9506011
Unification-Based Glossing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an approach to syntax-based machine translation that combines unification-style interpretation with statistical processing. This approach enables us to translate any Japanese newspaper article into English, with quality far better than a word-for-word translation. Novel ideas include the use of feature str...
cmp-lg/9506012
Presenting Punctuation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Until recently, punctuation has received very little attention in the linguistics and computational linguistics literature. Since the publication of Nunberg's (1990) monograph on the topic, however, punctuation has seen its stock begin to rise: spurred in part by Nunberg's ground-breaking work, a number of valuable i...
cmp-lg/9506013
A Study of the Context(s) in a Specific Type of Texts: Car Accident Reports
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper addresses the issue of defining context, and more specifically the different contexts needed for understanding a particular type of texts. The corpus chosen is homogeneous and allows us to determine characteristic properties of the texts from which certain inferences can be drawn by the reader. These chara...
cmp-lg/9506014
Inducing Features of Random Fields
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a technique for constructing random fields from a set of training samples. The learning paradigm builds increasingly complex fields by allowing potential functions, or features, that are supported by increasingly large subgraphs. Each feature has a weight that is trained by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler ...
cmp-lg/9506015
Ambiguity in the Acquisition of Lexical Information
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes an approach to the automatic identification of lexical information in on-line dictionaries. This approach uses bootstrapping techniques, specifically so that ambiguity in the dictionary text can be treated properly. This approach consists of processing an on-line dictionary multiple times, each t...
cmp-lg/9506016
Indefeasible Semantics and Defeasible Pragmatics
cmp-lg cs.CL
An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and pragmatics subsystems in terms of monotonic and nonmonotonic inferences, I will discus...
cmp-lg/9506017
The Effect of Pitch Accenting on Pronoun Referent Resolution
cmp-lg cs.CL
By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions served by pitch accents, as markers of both propositional (semantic/pragmatic) ...
cmp-lg/9506018
Intelligent Voice Prosthesis: Converting Icons into Natural Language Sentences
cmp-lg cs.CL
The Intelligent Voice Prosthesis is a communication tool which reconstructs the meaning of an ill-structured sequence of icons or symbols, and expresses this meaning into sentences of a Natural Language (French). It has been developed for the use of people who cannot express themselves orally in natural language, and...
cmp-lg/9506019
Review of Charniak's "Statistical Language Learning"
cmp-lg cs.CL
This article is an in-depth review of Eugene Charniak's book, "Statistical Language Learning". The review evaluates the appropriateness of the book as an introductory text for statistical language learning for a variety of audiences. It also includes an extensive bibliography of articles and papers which might be use...
cmp-lg/9506020
GLR-Parsing of Word Lattices Using a Beam Search Method
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an approach that allows the efficient integration of speech recognition and language understanding using Tomita's generalized LR-parsing algorithm. For this purpose the GLRP-algorithm is revised so that an agenda mechanism can be used to control the flow of computation of the parsing process. This...
cmp-lg/9506021
Prepositional Phrase Attachment through a Backed-Off Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
Recent work has considered corpus-based or statistical approaches to the problem of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity. Typically, ambiguous verb phrases of the form {v np1 p np2} are resolved through a model which considers values of the four head words (v, n1, p and n2). This paper shows that the problem is ...
cmp-lg/9506022
Deriving Procedural and Warning Instructions from Device and Environment Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
This study is centred on the generation of instructions for household appliances. We show how knowledge about a device, together with knowledge about the environment, can be used for reasoning about instructions. The information communicated by the instructions can be planned from a version of the knowledge of the ar...
cmp-lg/9506023
Empirical Discovery in Linguistics
cmp-lg cs.CL
A discovery system for detecting correspondences in data is described, based on the familiar induction methods of J. S. Mill. Given a set of observations, the system induces the ``causally'' related facts in these observations. Its application to empirical linguistic discovery is described.
cmp-lg/9506024
An Approach to Proper Name Tagging for German
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an incremental method for the tagging of proper names in German newspaper texts. The tagging is performed by the analysis of the syntactic and textual contexts of proper names together with a morphological analysis. The proper names selected by this process supply new contexts which can be used fo...
cmp-lg/9506025
A Categorial Framework for Composition in Multiple Linguistic Domains
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes a computational framework for a grammar architecture in which different linguistic domains such as morphology, syntax, and semantics are treated not as separate components but compositional domains. Word and phrase formation are modeled as uniform processes contributing to the derivation of the s...
