waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
combining distributional and morphological information for part of speech induction. in this paper we discuss algorithms for clustering words into classes from unlabelled text using unsupervised algorithms, based on distributional and morphological information. we show how the use of morphological information can improve the performance on rare words, and that this is robust across a wide range of languages.
a task independent oral dialogue model. this paper presents a human-machine dialogue model in the field of task-oriented dialogues. the originality of this model resides in the clear separation of dialogue knowledge from task knowledge in order to facilitate for the modeling of dialogue strategies and the maintenance of dialogue coherence. these two aspects are crucial in the field of oral dialogues with a machine considering the current state of the art in speech recognition and understanding techniques. one important theoretical innovation is that our dialogue model is based on a recent linguistic theory of dialogue modeling. the dialogue model considers real-life situations, as our work was based on a real man-machine corpus of dialogues.in this paper we describe the model and the designed formalisms used in the implementation of a dialogue manager module inside an oral dialogue system. an important outcome and proof of our model is that it is able to dialogue on three different applications.
fragmentation and part of speech disambiguation. that at least some syntax is necessary to support semantic processing is fairly obvious. to know exactly how much syntax is needed, however, and how and when to apply it, is still an open and crucial, albeit old, question. this paper discusses the solutions used in a semantic analyser of french called saba, developed at the university of liege, belgium. specifically, we shall argue in favor of the usefulness of two syntactic processes: fragmentation, which can be interleaved with semantic processing, and part-of-speech disambiguation, which can be performed as a preprocessing step.
a logical approach to arabic phonology. logical approaches to linguistic description, particularly those which employ feature structures, have generally treated phonology as though it was the same as orthography. this approach breaks down for languages where the phonological shape of a morpheme can be heavily dependent on the phonological shape of another, as is the case in arabic. in this paper we show how the tense logical approach investigated by blackburn (1989) can be used to encode hierarchical and temporal phonological information of the kind explored by bird (1990). then we show how some arabic morphemes may be represented and combined.
situations and prepositional phrases. this paper presents a format for representing the linguistic form of utterances, called situation schemata, which is rooted in the situation semantics of barwise and perry. a treatment of locative prepositional phrases is given, thus illustrating the generation of the situation schemata and their interpretation in situation semantics.
the genia project: corpus-based knowledge acquisition and information extraction from genome research papers. we present an outline of the genome information acquisition (genia) project for automatically extracting biochemical information from journal papers and abstracts. genia will be available over the internet and is designed to aid in information extraction, retrieval and visualisation and to help reduce information overload on researchers. the vast repository of papers available online in databases such as medline is a natural environment in which to develop language engineering methods and tools and is an opportunity to show how language engineering can play a key role on the internet.
acquisition of conceptual data models from natural language descriptions. acquiring information systems specifications from natural language description is presented as a problem class that requires a different treatment of semantics when compared with other applied nl systems such as database and operating system interfaces. within this problem class, the specific task of obtaining explicit conceptual data models from natural language text or dialogue is being investigated. the knowledge brought to bear on this task is classified into syntactic, semantic and systems analysis knowledge. investigations with a simple syntactic parse and with a semantic analysis using mccord's slot grammar are reported, and the structure of the systems analysis knowledge is considered.
coordination in unification-based grammars. within unification-based grammar formalisms, providing a treatment of cross-categorial coordination is problematic, and most current solutions either over-generate or under-generate. in this paper we consider an approach to coordination involving "composite" feature structures, which describe coordinate phrases, and present the augmentation to the logic of feature structures required to admit such feature structures. this augmentation involves the addition of two connectives, composite conjunction and composite disjunction, which interact to allow cross-categorial coordination data to be captured exactly. the connectives are initially considered to function only in the domain of atomic values, before their domain of application is extended to cover complex feature structures. satisfiability conditions for the connectives in terms of deterministic finite state automata are given, both for the atomic case and for the more complex case. finally, the prolog implementation of the connectives is discussed, and it is illustrated how, in the atomic case, and with the use of the freeze/2 predicate of second generation prologs, the connectives may be implemented.
analysis of unknown words through morphological decomposition. this paper describes a method of analysing words through morphological decomposition when the lexicon is incomplete. the method is used within a text-to-speech system to help generate pronunciations of unknown words. the method is achieved within a general morphological analyser system using koskenniemi two-level rules.
