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cmp-lg/9702013
Knowledge Acquisition for Content Selection
cmp-lg cs.CL
An important part of building a natural-language generation (NLG) system is knowledge acquisition, that is deciding on the specific schemas, plans, grammar rules, and so forth that should be used in the NLG system. We discuss some experiments we have performed with KA for content-selection rules, in the context of bu...
cmp-lg/9702014
Building a Generation Knowledge Source using Internet-Accessible Newswire
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we describe a method for automatic creation of a knowledge source for text generation using information extraction over the Internet. We present a prototype system called PROFILE which uses a client-server architecture to extract noun-phrase descriptions of entities such as people, places, and organiza...
cmp-lg/9702015
Improvising Linguistic Style: Social and Affective Bases for Agent Personality
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is a key aspect of character, and show how speech act representations common in ...
cmp-lg/9702016
Instructions for Temporal Annotation of Scheduling Dialogs
cmp-lg cs.CL
Human annotation of natural language facilitates standardized evaluation of natural language processing systems and supports automated feature extraction. This document consists of instructions for annotating the temporal information in scheduling dialogs, dialogs in which the participants schedule a meeting with one...
cmp-lg/9703001
Domain Adaptation with Clustered Language Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, a method of domain adaptation for clustered language models is developed. It is based on a previously developed clustering algorithm, but with a modified optimisation criterion. The results are shown to be slightly superior to the previously published 'Fillup' method, which can be used to adapt standar...
cmp-lg/9703002
Concept Clustering and Knowledge Integration from a Children's Dictionary
cmp-lg cs.CL
Knowledge structures called Concept Clustering Knowledge Graphs (CCKGs) are introduced along with a process for their construction from a machine readable dictionary. CCKGs contain multiple concepts interrelated through multiple semantic relations together forming a semantic cluster represented by a conceptual graph....
cmp-lg/9703003
A Semantics-based Communication System for Dysphasic Subjects
cmp-lg cs.CL
Dysphasic subjects do not have complete linguistic abilities and only produce a weakly structured, topicalized language. They are offered artificial symbolic languages to help them communicate in a way more adapted to their linguistic abilities. After a structural analysis of a corpus of utterances from children with...
cmp-lg/9703004
Insights into the Dialogue Processing of VERBMOBIL
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present the dialogue module of the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL. We follow the approach that the solution to dialogue processing in a mediating scenario can not depend on a single constrained processing tool, but on a combination of several simple, efficient, and robust components. We show how our...
cmp-lg/9703005
Semi-Automatic Acquisition of Domain-Specific Translation Lexicons
cmp-lg cs.CL
We investigate the utility of an algorithm for translation lexicon acquisition (SABLE), used previously on a very large corpus to acquire general translation lexicons, when that algorithm is applied to a much smaller corpus to produce candidates for domain-specific translation lexicons.
cmp-lg/9704001
Evaluating Multilingual Gisting of Web Pages
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe a prototype system for multilingual gisting of Web pages, and present an evaluation methodology based on the notion of gisting as decision support. This evaluation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other ...
cmp-lg/9704002
A Maximum Entropy Approach to Identifying Sentence Boundaries
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a trainable model for identifying sentence boundaries in raw text. Given a corpus annotated with sentence boundaries, our model learns to classify each occurrence of ., ?, and ! as either a valid or invalid sentence boundary. The training procedure requires no hand-crafted rules, lexica, part-of-speech tag...
cmp-lg/9704003
Machine Transliteration
cmp-lg cs.CL
It is challenging to translate names and technical terms across languages with different alphabets and sound inventories. These items are commonly transliterated, i.e., replaced with approximate phonetic equivalents. For example, "computer" in English comes out as "konpyuutaa" in Japanese. Translating such items from...
cmp-lg/9704004
PARADISE: A Framework for Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Agents
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents PARADISE (PARAdigm for DIalogue System Evaluation), a general framework for evaluating spoken dialogue agents. The framework decouples task requirements from an agent's dialogue behaviors, supports comparisons among dialogue strategies, enables the calculation of performance over subdialogues and ...