cmp-lg/9506026
A Computational Approach to Aspectual Composition
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, I argue, contrary to the prevailing opinion in the linguistics and philosophy literature, that a sortal approach to aspectual composition can indeed be explanatory. In support of this view, I develop a synthesis of competing proposals by Hinrichs, Krifka and Jackendoff which takes Jackendoff's cross-cu...
cmp-lg/9507001
Constraint Categorial Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
Although unification can be used to implement a weak form of $\beta$-reduction, several linguistic phenomena are better handled by using some form of $\lambda$-calculus. In this paper we present a higher order feature description calculus based on a typed $\lambda$-calculus. We show how the techniques used in \CLG fo...
cmp-lg/9507002
A framework for lexical representation
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we present a unification-based lexical platform designed for highly inflected languages (like Roman ones). A formalism is proposed for encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for linguistic generalizations. From this source, we automatically generate an allomorph indexed dictionary, adequate ...
cmp-lg/9507003
Robust Processing of Natural Language
cmp-lg cs.CL
Previous approaches to robustness in natural language processing usually treat deviant input by relaxing grammatical constraints whenever a successful analysis cannot be provided by ``normal'' means. This schema implies, that error detection always comes prior to error handling, a behaviour which hardly can compete w...
cmp-lg/9507004
GRAMPAL: A Morphological Processor for Spanish implemented in Prolog
cmp-lg cs.CL
A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflection for verbs, nouns and adjectives is presented. This model is based on feature unification and it relies upon a lexicon of allomorphs both for stems and morphemes. Word forms are built by the concatenation of allomorphs by means of special contextual features. We mak...
cmp-lg/9507005
Comparative Ellipsis and Variable Binding
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we discuss the question whether phrasal comparatives should be given a direct interpretation, or require an analysis as elliptic constructions, and answer it with Yes and No. The most adequate analysis of wide reading attributive (WRA) comparatives seems to be as cases of ellipsis, while a direct (but ...
cmp-lg/9507006
Transfer in a Connectionist Model of the Acquisition of Morphology
cmp-lg cs.CL
The morphological systems of natural languages are replete with examples of the same devices used for multiple purposes: (1) the same type of morphological process (for example, suffixation for both noun case and verb tense) and (2) identical morphemes (for example, the same suffix for English noun plural and possess...
cmp-lg/9507007
An Efficient Algorithm for Surface Generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
A method is given that "inverts" a logic grammar and displays it from the point of view of the logical form, rather than from that of the word string. LR-compiling techniques are used to allow a recursive-descent generation algorithm to perform "functor merging" much in the same way as an LR parser performs prefix me...
cmp-lg/9507008
A Constraint-based Case Frame Lexicon Architecture
cmp-lg cs.CL
In Turkish, (and possibly in many other languages) verbs often convey several meanings (some totally unrelated) when they are used with subjects, objects, oblique objects, adverbial adjuncts, with certain lexical, morphological, and semantic features, and co-occurrence restrictions. In addition to the usual sense var...
cmp-lg/9507009
Specifying Logic Programs in Controlled Natural Language
cmp-lg cs.CL
Writing specifications for computer programs is not easy since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge this conceptual gap we propose controlled natural language as a declarative and application-specific specification language. Cont...
cmp-lg/9507010
On-line Learning of Binary Lexical Relations Using Two-dimensional Weighted Majority Algorithms
cmp-lg cs.CL
We consider the problem of learning a certain type of lexical semantic knowledge that can be expressed as a binary relation between words, such as the so-called sub-categorization of verbs (a verb-noun relation) and the compound noun phrase relation (a noun-noun relation). Specifically, we view this problem as an on-...
cmp-lg/9507011
Generalizing Case Frames Using a Thesaurus and the MDL Principle
cmp-lg cs.CL
We address the problem of automatically acquiring case-frame patterns from large corpus data. In particular, we view this problem as the problem of estimating a (conditional) distribution over a partition of words, and propose a new generalization method based on the MDL (Minimum Description Length) principle. In ord...
cmp-lg/9507012
A Grammar Formalism and Cross-Serial Dependencies
cmp-lg cs.CL
First we define a unification grammar formalism called the Tree Homomorphic Feature Structure Grammar. It is based on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), but has a strong restriction on the syntax of the equations. We then show that this grammar formalism defines a full abstract family of languages, and that it is capa...
cmp-lg/9507013
Indexed Languages and Unification Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
Indexed languages are interesting in computational linguistics because they are the least class of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy that has not been shown not to be adequate to describe the string set of natural language sentences. We here define a class of unification grammars that exactly describe the class of i...