the role of initiative in tutorial dialogue. this work is the first systematic investigation of initiative in human-human tutorial dialogue. we studied initiative management in two dialogue strategies: didactic tutoring and socratic tutoring. we hypothesized that didactic tutoring would be mostly tutor-initiative while socratic tutoring would be mixed-initiative, and that more student initiative would lead to more learning (i.e., task success for the tutor). surprisingly, students had initiative more of the time in the didactic dialogues (21% of the turns) than in the socratic dialogues (10% of the turns), and there was no direct relationship between student initiative and learning. however, socratic dialogues were more interactive than didactic dialogues as measured by percentage of tutor utterances that were questions and percentage of words in the dialogue uttered by the student, and interactivity had a positive correlation with learning.
formalisms for morphographemic description. recently there has been some interest in rule formalisms for describing morphologically significant regularities in orthography of words, largely influenced by the work of koskenniemi. various implementations of these rules are possible, but there are some weaknesses in the formalism as it stands. an alternative specification formalism is possible which solves some of the problems. this new formalism can be viewed as a variant of the "pure" koskenniemi model with certain constraints relaxed. the new formalism has particular advantages for multiple character changes. an interpreter has been implemented for the formalism and a significant subset of english morphographemics has been described, but it has yet to be used for describing other languages.
an extension of earley's algorithm for s-attributed grammars. attribute grammars are an elegant formalization of the augmented context-free grammars characteristic of most current natural language systems. this paper presents an extension of earley's algorithm to knuth's attribute grammars, considering the case of s-attributed grammars. for this case, we study the conditions on the underlying base grammar under which the extended algorithm may be guaranteed to terminate. finite partitioning of attribute domains is proposed to guarantee the termination of the algorithm, without the need for any restrictions on the context-free base.
a specification language for lexical functional grammars. this paper defines a language &lambda; for specifying lfg grammars. this enables constraints on lfg's composite ontology (c-structures synchronised with f-structures) to be stated directly; no appeal to the lfg construction algorithm is needed. we use &lambda; to specify schemata annotated rules and the lfg uniqueness, completeness and coherence principles. broader issues raised by this work are noted and discussed.
esfinge a question answering system in the web using the web. esfinge is a general domain portuguese question answering system. it tries to take advantage of the great amount of information existent in the world wide web. since portuguese is one of the most used languages in the web and the web itself is a constantly growing source of updated information, this kind of techniques are quite interesting and promising.
talking about trees. in this paper we introduce a modal language lt for imposing constraints on trees, and an extension lt (lf) for imposing constraints on trees decorated with feature structures. the motivation for introducing these languages is to provide tools for formalising grammatical frameworks perspicuously, and the paper illustrates this by showing how the leading ideas of gpsg can be captured in lt (lf).in addition, the role of modal languages (and in particular, what we have called layered modal languages) as constraint formalisms for linguistic theorising is discussed in some detail.
an efficient implementation of a new dop model. two apparently opposing dop models exist in the literature: one which computes the parse tree involving the most frequent subtrees from a treebank and one which computes the parse tree involving the fewest subtrees from a treebank. this paper proposes an integration of the two models which outperforms each of them separately. together with a pcfg-reduction of dop we obtain improved accuracy and efficiency on the wall street journal treebank. our results show an 11% relative reduction in error rate over previous models, and an average processing time of 3.6 seconds per wsj sentence.
integrating semantics and flexible syntax by exploiting isomorphism between gramnatical and senantical relations. this work concerns integration between syntax and semantics. syntactic and semantic activities rely on separate bodies of knowledges. integration is obtained by exploiting the isomorphism between grammatical relations (among immediate constituents) and conceptual relations, thanks to a limited set of formal mapping rules. syntactic analysis does not construct all the explicit parse trees but just a graph that represents all the plausible grammatical relations among immediate constituents. such graph gives the semantic interpreter, based on conceptual graphs formalism, the discriminative power required to establish conceptual relations.
using an annotated corpus as a stochastic grammar. in data oriented parsing (dop), an annotated corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. an input string is parsed by combining subtrees from the corpus. as a consequence, one parse tree can usually be generated by several derivations that involve different subtrees. this leads to a statistics where the probability of a parse is equal to the sum of the probabilities of all its derivations. in (scha, 1990) an informal introduction to dop is given, while (bod, 1992a) provides a formalization of the theory. in this paper we compare dop with other stochastic grammars in the context of formal language theory. it it proved that it is not possible to create for every dop-model a strongly equivalent stochastic cfg which also assigns the same probabilities to the parses. we show that the maximum probability parse can be estimated in polynomial time by applying monte carlo techniques. the model was tested on a set of hand-parsed strings from the air travel information system (atis) spoken language corpus. preliminary experiments yield 96% test set parsing accuracy.