cmp-lg/9704005
Tracking Initiative in Collaborative Dialogue Interactions
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we argue for the need to distinguish between task and dialogue initiatives, and present a model for tracking shifts in both types of initiatives in dialogue interactions. Our model predicts the initiative holders in the next dialogue turn based on the current initiative holders and the effect that obse...
cmp-lg/9704006
Representing Constraints with Automata
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we describe an approach to constraint-based syntactic theories in terms of finite tree automata. The solutions to constraints expressed in weak monadic second order (MSO) logic are represented by tree automata recognizing the assignments which make the formulas true. We show that this allows an efficien...
cmp-lg/9704007
Combining Unsupervised Lexical Knowledge Methods for Word Sense Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a method to combine a set of unsupervised algorithms that can accurately disambiguate word senses in a large, completely untagged corpus. Although most of the techniques for word sense resolution have been presented as stand-alone, it is our belief that full-fledged lexical ambiguity resolution sh...
cmp-lg/9704008
Intonational Boundaries, Speech Repairs and Discourse Markers: Modeling Spoken Dialog
cmp-lg cs.CL
To understand a speaker's turn of a conversation, one needs to segment it into intonational phrases, clean up any speech repairs that might have occurred, and identify discourse markers. In this paper, we argue that these problems must be resolved together, and that they must be resolved early in the processing strea...
cmp-lg/9704009
Developing a hybrid NP parser
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe the use of energy function optimization in very shallow syntactic parsing. The approach can use linguistic rules and corpus-based statistics, so the strengths of both linguistic and statistical approaches to NLP can be combined in a single framework. The rules are contextual constraints for resolving synt...
cmp-lg/9704010
The Theoretical Status of Ontologies in Natural Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper discusses the use of `ontologies' in Natural Language Processing. It classifies various kinds of ontologies that have been employed in NLP and discusses various benefits and problems with those designs. Particular focus is then placed on experiences gained in the use of the Upper Model, a linguistically-mo...
cmp-lg/9704011
Morphological Disambiguation by Voting Constraints
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a constraint-based morphological disambiguation system in which individual constraints vote on matching morphological parses, and disambiguation of all the tokens in a sentence is performed at the end by selecting parses that receive the highest votes. This constraint application paradigm makes the outcome...
cmp-lg/9704012
Emphatic generation: employing the theory of semantic emphasis for text generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper deals with the problem of text generation and planning approaches making only limited formally specifiable contact with accounts of grammar. We propose an enhancement of a systemically-based generation architecture for German (the KOMET system) by aspects of Kunze's theory of semantic emphasis. Doing this, ...
cmp-lg/9704013
A Theory of Parallelism and the Case of VP Ellipsis
cmp-lg cs.CL
We provide a general account of parallelism in discourse, and apply it to the special case of resolving possible readings for instances of VP ellipsis. We show how several problematic examples are accounted for in a natural and straightforward fashion. The generality of the approach makes it directly applicable to a ...
cmp-lg/9704014
Centering in-the-large: Computing referential discourse segments
cmp-lg cs.CL
We specify an algorithm that builds up a hierarchy of referential discourse segments from local centering data. The spatial extension and nesting of these discourse segments constrain the reachability of potential antecedents of an anaphoric expression beyond the local level of adjacent center pairs. Thus, the center...
cmp-lg/9705001
Co-evolution of Language and of the Language Acquisition Device
cmp-lg cs.CL
A new account of parameter setting during grammatical acquisition is presented in terms of Generalized Categorial Grammar embedded in a default inheritance hierarchy, providing a natural partial ordering on the setting of parameters. Experiments show that several experimentally effective learners can be defined in th...
cmp-lg/9705002
Sloppy Identity
cmp-lg cs.CL
Although sloppy interpretation is usually accounted for by theories of ellipsis, it often arises in non-elliptical contexts. In this paper, a theory of sloppy interpretation is provided which captures this fact. The underlying idea is that sloppy interpretation results from a semantic constraint on parallel structure...