cmp-lg/9507014
Co-Indexing Labelled DRSs to Represent and Reason with Ambiguities
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper addresses the problem of representing ambiguities in a way that allows for monotonic disambiguation and for direct deductive computation. The paper focuses on an extension of the formalism of underspecified DRSs to ambiguities introduced by plural NPs. It deals with the collective/distributive distinction, ...
cmp-lg/9508001
Bridging as Coercive Accommodation
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we discuss the notion of "bridging" in Discourse Representation Theory as a tool to account for discourse referents that have only been established implicitly, through the lexical semantics of other referents. In doing so, we use ideas from Generative Lexicon theory, to introduce antecedents for anaphor...
cmp-lg/9508002
A Compositional Treatment of Polysemous Arguments in Categorial Grammar
cmp-lg cs.CL
We discuss an extension of the standard logical rules (functional application and abstraction) in Categorial Grammar (CG), in order to deal with some specific cases of polysemy. We borrow from Generative Lexicon theory which proposes the mechanism of {\em coercion}, next to a rich nominal lexical semantic structure c...
cmp-lg/9508003
A Robust Parsing Algorithm For Link Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we present a robust parsing algorithm based on the link grammar formalism for parsing natural languages. Our algorithm is a natural extension of the original dynamic programming recognition algorithm which recursively counts the number of linkages between two words in the input sentence. The modified al...
cmp-lg/9508004
Parsing English with a Link Grammar
cmp-lg cs.CL
We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural language grammars app...
cmp-lg/9508005
A Matching Technique in Example-Based Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper addresses an important problem in Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT), namely how to measure similarity between a sentence fragment and a set of stored examples. A new method is proposed that measures similarity according to both surface structure and content. A second contribution is the use of clust...
cmp-lg/9508006
Bi-Lexical Rules for Multi-Lexeme Translation in Lexicalist MT
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper presents a prototype lexicalist Machine Translation system (based on the so-called `Shake-and-Bake' approach of Whitelock (1992) consisting of an analysis component, a dynamic bilingual lexicon, and a generation component, and shows how it is applied to a range of MT problems. Multi-Lexeme translations are ...
cmp-lg/9508007
A Dynamic Approach to Rhythm in Language: Toward a Temporal Phonology
cmp-lg cs.CL
It is proposed that the theory of dynamical systems offers appropriate tools to model many phonological aspects of both speech production and perception. A dynamic account of speech rhythm is shown to be useful for description of both Japanese mora timing and English timing in a phrase repetition task. This orientati...
cmp-lg/9508008
On Constraint-Based Lambek Calculi
cmp-lg cs.CL
We explore the consequences of layering a Lambek proof system over an arbitrary (constraint) logic. A simple model-theoretic semantics for our hybrid language is provided for which a particularly simple combination of Lambek's and the proof system of the base logic is complete. Furthermore the proof system for the un...
cmp-lg/9508009
A Labelled Analytic Theorem Proving Environment for Categorial Grammar
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a system for the investigation of computational properties of categorial grammar parsing based on a labelled analytic tableaux theorem prover. This proof method allows us to take a modular approach, in which the basic grammar can be kept constant, while a range of categorial calculi can be captured by assi...
cmp-lg/9508010
Heuristics and Parse Ranking
cmp-lg cs.CL
There are currently two philosophies for building grammars and parsers -- Statistically induced grammars and Wide-coverage grammars. One way to combine the strengths of both approaches is to have a wide-coverage grammar with a heuristic component which is domain independent but whose contribution is tuned to particul...
cmp-lg/9508011
The Use of Knowledge Preconditions in Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
If an agent does not possess the knowledge needed to perform an action, it may privately plan to obtain the required information on its own, or it may involve another agent in the planning process by engaging it in a dialogue. In this paper, we show how the requirements of knowledge preconditions can be used to accou...
cmp-lg/9508012
A Natural Law of Succession
cmp-lg cs.CL
Consider the problem of multinomial estimation. You are given an alphabet of k distinct symbols and are told that the i-th symbol occurred exactly n_i times in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we present...
cmp-lg/9509001
How much is enough?: Data requirements for statistical NLP
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper I explore a number of issues in the analysis of data requirements for statistical NLP systems. A preliminary framework for viewing such systems is proposed and a sample of existing works are compared within this framework. The first steps toward a theory of data requirements are made by establishing som...