a strategy for dynamic interpretation: a fragment and an implementation. the strategy for natural language interpretation presented in this paper implements the dynamics of context change by translating natural language texts into a meaning representation language consisting of (descriptions of) programs, in the spirit of dynamic predicate logic (dpl) [5]. the difference with dpl is that the usual dpl semantics is replaced by an error state semantics [2]. this allows for the treatment of unbound anaphors, as in dpl, but also of presuppositions and presupposition projection.the use of this dynamic interpretation strategy is demonstrated in an implementation of a small fragment of natural language which handles unbound pronoun antecedent links, where it is assumed that the intended links are indicated in the input string, and uniqueness presuppositions of definite descriptions. the implementation consists of a syntax module which outputs parse trees, a semantic module mapping parse trees to dpl representations, a representation processor which determines truth conditions, falsity conditions and presupposition failure conditions, and an evaluator of these conditions in a database model.the implementation uses the logic programming language g&ouml;del [6], an experimental successor of prolog, with similar functionality and expressiveness, but with an improved declarative semantics.
efficient processing of flexible categorial grammar. from a processing point of view, however, flexible categorial systems are problematic, since they introduce spurious ambiguity. in this paper, we present a flexible categorial grammar which makes extensive use of the product-operator, first introduced by lambek (1958). the grammar has the property that for every reading of a sentence, a strictly left-branching derivation can be given. this leads to the definition of a subset of the grammar, for which the spurious ambiguity problem does not arise and efficient processing is possible.
multiple interpreters in a principle-based model of sentence processing. this paper describes a computational model of human sentence processing based on the principles and parameters paradigm of current linguistic theory. the syntactic processing model posits four modules, recovering phrase structure, long-distance dependencies, coreference, and thematic structure. these four modules are implemented as meta-interpreters over their relevant components of the grammar, permitting variation in the deductive strategies employed by each module. these four interpreters are also 'coroutined' via the freeze directive of constraint logic programming to achieve incremental interpretation across the modules.
prediction in chart parsing algorithms for categorial unification grammar. natural language systems based on categorial unification grammar (cug) have mainly employed bottom-up parsing algorithms for processing. conventional prediction techniques to improve the efficiency of the parsing process, appear to fall short when parsing cug. nevertheless, prediction seems necessary when parsing grammars with highly ambiguous lexicons or with noncanonical categorial rules. in this paper we present a lexicalist prediction technique for cug and show that this may lead to considerable gains in efficiency for both bottom-up and top-down parsing.
ellipsis and quantification: a substitutional approach. the paper describes a substitutional approach to ellipsis resolution giving comparable results to (dalrymple et al., 1991), but without the need for order-sensitive interleaving of quantifier scoping and ellipsis resolution. it is argued that the order-independence results from viewing semantic interpretation as building a description of a semantic composition, instead of the more common view of interpretation as actually performing the composition.
head-driven parsing for lexicalist grammars: experimental results. we present evidence that head-driven parsing strategies lead to efficiency gains over standard parsing strategies, for lexicalist, concatenative and unification-based grammars. a head-driven parser applies a rule only after a phrase matching the head has been derived. by instantiating the head of the rule important information is obtained about the left-hand-side and the other elements of the ritht-hand-side. we have used two different head-driven parsers and a number of standard parsers to parse with lexicalist grammars for english and for dutch. the results indicate that for important classes of lexicalist grammars it is fruitful to apply parsing strategies which are sensitive to the linguistic notion 'head'.
investigating gis and smoothing for maximum entropy taggers. this paper investigates two elements of maximum entropy tagging: the use of a correction feature in the generalised iterative scaling (gis) estimation algorithm, and techniques for model smoothing. we show analytically and empirically that the correction feature, assumed to be required for the correctness of gis, is unnecessary. we also explore the use of a gaussian prior and a simple cutoff for smoothing. the experiments are performed with two tagsets: the standard penn treebank pos tagset and the larger set of lexical types from combinatory categorial grammar.