cmp-lg/9705003
Grammatical analysis in the OVIS spoken-dialogue system
cmp-lg cs.CL
We argue that grammatical processing is a viable alternative to concept spotting for processing spoken input in a practical dialogue system. We discuss the structure of the grammar, the properties of the parser, and a method for achieving robustness. We discuss test results suggesting that grammatical processing allo...
cmp-lg/9705004
Computing Parallelism in Discourse
cmp-lg cs.CL
Although much has been said about parallelism in discourse, a formal, computational theory of parallelism structure is still outstanding. In this paper, we present a theory which given two parallel utterances predicts which are the parallel elements. The theory consists of a sorted, higher-order abductive calculus an...
cmp-lg/9705005
Document Classification Using a Finite Mixture Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
We propose a new method of classifying documents into categories. The simple method of conducting hypothesis testing over word-based distributions in categories suffers from the data sparseness problem. In order to address this difficulty, Guthrie et.al. have developed a method using distributions based on hard clust...
cmp-lg/9705006
Quantitative Constraint Logic Programming for Weighted Grammar Applications
cmp-lg cs.CL
Constraint logic grammars provide a powerful formalism for expressing complex logical descriptions of natural language phenomena in exact terms. Describing some of these phenomena may, however, require some form of graded distinctions which are not provided by such grammars. Recent approaches to weighted constraint l...
cmp-lg/9705007
Recycling Lingware in a Multilingual MT System
cmp-lg cs.CL
We describe two methods relevant to multi-lingual machine translation systems, which can be used to port linguistic data (grammars, lexicons and transfer rules) between systems used for processing related languages. The methods are fully implemented within the Spoken Language Translator system, and were used to creat...
cmp-lg/9705008
The TreeBanker: a Tool for Supervised Training of Parsed Corpora
cmp-lg cs.CL
I describe the TreeBanker, a graphical tool for the supervised training involved in domain customization of the disambiguation component of a speech- or language-understanding system. The TreeBanker presents a user, who need not be a system expert, with a range of properties that distinguish competing analyses for an...
cmp-lg/9705009
Charts, Interaction-Free Grammars, and the Compact Representation of Ambiguity
cmp-lg cs.CL
Recently researchers working in the LFG framework have proposed algorithms for taking advantage of the implicit context-free components of a unification grammar [Maxwell 96]. This paper clarifies the mathematical foundations of these techniques, provides a uniform framework in which they can be formally studied and e...
cmp-lg/9705010
Memory-Based Learning: Using Similarity for Smoothing
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper analyses the relation between the use of similarity in Memory-Based Learning and the notion of backed-off smoothing in statistical language modeling. We show that the two approaches are closely related, and we argue that feature weighting methods in the Memory-Based paradigm can offer the advantage of auto...
cmp-lg/9705011
A Lexicon for Underspecified Semantic Tagging
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper defends the notion that semantic tagging should be viewed as more than disambiguation between senses. Instead, semantic tagging should be a first step in the interpretation process by assigning each lexical item a representation of all of its systematically related senses, from which further semantic proces...
cmp-lg/9705012
A Comparative Study of the Application of Different Learning Techniques to Natural Language Interfaces
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we present first results from a comparative study. Its aim is to test the feasibility of different inductive learning techniques to perform the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge within a natural language database interface. In our interface architecture the machine learning module replaces a...
cmp-lg/9705013
FASTUS: A Cascaded Finite-State Transducer for Extracting Information from Natural-Language Text
cmp-lg cs.CL
FASTUS is a system for extracting information from natural language text for entry into a database and for other applications. It works essentially as a cascaded, nondeterministic finite-state automaton. There are five stages in the operation of FASTUS. In Stage 1, names and other fixed form expressions are recognize...