cmp-lg/9509002
Conserving Fuel in Statistical Language Learning: Predicting Data Requirements
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper I address the practical concern of predicting how much training data is sufficient for a statistical language learning system. First, I briefly review earlier results and show how these can be combined to bound the expected accuracy of a mode-based learner as a function of the volume of training data. I...
cmp-lg/9509003
Cluster Expansions and Iterative Scaling for Maximum Entropy Language Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
The maximum entropy method has recently been successfully introduced to a variety of natural language applications. In each of these applications, however, the power of the maximum entropy method is achieved at the cost of a considerable increase in computational requirements. In this paper we present a technique, cl...
cmp-lg/9509004
The Development and Migration of Concepts from Donor to Borrower Disciplines: Sublanguage Term Use in Hard & Soft Sciences
cmp-lg cs.CL
Academic disciplines, often divided into hard and soft sciences, may be understood as "donor disciplines" if they produce more concepts than they borrow from other disciplines, or "borrower disciplines" if they import more than they originate. Terms used to describe these concepts can be used to distinguish between h...
cmp-lg/9509005
ParseTalk about Textual Ellipsis
cmp-lg cs.CL
A hybrid methodology for the resolution of text-level ellipsis is presented in this paper. It incorporates conceptual proximity criteria applied to ontologically well-engineered domain knowledge bases and an approach to centering based on functional topic/comment patterns. We state text grammatical predicates for ell...
cmp-lg/9510001
POS Tagging Using Relaxation Labelling
cmp-lg cs.CL
Relaxation labelling is an optimization technique used in many fields to solve constraint satisfaction problems. The algorithm finds a combination of values for a set of variables such that satisfies -to the maximum possible degree- a set of given constraints. This paper describes some experiments performed applying ...
cmp-lg/9510002
Using Chinese Text Processing Technique for the Processing of Sanskrit Based Indian Languages: Maximum Resource Utilization and Maximum Compatibility
cmp-lg cs.CL
Chinese text processing systems are using Double Byte Coding , while almost all existing Sanskrit Based Indian Languages have been using Single Byte coding for text processing. Through observation, Chinese Information Processing Technique has already achieved great technical development both in east and west. In cont...
cmp-lg/9510003
A Proposal for Word Sense Disambiguation using Conceptual Distance
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a method for the resolution of lexical ambiguity and its automatic evaluation over the Brown Corpus. The method relies on the use of the wide-coverage noun taxonomy of WordNet and the notion of conceptual distance among concepts, captured by a Conceptual Density formula developed for this purpose....
cmp-lg/9510004
Disambiguating bilingual nominal entries against WordNet
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper explores the acquisition of conceptual knowledge from bilingual dictionaries (French/English, Spanish/English and English/Spanish) using a pre-existing broad coverage Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) WordNet. Bilingual nominal entries are disambiguated agains WordNet, therefore linking the bilingual dictionari...
cmp-lg/9510005
Developing and Evaluating a Probabilistic LR Parser of Part-of-Speech and Punctuation Labels
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe an approach to robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of unrestricted naturally-occurring (English) input. The technique involves parsing sequences of part-of-speech and punctuation labels using a unification-based grammar coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We describe the coverage of several co...
cmp-lg/9510006
Incorporating Discourse Aspects in English -- Polish MT: Towards Robust Implementation
cmp-lg cs.CL
The main aim of translation is an accurate transfer of meaning so that the result is not only grammatically and lexically correct but also communicatively adequate. This paper stresses the need for discourse analysis the aim of which is to preserve the communicative meaning in English--Polish machine translation. Unl...
cmp-lg/9510007
Automatic Identification of Support Verbs: A Step Towards a Definition of Semantic Weight
cmp-lg cs.CL
Current definitions of notions of lexical density and semantic weight are based on the division of words into closed and open classes, and on intuition. This paper develops a computationally tractable definition of semantic weight, concentrating on what it means for a word to be semantically light; the definition inv...
cmp-lg/9510008
Toward an MT System without Pre-Editing --- Effects of New Methods in ALT-J/E ---
cmp-lg cs.CL
Recently, several types of Japanese-to-English machine translation systems have been developed, but all of them require an initial process of rewriting the original text into easily translatable Japanese. Therefore these systems are unsuitable for translating information that needs to be speedily disseminated. To ove...
cmp-lg/9511001
Countability and Number in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a heuristic method that uses information in the Japanese text along with knowledge of English countability and number stored in transfer dictionaries to determine the countability and number of English noun phrases. Incorporating this method into the machine translation system ALT-J/E, helped to r...
