waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
empirical studies of discourse representations for natural language interfaces. we present the results from a series of experiments aimed at uncovering the discourse structure of man-machine communication in natural language (wizard of oz experiments). the results suggest the existence of different classes of dialogue situations, requiring computational discourse representations of various complexity. important factors seem to be the number of different permissible tasks in the system and to what extent the system takes initiative in the dialogue. we also analyse indexical expressions and especially the use of pronouns, and suggest a psychological explanation of their restricted occurrence in these types of dialogues.
non standard uses of if. the present study examines the semantic problems involved in computing the meaning of the non standard uses of if. the central question is whether or not it is necessary to introduce different meanings of if.austin proposed two non standard meanings for if. we show that these can be accounted for by the standard meaning together with shifts in the position of the speech act within the sentence. these uses of if are among the 9 different non standard uses which we found in a sample of if sentences taken from the brown university corpus:1. counterfactual: if e had stuck to his plan he'd still be famous.2. factual: if r was a liar, he was also a canny gentleman.3. conditional speech act: you may come back to strasbourg, now, if you wish.4. performative speech act: he vowed vengence on l, if ever the chance came his way.5. noun clause: he wondered if the audience would let him finish.6. doubtful presupposition perfect entities, if they move at all, don't move to ...7. restrictive social relations impose courtesy, if not sympathy, ...8. concessive9. protasis only"if you want to see -" "never mind", she said sternly.each use was examined to see whether it could be accounted for by the standard meaning of if, together with other features of the sentence. similar differences in usage should then be found with other scs. this was the case for the first four uses. in three uses (6, 7, 8) if may/must occur in a phrase rather than in a full clause. the hypothesis that these uses can be derived from the standard meaning of if in an equivalent clause was explored and rejected. two of these uses (6, 7) require a material implication interpretation of if, also necessary for a few of the standard conditional sentences.two uses (5, 9) require only that the truth value of the following clause/phrase is unspecified. this is a property that all the uses have in common (with the exception of the factual use where the truth of the protasis is used to emphasise the truth of the apodosis) and is thus the feature that relates the different meanings of if. the standard use and the non standard uses using the standard meaning (1,2,3,4) require, in addition, that there is an inference relation from the protasis (the if sub clause) to the apodosis (the main clause in which the if clause is embedded).so we propose that three different meanings of if are required: inference (including the standard use), material implication (uses 6,7) and just doubting the truth value of the following proposition (uses 5,9). each of these three uses may be expected to be translated by different words in other languages, e.g. in dutch by als, zo and of (except for use 8) respectively.
towards better understanding of anaphora. this paper presents a syntactical method of interpreting pronouns in polish. using the surface structure of the sentence as well as grammatical and inflexional information accessible during syntactic analysis, an <u>area of reference</u> is marked out for each personal and possessive pronoun. this area consists of a few <u>internal areas</u> inside the current sentence and an <u>external area,</u> i.e. the part of the text preceding it. in order to determine that area of reference several syntactic sentence-level restrictions on anaphora interpretation are formulated.next, when looking at the area of pronoun's reference, all nps which number-gender agree with the pronoun can be selected and this way the set of <u>surface referents</u> of each pronoun can be created. it can be used as data for further semantic analysis.
the linguistic basis of text generation. this study presents an original and penetrating analysis of the complex problems surrounding the automatic generation of natural language text. laurence danlos provides a valuable critical review of current research in this important and increasingly active field, and goes on to describe a new theoretical model that is thoroughly grounded in linguistic principles.the model emphasizes the semantic, syntactic and lexical constraints that must be dealt with when establishing a relationship between meaning and form, and it is consideration of such linguistic constraints that determines danlos' generation algorithm. the book concludes with a description of a generation system based on this algorithm which produces texts in several domains and also a system for the synthesis of spoken messages from semantic representations.the book is a significant addition to the literature on text generation, and will be of particular interest to all computational linguists and ai researchers who have wrestled with the problem of vocabulary selection.
automatic acronym recognition. this paper deals with the problem of recognizing and extracting acronymdefinition pairs in swedish medical texts. this project applies a rule-based method to solve the acronym recognition task and compares and evaluates the results of different machine learning algorithms on the same task. the method proposed is based on the approach that acronym-definition pairs follow a set of patterns and other regularities that can be usefully applied for the acronym identification task. supervised machine learning was applied to monitor the performance of the rule-based method, using memory based learning (mbl). the rule-based algorithm was evaluated on a hand tagged acronym corpus and performance was measured using standard measures recall, precision and f-score. the results show that performance could further improve by increasing the training set and modifying the input settings for the machine learning algorithms. an analysis of the errors produced indicates that further improvement of the rule-based method requires the use of syntactic information and textual pre-processing.