cmp-lg/9705014
Incorporating POS Tagging into Language Modeling
cmp-lg cs.CL
Language models for speech recognition tend to concentrate solely on recognizing the words that were spoken. In this paper, we redefine the speech recognition problem so that its goal is to find both the best sequence of words and their syntactic role (part-of-speech) in the utterance. This is a necessary first step ...
cmp-lg/9705015
Translation Methodology in the Spoken Language Translator: An Evaluation
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we describe how the translation methodology adopted for the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) addresses the characteristics of the speech translation task in a context where it is essential to achieve easy customization to new languages and new domains. We then discuss the issues that arise in any attemp...
cmp-lg/9705016
Sense Tagging: Semantic Tagging with a Lexicon
cmp-lg cs.CL
Sense tagging, the automatic assignment of the appropriate sense from some lexicon to each of the words in a text, is a specialised instance of the general problem of semantic tagging by category or type. We discuss which recent word sense disambiguation algorithms are appropriate for sense tagging. It is our belief ...
cmp-lg/9706001
Assigning Grammatical Relations with a Back-off Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a corpus-based method to assign grammatical subject/object relations to ambiguous German constructs. It makes use of an unsupervised learning procedure to collect training and test data, and the back-off model to make assignment decisions.
cmp-lg/9706002
Learning Parse and Translation Decisions From Examples With Rich Context
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a knowledge and context-based system for parsing and translating natural language and evaluate it on sentences from the Wall Street Journal. Applying machine learning techniques, the system uses parse action examples acquired under supervision to generate a deterministic shift-reduce parser in the form of ...
cmp-lg/9706003
Three New Probabilistic Models for Dependency Parsing: An Exploration
cmp-lg cs.CL
After presenting a novel O(n^3) parsing algorithm for dependency grammar, we develop three contrasting ways to stochasticize it. We propose (a) a lexical affinity model where words struggle to modify each other, (b) a sense tagging model where words fluctuate randomly in their selectional preferences, and (c) a gener...
cmp-lg/9706004
An Empirical Comparison of Probability Models for Dependency Grammar
cmp-lg cs.CL
This technical report is an appendix to Eisner (1996): it gives superior experimental results that were reported only in the talk version of that paper. Eisner (1996) trained three probability models on a small set of about 4,000 conjunction-free, dependency-grammar parses derived from the Wall Street Journal section...
cmp-lg/9706005
Comparing a Linguistic and a Stochastic Tagger
cmp-lg cs.CL
Concerning different approaches to automatic PoS tagging: EngCG-2, a constraint-based morphological tagger, is compared in a double-blind test with a state-of-the-art statistical tagger on a common disambiguation task using a common tag set. The experiments show that for the same amount of remaining ambiguity, the er...
cmp-lg/9706006
Mistake-Driven Learning in Text Categorization
cmp-lg cs.CL
Learning problems in the text processing domain often map the text to a space whose dimensions are the measured features of the text, e.g., its words. Three characteristic properties of this domain are (a) very high dimensionality, (b) both the learned concepts and the instances reside very sparsely in the feature sp...
cmp-lg/9706007
Aggregate and mixed-order Markov models for statistical language processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We consider the use of language models whose size and accuracy are intermediate between different order n-gram models. Two types of models are studied in particular. Aggregate Markov models are class-based bigram models in which the mapping from words to classes is probabilistic. Mixed-order Markov models combine big...
cmp-lg/9706008
Distinguishing Word Senses in Untagged Text
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes an experimental comparison of three unsupervised learning algorithms that distinguish the sense of an ambiguous word in untagged text. The methods described in this paper, McQuitty's similarity analysis, Ward's minimum-variance method, and the EM algorithm, assign each instance of an ambiguous wo...
cmp-lg/9706009
Library of Practical Abstractions, Release 1.2
cmp-lg cs.CL
The library of practical abstractions (LIBPA) provides efficient implementations of conceptually simple abstractions, in the C programming language. We believe that the best library code is conceptually simple so that it will be easily understood by the application programmer; parameterized by type so that it enjoys ...