cmp-lg/9511002
Letting the Cat out of the Bag: Generation for Shake-and-Bake MT
cmp-lg cs.CL
Describes an algorithm for the generation phase of a Shake-and-Bake Machine Translation system. Since the problem is NP-complete, it is unlikely that the algorithm will be efficient in all cases, but for the cases tested it offers an improvement over Whitelock's previously published algorithm. The work was carried ou...
cmp-lg/9511003
The Effect of Resource Limits and Task Complexity on Collaborative Planning in Dialogue
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper shows how agents' choice in communicative action can be designed to mitigate the effect of their resource limits in the context of particular features of a collaborative planning task. I first motivate a number of hypotheses about effective language behavior based on a statistical analysis of a corpus of n...
cmp-lg/9511004
An investigation into the correlation of cue phrases, unfilled pauses and the structuring of spoken discourse
cmp-lg cs.CL
Expectations about the correlation of cue phrases, the duration of unfilled pauses and the structuring of spoken discourse are framed in light of Grosz and Sidner's theory of discourse and are tested for a directions-giving dialogue. The results suggest that cue phrase and discourse structuring tasks may align, and s...
cmp-lg/9511005
Chart-driven Connectionist Categorial Parsing of Spoken Korean
cmp-lg cs.CL
While most of the speech and natural language systems which were developed for English and other Indo-European languages neglect the morphological processing and integrate speech and natural language at the word level, for the agglutinative languages such as Korean and Japanese, the morphological processing plays a m...
cmp-lg/9511006
Disambiguating Noun Groupings with Respect to WordNet Senses
cmp-lg cs.CL
Word groupings useful for language processing tasks are increasingly available, as thesauri appear on-line, and as distributional word clustering techniques improve. However, for many tasks, one is interested in relationships among word {\em senses}, not words. This paper presents a method for automatic sense disambi...
cmp-lg/9511007
Using Information Content to Evaluate Semantic Similarity in a Taxonomy
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a new measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy, based on the notion of information content. Experimental evaluation suggests that the measure performs encouragingly well (a correlation of r = 0.79 with a benchmark set of human similarity judgments, with an upper bound of r = 0.90 for hum...
cmp-lg/9512001
Analysis of the Arabic Broken Plural and Diminutive
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper demonstrates how the challenging problem of the Arabic broken plural and diminutive can be handled under a multi-tape two-level model, an extension to two-level morphology.
cmp-lg/9512002
The Unsupervised Acquisition of a Lexicon from Continuous Speech
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical representation of language that overcomes many of the problems that have stymied previous grammar-indu...
cmp-lg/9512003
Limited Attention and Discourse Structure
cmp-lg cs.CL
This squib examines the role of limited attention in a theory of discourse structure and proposes a model of attentional state that relates current hierarchical theories of discourse structure to empirical evidence about human discourse processing capabilities. First, I present examples that are not predicted by Gros...
cmp-lg/9512004
Natural language processing: she needs something old and something new (maybe something borrowed and something blue, too)
cmp-lg cs.CL
Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second, that an attack on the summarising task, which is made ever more important by the ...
cmp-lg/9512005
Term Encoding of Typed Feature Structures
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an approach to Prolog-style term encoding of typed feature structures. The type feature structures to be encoded are constrained by appropriateness conditions as in Carpenter's ALE system. But unlike ALE, we impose a further independently motivated closed-world assumption. This assumption allows u...
cmp-lg/9601001
Automatic Inference of DATR Theories
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents an approach for the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge from unstructured data. The acquired knowledge is represented in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. A set of transformation rules that establish inheritance relationships and a default-inference algorithm make up th...
cmp-lg/9601002
Generic rules and non-constituent coordination
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a metagrammatical formalism, {\em generic rules}, to give a default interpretation to grammar rules. Our formalism introduces a process of {\em dynamic binding} interfacing the level of pure grammatical knowledge representation and the parsing level. We present an approach to non-constituent coordination w...
cmp-lg/9601003
Report of the Study Group on Assessment and Evaluation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This is an interim report discussing possible guidelines for the assessment and evaluation of projects developing speech and language systems. It was prepared at the request of the European Commission DG XIII by an ad hoc study group, and is now being made available in the form in which it was submitted to the Commis...
cmp-lg/9601004
Similarity between Words Computed by Spreading Activation on an English Dictionary
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes a method for measuring semantic similarity between words as a new tool for text analysis. The similarity is measured on a semantic network constructed systematically from a subset of the English dictionary, LDOCE (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Spreading activation on the network can...