constraint based integration of deep and shallow parsing techniques. to investigate the contributions of taggers or chunkers to the performance of a deep syntactic parser, weighted constraint dependency grammars have been extended to also take into consideration information from external sources. using a weak information fusion scheme based on constraint optimization techniques, a parsing accuracy has been achieved which is comparable to other (stochastic) parsers.
text alignment in the real world: improving alignments of noisy translations using common lexical features, string matching strategies and n-gram comparisons. alignment methods based on byte-length comparisons of alignment blocks have been remarkably successful for aligning good translations from legislative transcriptions. for noisy translations in which the parallel text of a document has significant structural differences, byte-alignment methods often do not perform well. the pan american health organization (paho) corpus is a series of articles that were first translated by machine methods and then improved by professional translators. many of the spanish paho texts do not share formatting conventions with the corresponding english documents, refer to tables in stylistically different ways and contain extraneous information. a method based on a dynamic programming framework, but using a decision criterion derived from a combination of byte-length ratio measures, hard matching of numbers, string comparisons and n-gram co-occurrence matching substantially improves the performance of the alignment process.
planning for problem formulation in advice-giving dialogue. we distinguish three main, overlapping activities in an advice-giving dialogue: problem formulation, resolution, and explanation. this paper focuses on a problem formulation activity in a dialogue module which interacts on one side with an expert problem solver for financial investing and on the other side with a natural language front-end. several strategies which reflect specific aspects of person-machine advice-giving dialogues are realized by incorporating planning at a high-level of dialogue.
a phonological processor for italian. a computer program for the automatic translation of any text of italian into naturally fluent synthetic speech is presented. the program, or phonological processor (hence fp) maps into prosodic structures the phonological rules of italian. structural information is provided by such hierarchical prosodic constitutents as syllable (s), metrical foot (mf), phonological word (pw), intonational group (ig). onto these structures, phonological rules are applied such as the "letter-to-sound" rules, automatic word stress rules, internal stress hierarchy rules indicating secondary stress, external sandhi rules, phonological focus assignment rules, logical focus assignment rules. the fp constitutes also a model to simulate the reading process aloud, and the psycholinguistics and cognitive aspects related will be discussed in the computational model of the fp. at present, logical focus assignment rules and the computational model are work in progress still to be implemented in the fp. recorded samples of automatically produced synthetic speech will be presented at the conference to illustrate the functioning of the rules.
parsing defficulties & phonological processing in italian. a recognition grammar to supply information to a text-to-speech system for the synthesis of italian must rely heavily upon lexical information, in order to instantiate the appropriate grammatical relations.italian is an almost free word order language which nonetheless adopts fairly analysable strategies to move major constituents: some of these can strongly affect the functioning of the phonological component. two basic claims will be made: i. difficulties in associating grammatical functions to constituent structure can be overcome only if lexical theory is adopted as a general theoretical framework, and translated into adequate computational formalisms like atn or chart; ii. decisions made at previous point affect focus structure construal rules, which are higher level phonological rules which individuate intonation centre, build up adequate intonational groups and assign pauses to adequate sites, all being very sensitive to syntactic and semantic information.we will concentrate on subject/object function association to c-structure in italian, and its relation to atn formalism, in particular hold mechanism and flagging. then we will show how syntactic decisions interact with an intonation grammar. we shall also introduce two functional notions: structure reversibility vs. functional reversibility in italian.
a preference mechanism based on multiple criteria resolution. this paper presents an experimental preference tool designed, implemented and tested in the eurotra project. the mechanism is based on preference rules which can either compare subtrees pairwise or single out a subtree on the basis of some specified constraints. scoring permits combining the effects of various preference rules.
discovering corpus-specific word senses. this paper presents an unsupervised algorithm which automatically discovers word senses from text. the algorithm is based on a graph model representing words and relationships between them. sense clusters are iteratively computed by clustering the local graph of similar words around an ambiguous word. discrimination against previously extracted sense clusters enables us to discover new senses. we use the same data for both recognising and resolving ambiguity.