cmp-lg/9706010
Exemplar-Based Word Sense Disambiguation: Some Recent Improvements
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, we report recent improvements to the exemplar-based learning approach for word sense disambiguation that have achieved higher disambiguation accuracy. By using a larger value of $k$, the number of nearest neighbors to use for determining the class of a test example, and through 10-fold cross validation...
cmp-lg/9706011
Applying Reliability Metrics to Co-Reference Annotation
cmp-lg cs.CL
Studies of the contextual and linguistic factors that constrain discourse phenomena such as reference are coming to depend increasingly on annotated language corpora. In preparing the corpora, it is important to evaluate the reliability of the annotation, but methods for doing so have not been readily available. In t...
cmp-lg/9706012
Probabilistic Coreference in Information Extraction
cmp-lg cs.CL
Certain applications require that the output of an information extraction system be probabilistic, so that a downstream system can reliably fuse the output with possibly contradictory information from other sources. In this paper we consider the problem of assigning a probability distribution to alternative sets of c...
cmp-lg/9706013
A Corpus-Based Approach for Building Semantic Lexicons
cmp-lg cs.CL
Semantic knowledge can be a great asset to natural language processing systems, but it is usually hand-coded for each application. Although some semantic information is available in general-purpose knowledge bases such as WordNet and Cyc, many applications require domain-specific lexicons that represent words and cat...
cmp-lg/9706014
A Linear Observed Time Statistical Parser Based on Maximum Entropy Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a statistical parser for natural language that obtains a parsing accuracy---roughly 87% precision and 86% recall---which surpasses the best previously published results on the Wall St. Journal domain. The parser itself requires very little human intervention, since the information it uses to make ...
cmp-lg/9706015
Determining Internal and External Indices for Chart Generation
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a compilation procedure which determines internal and external indices for signs in a unification based grammar to be used in improving the computational efficiency of lexicalist chart generation. The procedure takes as input a grammar and a set of feature paths indicating the position of semantic...
cmp-lg/9706016
Text Segmentation Using Exponential Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper introduces a new statistical approach to partitioning text automatically into coherent segments. Our approach enlists both short-range and long-range language models to help it sniff out likely sites of topic changes in text. To aid its search, the system consults a set of simple lexical hints it has learn...
cmp-lg/9706017
Name Searching and Information Retrieval
cmp-lg cs.CL
The main application of name searching has been name matching in a database of names. This paper discusses a different application: improving information retrieval through name recognition. It investigates name recognition accuracy, and the effect on retrieval performance of indexing and searching personal names diff...
cmp-lg/9706018
A Model of Lexical Attraction and Repulsion
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several hundred words, we show that their influence is nonstationary on a much smalle...
cmp-lg/9706019
Evaluating Competing Agent Strategies for a Voice Email Agent
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper reports experimental results comparing a mixed-initiative to a system-initiative dialog strategy in the context of a personal voice email agent. To independently test the effects of dialog strategy and user expertise, users interact with either the system-initiative or the mixed-initiative agent to perform...
cmp-lg/9706020
An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of temporal reference resolution in scheduling dialogs. The algorithm adopted is primarily a linear-recency based approach that does not include a model of global focus. A fully automatic system has been developed and evaluated on unseen test data with goo...
cmp-lg/9706021
An Efficient Distribution of Labor in a Two Stage Robust Interpretation Process
cmp-lg cs.CL
Although Minimum Distance Parsing (MDP) offers a theoretically attractive solution to the problem of extragrammaticality, it is often computationally infeasible in large scale practical applications. In this paper we present an alternative approach where the labor is distributed between a more restrictive partial par...
cmp-lg/9706022
Three Generative, Lexicalised Models for Statistical Parsing
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we first propose a new statistical parsing model, which is a generative model of lexicalised context-free grammar. We then extend the model to include a probabilistic treatment of both subcategorisation and wh-movement. Results on Wall Street Journal text show that the parser performs at 88.1/87.5% cons...