cmp-lg/9601005
Text Segmentation Based on Similarity between Words
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper proposes a new indicator of text structure, called the lexical cohesion profile (LCP), which locates segment boundaries in a text. A text segment is a coherent scene; the words in a segment are linked together via lexical cohesion relations. LCP records mutual similarity of words in a sequence of text. The...
cmp-lg/9601006
Possessive Pronouns as Determiners in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Possessive pronouns are used as determiners in English when no equivalent would be used in a Japanese sentence with the same meaning. This paper proposes a heuristic method of generating such possessive pronouns even when there is no equivalent in the Japanese. The method uses information about the use of possessive ...
cmp-lg/9601007
Context-Sensitive Measurement of Word Distance by Adaptive Scaling of a Semantic Space
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper proposes a computationally feasible method for measuring context-sensitive semantic distance between words. The distance is computed by adaptive scaling of a semantic space. In the semantic space, each word in the vocabulary V is represented by a multi-dimensional vector which is obtained from an English di...
cmp-lg/9601008
Noun Phrase Reference in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper shows the necessity of distinguishing different referential uses of noun phrases in machine translation. We argue that differentiating between the generic, referential and ascriptive uses of noun phrases is the minimum necessary to generate articles and number correctly when translating from Japanese to En...
cmp-lg/9601009
A General Architecture for Language Engineering (GATE) - a new approach to Language Engineering R&D
cmp-lg cs.CL
This report argues for the provision of a common software infrastructure for NLP systems. Current trends in Language Engineering research are reviewed as motivation for this infrastructure, and relevant recent work discussed. A freely-available system called GATE is described which builds on this work.
cmp-lg/9601010
Parsing with Typed Feature Structures
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we provide for parsing with respect to grammars expressed in a general TFS-based formalism, a restriction of ALE. Our motivation being the design of an abstract (WAM-like) machine for the formalism, we consider parsing as a computational process and use it as an operational semantics to guide the design...
cmp-lg/9601011
Parsing with Typed Feature Structures
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we provide for parsing with respect to grammars expressed in a general TFS-based formalism, a restriction of ALE. Our motivation being the design of an abstract (WAM-like) machine for the formalism, we consider parsing as a computational process and use it as an operational semantics to guide the design...
cmp-lg/9602001
How Part-of-Speech Tags Affect Text Retrieval and Filtering Performance
cmp-lg cs.CL
Natural language processing (NLP) applied to information retrieval (IR) and filtering problems may assign part-of-speech tags to terms and, more generally, modify queries and documents. Analytic models can predict the performance of a text filtering system as it incorporates changes suggested by NLP, allowing us to m...
cmp-lg/9602002
Situations and Computation: An Overview of Recent Research
cmp-lg cs.CL
Serious thinking about the computational aspects of situation theory is just starting. There have been some recent proposals in this direction (viz. PROSIT and ASTL), with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. We believe that a programming environment incorporating bona fide situation-theoret...
cmp-lg/9602003
Text Windows and Phrases Differing by Discipline, Location in Document, and Syntactic Structure
cmp-lg cs.CL
Knowledge of window style, content, location and grammatical structure may be used to classify documents as originating within a particular discipline or may be used to place a document on a theory versus practice spectrum. This distinction is also studied here using the type-token ratio to differentiate between subl...
cmp-lg/9602004
Assessing agreement on classification tasks: the kappa statistic
cmp-lg cs.CL
Currently, computational linguists and cognitive scientists working in the area of discourse and dialogue argue that their subjective judgments are reliable using several different statistics, none of which are easily interpretable or comparable to each other. Meanwhile, researchers in content analysis have already e...
cmp-lg/9603001
Speech Recognition by Composition of Weighted Finite Automata
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a general framework based on weighted finite automata and weighted finite-state transducers for describing and implementing speech recognizers. The framework allows us to represent uniformly the information sources and data structures used in recognition, including context-dependent units, pronunciation di...
cmp-lg/9603002
Finite-State Approximation of Phrase-Structure Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
Phrase-structure grammars are effective models for important syntactic and semantic aspects of natural languages, but can be computationally too demanding for use as language models in real-time speech recognition. Therefore, finite-state models are used instead, even though they lack expressive power. To reconcile t...
cmp-lg/9603003
Attempto Controlled English (ACE)
cmp-lg cs.CL
Attempto Controlled English (ACE) allows domain specialists to interactively formulate requirements specifications in domain concepts. ACE can be accurately and efficiently processed by a computer, but is expressive enough to allow natural usage. The Attempto system translates specification texts in ACE into discours...