on the notion of uniqueness. in the paper it is argued that for some linguistic phenomena, current discourse representation structures are insufficiently finegrained, both from the perspective of serving as representation in nlp and from a truth conditional perspective. one such semantic phenomenon is uniqueness. it is demonstrated that certain elements are forced to have a unique interpretation, from a certain point in discourse onwards. this could be viewed as the semantic counterpart of surface order. although it has always been acknowledged that the left-to-right order of constituents influences the meaning of an utterance, it is, for example, not reflected in standard discourse representation theory ([kamp, 1981]). in the paper, an alternative representation for unique constituents will be proposed, resulting in asymmetry of certain conjoined conditions in a drs-representation.
literal movement grammars. literal movement grammars (lmgs) provide a general account of extraposition phenomena through an attribute mechanism allowing top-down displacement of syntactical information. lmgs provide a simple and efficient treatment of complex linguistic phenomena such as cross-serial dependencies in german and dutch---separating the treatment of natural language into a parsing phase closely resembling traditional context-free treatment, and a disambiguation phase which can be carried out using matching, as opposed to full unification employed in most current grammar formalisms of linguistical relevance.
how to restrict ambiguity of discourse. we single out a class of <u>prototypes</u> i.e., a class of constructions forcing the obligatory coreference or obligatory noncoreference. an essential feature of prototypes is their undistinctiveness. in this sense they are the most natural and efficient means of communication in discourse.the non-application of prototype should be well motivated. this leads to the <u>rule of restricted choice</u> stating that whenever it is possible the application of a prototype should be preferred.the rule of the restricted choice suggests the general outline of interpreting ambiguous sentences, strictly speaking, the method of ordering admissible interpretations: those which can be equivalently expressed by means of a prototype are less probable. in other words, the rule of the restricted choice can be regarded as some kind of mechanism ordering the hypotheses for computation.
fail-soft ("emergency") measures in a production-oriented mt system. a system of fail-soft (emergency) measures for a production-oriented mt system is discussed, stating first the specific purposes of such a system, and showing then, how these measures are being used in the system of english-to-czech machine translation as prepared by the group of mathematical linguistics at charles university in prague.
ruslan - an mt system between closely related languages. a project of machine translation of czech computer manuals into russian is described, presenting first a description of the overall system structure and concentrating then mainly on input text preparation and a parsing algorithm based on bottom-up parser programmed in colmerauer's q-systems.
tenses as anaphora. a proposal to deal with french tenses in the frame-work of discourse representation theory is presented, as it has been implemented for a fragment at the ims. it is based on the theory of tenses of h. kamp and ch. rohrer.instead of using operators to express the meaning of the tenses the reichenbachian point of view is adopted and refined such that the impact of the tenses with respect to the meaning of the text is understood as contribution to the integration of the events of a sentences in the event structure of the preceeding text. thereby a system of relevant times provided by the preceeding text and by the temporal adverbials of the sentence being processed is used. this system consists of one or more reference times and temporal perspective times, the speech time and the location time. the special interest of our proposal is to establish a plausible choice of "anchors" for the new event out of the system of relevant times and to update this system of temporal coordinates correctly. the problem of choice is largely neglected in the literature. in opposition to the approach of kamp and rohrer the exact meaning of the tenses is fixed by the resolution component and not in the process of syntactic analysis.
structure of sentence and inferencing in question answering. in the present paper we characterize in more detail some of the aspects of a question answering system using as its starting point the underlying structure of sentences (which with some approaches can be identified with the level of meaning or of logical form). first of all, the criteria are described that are used to identify the elementary units of underlying structure and the operations conjoining them into complex units (sect.1), then the main types of units and operations resulting from an empirical investigation on the basis of the criteria are registered (sect.2), and finally the rules of inference, accounting for the relevant aspects of the relationship between linguistic and cognitive structures are illustrated (sect.3).
resolving discourse deictic anaphora in dialogues. most existing anaphora resolution algorithms are designed to account only for anaphors with np-antecedents. this paper describes an algorithm for the resolution of discourse deictic anaphors, which constitute a large percentage of anaphors in spoken dialogues. the success of the resolution is dependent on the classification of all pronouns and demonstratives into individual, discourse deictic and vague anaphora. finally, the empirical results of the application of the algorithm to a corpus of spoken dialogues are presented.