cmp-lg/9706023
An Information Extraction Core System for Real World German Text Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes SMES, an information extraction core system for real world German text processing. The basic design criterion of the system is of providing a set of basic powerful, robust, and efficient natural language components and generic linguistic knowledge sources which can easily be customized for proces...
cmp-lg/9706024
A Lexicalist Approach to the Translation of Colloquial Text
cmp-lg cs.CL
Colloquial English (CE) as found in television programs or typical conversations is different than text found in technical manuals, newspapers and books. Phrases tend to be shorter and less sophisticated. In this paper, we look at some of the theoretical and implementational issues involved in translating CE. We pres...
cmp-lg/9706025
A Portable Algorithm for Mapping Bitext Correspondence
cmp-lg cs.CL
The first step in most empirical work in multilingual NLP is to construct maps of the correspondence between texts and their translations ({\bf bitext maps}). The Smooth Injective Map Recognizer (SIMR) algorithm presented here is a generic pattern recognition algorithm that is particularly well-suited to mapping bite...
cmp-lg/9706026
A Word-to-Word Model of Translational Equivalence
cmp-lg cs.CL
Many multilingual NLP applications need to translate words between different languages, but cannot afford the computational expense of inducing or applying a full translation model. For these applications, we have designed a fast algorithm for estimating a partial translation model, which accounts for translational e...
cmp-lg/9706027
Automatic Discovery of Non-Compositional Compounds in Parallel Data
cmp-lg cs.CL
Automatic segmentation of text into minimal content-bearing units is an unsolved problem even for languages like English. Spaces between words offer an easy first approximation, but this approximation is not good enough for machine translation (MT), where many word sequences are not translated word-for-word. This pap...
cmp-lg/9706028
Efficient Construction of Underspecified Semantics under Massive Ambiguity
cmp-lg cs.CL
We investigate the problem of determining a compact underspecified semantical representation for sentences that may be highly ambiguous. Due to combinatorial explosion, the naive method of building semantics for the different syntactic readings independently is prohibitive. We present a method that takes as input a s...
cmp-lg/9706029
Learning Parse and Translation Decisions From Examples With Rich Context
cmp-lg cs.CL
We propose a system for parsing and translating natural language that learns from examples and uses some background knowledge. As our parsing model we choose a deterministic shift-reduce type parser that integrates part-of-speech tagging and syntactic and semantic processing. Applying machine learning techniques, t...
cmp-lg/9707001
Reluctant Paraphrase: Textual Restructuring under an Optimisation Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper develops a computational model of paraphrase under which text modification is carried out reluctantly; that is, there are external constraints, such as length or readability, on an otherwise ideal text, and modifications to the text are necessary to ensure conformance to these constraints. This problem is ...
cmp-lg/9707002
Automatic Detection of Text Genre
cmp-lg cs.CL
As the text databases available to users become larger and more heterogeneous, genre becomes increasingly important for computational linguistics as a complement to topical and structural principles of classification. We propose a theory of genres as bundles of facets, which correlate with various surface cues, and a...
cmp-lg/9707003
A Flexible POS tagger Using an Automatically Acquired Language Model
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an algorithm that automatically learns context constraints using statistical decision trees. We then use the acquired constraints in a flexible POS tagger. The tagger is able to use information of any degree: n-grams, automatically learned context constraints, linguistically motivated manually written cons...
cmp-lg/9707004
Discourse Preferences in Dynamic Logic
cmp-lg cs.CL
In order to enrich dynamic semantic theories with a `pragmatic' capacity, we combine dynamic and nonmonotonic (preferential) logics in a modal logic setting. We extend a fragment of Van Benthem and De Rijke's dynamic modal logic with additional preferential operators in the underlying static logic, which enables us t...
cmp-lg/9707005
Intrasentential Centering: A Case Study
cmp-lg cs.CL
One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit center-updating utterance units and how to process complex utterances consisti...