an endogeneous corpus-based method for structural noun phrase disambiguation. in this paper, we describe a method for structural noun phrase disambiguation which mainly relies on the examination of the text corpus under analysis and doesn't need to integrate any domain-dependent lexico- or syntactico-semantic information. this method is implemented in the terminology extraction sottware lexter. we first explain why the integration of lexter in the lexter-k project, which aims at building a tool for knowledge extraction from large technical text corpora, requires improving the quality of the terminolgy extracted by lexter. then we briefly describe the way lexter works and show what kind of disambiguation it has to perform when parsing "maximal-length" noun phrases. we introduce a method of disambiguation which relies on a very simple idea: whenever lexter has to choose among several competing noun sub-groups in order to disambiguate a maximal-length noun phrase, it checks each of these sub-groups if it occurs anywhere else in the corpus in a non-ambiguous situation, and then it makes a choice. the half-a-million words corpus analysis resulted in an efficient strategy of disambiguation. the average rates are:27% no disambiguation70% correct disambiguation3% wrong disambiguation
abstract control structures and the semantics of quantifiers. intuitively, a <u>quantifier</u> is any word or phrase that expresses a meaning that answers one of the questions "how many?" or "how much?" typical english examples include <u>all, no, many, few, some but not many, all but at most a very few, wherever, whoever, whoever there is,</u> and also, it can be arguesd, <u>only</u> (keenan, 1971), <u>also</u> (cushing, 1978b), and <u>the</u> (chomsky, 1977), in this paper we review an empirically motivated analysis of such meanings (cushing, 1976; 1982a) and draw out its computational significance. for purposes of illustration, we focus our attention on the meanings expressed by the english words <u>whatever</u> and <u>some</u>, commonly represented, respectively, by the symbols "v" and "3", but most of what we say will generalize to the other meanings of this class.in section i, we review the notion of satisfaction in a model, through which logical formulas are customarily imbued implicitly with meaning. in section 2, we discuss quantifier relativization, a notion that becomes important for meanings other than v and 3. in section 3, we use these two notions to characterize quantifier meanings as structured function of a certain sort. in section 4, we discuss the computational significance of that analysis. in section 5, we elaborate on this significance by outlining a notion of abstract control structure that the analysis instantiates.
term extraction + term clustering: an integrated platform for computer-aided terminology. a novel technique for automatic thesaurus construction is proposed. it is based on the complementary use of two tools: (1) a term extraction tool that acquires term candidates from tagged corpora through a shallow grammar of noun phrases, and (2) a term clustering tool that groups syntactic variants (insertions). experiments performed on corpora in three technical domains yield clusters of term candidates with precision rates between 93% and 98%.
an automatic speech recognition system for the italian language. an automatic speech recognition system for italian language has been developed at ibm italy scientific center in rome. it is able to recognize in real time natural language sentences, composed with words from a dictionary of 6500 items, dictated by a speaker with short pauses among them. the system is speaker dependent, before using it the speaker has to perform the training stage reading a predefined text 15--20 minutes long. it runs on an architecture composed by an ibm 3090 mainframe and a pc/at based workstation with signal processing equipments.
cooperative error handling and shallow processing. this paper is concerned with the detection and correction of sub-sentential english text errors. previous spelling programs, unless restricted to a very small set of words, have operated as post-processors. and to date, grammar checkers and other programs which deal with ill-formed input usually step directly from spelling considerations to a full-scale parse, assuming a complete sentence. work described below is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of shallow (sub-sentential) processing and the feasibility of cooperative error checking, through building and testing appropriately an error-processing system. a system under construction is outlined which incorporates morphological checks (using new two-level error rules) over a directed letter graph, tag positional trigrams and partial parsing. intended testing is discussed.
a tool for the automatic creation, extension and updating of lexical knowledge bases. a tool is described which helps in the creation, extension and updating of lexical knowledge bases (lkbs). two levels of representation are distinguished: a static storage level and a dynamic knowledge level. the latter is an object-oriented environment containing linguistic and lexicographic knowledge. at the knowledge level, constructors and filters can be defined. constructors are objects which extend the lkb both horizontally (new information) and vertically (new entries) using the linguistic knowledge. filters are objects which derive new lkbs from existing ones thereby optionally changing the storage structure. the latter use lexicographic knowledge.
cascaded markov models. this paper presents a new approach to partial parsing of context-free structures. the approach is based on markov models. each layer of the resulting structure is represented by its own markov model, and output of a lower layer is passed as input to the next higher layer. an empirical evaluation of the method yields very good results for np/pp chunking of german newspaper texts.