towards an automatic identipeation of topic and focus. the purpose of the paper is (i) to substantiate the claim that the output of an automatic analysis should represent among other things also the hierarchy of topic-focus articulation, and (ii) to present a general procedure for determining the topic-focus articulation in czech and english.(i) the following requirements on the output of an automatic analysis are significant:(a) in the output of the analysis it should be marked which elements of the analyzed sentence belong to its topic and which to the focus;(b) the scale of communicative dynamism (cd) should also be identified for every representation of a meaning of the analyzed sentence, since the degrees of cd correspond to the unmarked distribution of quantifier scopes in the semantic interpretation of the sentences;(c) the analysis should also distinguish topicless sentences from those having a topic, which is relevant for the scope of negation.(ii) for an automatic recognition of topic, focus and the degrees of cd, two points are crucial:(a) either the input language has(a considerable degree of) the so-called free word order (as in czech, russian), or its word order is determined mainly by the grammatical relations (as in english, french);(b) either the input is spoken discourse (and the recognition procedure includes an acoustic analysis), or written (printed) texts are analyzed.in accordance with these points, a general procedure for determining topic, focus and the degrees of cd is formulated for czech and english, with some hints how the preceding context can be taken into account.
multilevel semantic analysis in an automatic speech understanding and dialog system. at our institute a speech understanding and dialog system is developed. as an example we model an information system for timetables and other information about intercity trains.in understanding spoken utterances, additional problems arise due to pronunciation variabilities and vagueness of the word recognition process. experiments so far have also shown that the syntactical analysis produces a lot more hypotheses instead of reducing the number of word hypotheses. the reason for that is the possibility of combining nearly every group of word hypotheses which are adjacent with respect to the speech signal to a syntactically correct constituent. also, the domain independent semantic analysis cannot be used for filtering, because a syntactic sentence hypothesis normally can be interpreted in several different ways, respectively a set of syntactic hypotheses for constituents can be combined to a lot of semantically interpretible sentences. because of this combinatorial explosion it seems to be reasonable to introduce domain dependent and contextual knowledge as early as possible, also for the semantic analysis. on the other hand it would be more efficient prior to the whole semantic interpretation of each syntactic hypothesis or combination of syntactic hypotheses to find possible candidates with less effort and interpret only the more probable ones.
identifying topic and focus by an automatic procedure. an algorithm for automatic identification of topic and focus of the sentence is presented, based on dependency syntax and using written input, which is much more ambiguous than spoken utterance.
automating the acquisition of bilingual terminology. as the acquisition problem of bilingual lists of terminological expressions is formidable, it is worthwhile to investigate methods to compile such lists as automatically as possible. in this paper we discuss experimental results for a number of methods, which operate on corpora of previously translated texts.
parsing with polymorphism. certain phenomena resist coverage within the lambek calculus, such as scope-ambiguity and non-peripheral extraction. i have argued in previous work that an extension called polymorphic lambek calculus (plc), which adds variables and their universal quantification, covers these phenomena. however, a major problem is the absence of a known decision procedure for plc grammars. this paper proposes a decision procedure which covers a subset of all the possible plc grammars, a subset which, however, includes the plc grammars with wide coverage. the decision procedure is shown to be terminating, and correct, and a prolog implementation of it is described.
an atn treatment wh-movement. an atn-parser is presented with emphasis on the treatment of those phenomena which in the framework of transformational grammar are subsumed under the concept of wh-movement. the approach taken tries to embed these constructions into an atn grammar in a general, linguistically motivated and in terms of the atn grammar formalism descriptive way. to accomplish this goal the approach described incorporates the basic principles governing such constructions as formulated in the framework of the trace theory proposed in the development of the extended standard theory (est). thus a unified treatment for both relative clauses and wh-questions is achieved.
profit: prolog with features, inheritance and templates. profit is an extension of standard prolog with features, inheritance and templates. profit allows the programmer or grammar developer to declare an inheritance hierarchy, features and templates. sorted feature terms can be used in profit programs together with prolog terms to provide a clearer description language for linguistic structures. profit compiles all sorted feature terms into a prolog term representation, so that the built-in prolog term unification can be used for the unification of sorted feature structures, and no special unification algorithm is needed. profit programs are compiled into prolog programs, so that no meta-interpreter is needed for their execution. profit thus provides a direct step from grammars developed with sorted feature terms to prolog programs usable for practical nlp systems.