cmp-lg/9707006
Finite State Transducers Approximating Hidden Markov Models
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper describes the conversion of a Hidden Markov Model into a sequential transducer that closely approximates the behavior of the stochastic model. This transformation is especially advantageous for part-of-speech tagging because the resulting transducer can be composed with other transducers that encode correc...
cmp-lg/9707007
Tailored Patient Information: Some Issues and Questions
cmp-lg cs.CL
Tailored patient information (TPI) systems are computer programs which produce personalised heath-information material for patients. TPI systems are of growing interest to the natural-language generation (NLG) community; many TPI systems have also been developed in the medical community, usually with mail-merge techn...
cmp-lg/9707008
Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Preferences
cmp-lg cs.CL
I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base pre...
cmp-lg/9707009
Recognizing Referential Links: An Information Extraction Perspective
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present an efficient and robust reference resolution algorithm in an end-to-end state-of-the-art information extraction system, which must work with a considerably impoverished syntactic analysis of the input sentences. Considering this disadvantage, the basic setup to collect, filter, then order by salience does ...
cmp-lg/9707010
Experiences with the GTU grammar development environment
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper we describe our experiences with a tool for the development and testing of natural language grammars called GTU (German: Grammatik-Testumgebumg; grammar test environment). GTU supports four grammar formalisms under a window-oriented user interface. Additionally, it contains a set of German test sentence...
cmp-lg/9707011
A lexical database tool for quantitative phonological research
cmp-lg cs.CL
A lexical database tool tailored for phonological research is described. Database fields include transcriptions, glosses and hyperlinks to speech files. Database queries are expressed using HTML forms, and these permit regular expression search on any combination of fields. Regular expressions are passed directly to ...
cmp-lg/9707012
Adjunction As Substitution: An Algebraic Formulation of Regular, Context-Free and Tree Adjoining Languages
cmp-lg cs.CL
This note presents a method of interpreting the tree adjoining languages as the natural third step in a hierarchy that starts with the regular and the context-free languages. The central notion in this account is that of a higher-order substitution. Whereas in traditional presentations of rule systems for abstract la...
cmp-lg/9707013
On Cloning Context-Freeness
cmp-lg cs.CL
To Rogers (1994) we owe the insight that monadic second order predicate logic with multiple successors (MSO) is well suited in many respects as a realistic formal base for syntactic theorizing. However, the agreeable formal properties of this logic come at a cost: MSO is equivalent with the class of regular tree auto...
cmp-lg/9707014
Towards a PURE Spoken Dialogue System for Information Access
cmp-lg cs.CL
With the rapid explosion of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly possible to easily acquire a wide variety of information such as flight schedules, yellow pages, used car prices, current stock prices, entertainment event schedules, account balances, etc. It would be very useful to have spoken dialogue inte...
cmp-lg/9707015
Tagging Grammatical Functions
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper addresses issues in automated treebank construction. We show how standard part-of-speech tagging techniques extend to the more general problem of structural annotation, especially for determining grammatical functions and syntactic categories. Annotation is viewed as an interactive process where manual and...
cmp-lg/9707016
On aligning trees
cmp-lg cs.CL
The increasing availability of corpora annotated for linguistic structure prompts the question: if we have the same texts, annotated for phrase structure under two different schemes, to what extent do the annotations agree on structuring within the text? We suggest the term tree alignment to indicate the situation wh...
cmp-lg/9707017
Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability
cmp-lg cs.CL
In foundational works of generative phonology it is claimed that subjects can reliably discriminate between possible but non-occurring words and words that could not be English. In this paper we examine the use of a probabilistic phonological parser for words to model experimentally-obtained judgements of the accepta...
cmp-lg/9707018
Multilingual phonological analysis and speech synthesis
cmp-lg cs.CL
We give an overview of multilingual speech synthesis using the IPOX system. The first part discusses work in progress for various languages: Tashlhit Berber, Urdu and Dutch. The second part discusses a multilingual phonological grammar, which can be adapted to a particular language by setting parameters and adding la...
cmp-lg/9707019
Generating Coherent Messages in Real-time Decision Support: Exploiting Discourse Theory for Discourse Practice
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper presents a message planner, TraumaGEN, that draws on rhetorical structure and discourse theory to address the problem of producing integrated messages from individual critiques, each of which is designed to achieve its own communicative goal. TraumaGEN takes into account the purpose of the messages, the si...
cmp-lg/9707020
A Czech Morphological Lexicon
cmp-lg cs.CL
In this paper, a treatment of Czech phonological rules in two-level morphology approach is described. First the possible phonological alternations in Czech are listed and then their treatment in a practical application of a Czech morphological lexicon.
cmp-lg/9708001
Expectations in Incremental Discourse Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
The way in which discourse features express connections back to the previous discourse has been described in the literature in terms of adjoining at the right frontier of discourse structure. But this does not allow for discourse features that express expectations about what is to come in the subsequent discourse. Af...
cmp-lg/9708002
Natural Language Generation in Healthcare: Brief Review
cmp-lg cs.CL
Good communication is vital in healthcare, both among healthcare professionals, and between healthcare professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying and even more convincing, than the struct...
cmp-lg/9708003
Structure and Ostension in the Interpretation of Discourse Deixis
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that ``This. The pronoun 'this', referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot ...
cmp-lg/9708004
Epistemic NP Modifiers
cmp-lg cs.CL
The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation ...
cmp-lg/9708005
Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure
cmp-lg cs.CL
Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operati...
cmp-lg/9708006
Global Thresholding and Multiple Pass Parsing
cmp-lg cs.CL
We present a variation on classic beam thresholding techniques that is up to an order of magnitude faster than the traditional method, at the same performance level. We also present a new thresholding technique, global thresholding, which, combined with the new beam thresholding, gives an additional factor of two imp...
cmp-lg/9708007
A complexity measure for diachronic Chinese phonology
cmp-lg cs.CL
This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic Finite State Automaton. The Minimum Message Length principle is then employed t...
cmp-lg/9708008
Fast Context-Free Parsing Requires Fast Boolean Matrix Multiplication
cmp-lg cs.CL
Valiant showed that Boolean matrix multiplication (BMM) can be used for CFG parsing. We prove a dual result: CFG parsers running in time $O(|G||w|^{3 - \myeps})$ on a grammar $G$ and a string $w$ can be used to multiply $m \times m$ Boolean matrices in time $O(m^{3 - \myeps/3})$. In the process we also provide a form...
cmp-lg/9708009
DIA-MOLE: An Unsupervised Learning Approach to Adaptive Dialogue Models for Spoken Dialogue Systems
cmp-lg cs.CL
The DIAlogue MOdel Learning Environment supports an engineering-oriented approach towards dialogue modelling for a spoken-language interface. Major steps towards dialogue models is to know about the basic units that are used to construct a dialogue model and possible sequences. In difference to many other approaches ...
cmp-lg/9708010
Similarity-Based Methods For Word Sense Disambiguation
cmp-lg cs.CL
We compare four similarity-based estimation methods against back-off and maximum-likelihood estimation methods on a pseudo-word sense disambiguation task in which we controlled for both unigram and bigram frequency. The similarity-based methods perform up to 40% better on this particular task. We also conclude that e...
cmp-lg/9708011
Similarity-Based Approaches to Natural Language Processing
cmp-lg cs.CL
This thesis presents two similarity-based approaches to sparse data problems. The first approach is to build soft, hierarchical clusters: soft, because each event belongs to each cluster with some probability; hierarchical, because cluster centroids are iteratively split to model finer distinctions. Our second approa...
cmp-lg/9708012
Encoding Frequency Information in Lexicalized Grammars
cmp-lg cs.CL
We address the issue of how to associate frequency information with lexicalized grammar formalisms, using Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar as a representative framework. We consider systematically a number of alternative probabilistic frameworks, evaluating their adequacy from both a theoretical and empirical persp...