waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
location normalization for information extraction. ambiguity is very high for location names. for example, there are 23 cities named 'buffalo' in the u.s. country names such as 'canada', 'brazil' and 'china' are also city names in the usa. almost every city has a main street or broadway. such ambiguity needs to be handled before we can refer to location names for visualization of related extracted events. this paper presents a hybrid approach for location normalization which combines (i) lexical grammar driven by local context constraints, (ii) graph search for maximum spanning tree and (iii) integration of semi-automatically derived default senses. the focus is on resolving ambiguities for the following types of location names: island, town, city, province, and country. the results are promising with 93.8% accuracy on our test collections.
from trees to predicate-argument structures. the penn treebank encodes valuable information such as grammatical function, semantic roles, and identification of traces. the addition of such information was intended to facilitate the process of predicate-argument extraction. however, even with the enriched annotation this task is far from trivial and, to our knowledge, no complete set of predicate argument structures derived from the treebank exists. our paper describes a method for retrieving predicate-argument structures that circumvents the complexity of the tree structures in the corpus, while employing few template rules. our system operates on a flattened, morphologically enriched version of the corpus. this flattened representation allows access to all levels of the tree simultaneously and thus enables the detection of the main sentence constituents by means of simple template rules. a small number of rules apply to identify the head words of each constituent and the latter fill in the constituent templates, to build the logical forms representative of the predicate argument structure. the system is robust in the face of incomplete syntactic coverage.
on the structural complexity of natural language sentences. the objective of this paper is to formalize the intnition about the complexity of syntactic structures. we propose a definition of structural complexity such that sentences ranked by our definition as more complex are generally more difficult for humans to process. we justify the definition by showing how it is able to account for several seemingly unrelated phenomena in natural languages.
arbus, a tool for developing application grammars. the development of a natural language system usually requires frequent changes to the grammar used. it is then very useful to be able to define and modify the grammar rules easily, without having to tamper with the parsing program. the arbus system was designed to help develop grammars for natural language processing. with this system one can build, display, test, modify and file a grammar interactively in a very convenient way. this was achieved by packaging a parser and a grammar editor with an elaborate interface which isolates the user from implementation details and guides him as much as possible.
the automated acquisition of topic signatures for text summarization. in order to produce a good summary, one has to identify the most relevant portions of a given text. we describe in this paper a method for automatically training topic signatures-sets of related words, with associated weights, organized around head topics and illustrate with signatures we created with 6,194 trec collection texts over 4 selected topics. we describe the possible integration of topic signatures with outologies and its evaluaton on an automated text summarization system.
its: interactive translation system. at coling78 we reported on an interactive translation system now called its, which uses on-line man-machine interaction. this paper is an update on its with suggestions for future work.
concept discovery from text. broad-coverage lexical resources such as wordnet are extremely useful. however, they often include many rare senses while missing domain-specific senses. we present a clustering algorithm called cbc (clustering by committee) that automatically discovers concepts from text. it initially discovers a set of tight clusters called committees that are well scattered in the similarity space. the centroid of the members of a committee is used as the feature vector of the cluster. we proceed by assigning elements to their most similar cluster. evaluating cluster quality has always been a difficult task. we present a new evaluation methodology that is based on the editing distance between output clusters and classes extracted from wordnet (the answer key). our experiments show that cbc outperforms several well-known clustering algorithms in cluster quality.
error diagnosting and selection in a training system for second language learning. a diagnosing procedure to be used in intelligent systems for language instruction is presented. based on a knowledge representation scheme for a certain class of syntactic correctness conditions the system carries out a thorough analysis of possible error hypotheses and their consequences. a comparison with earlier attempts shows a clearly improved precision of diagnostic results. first of all, the procedure concentrates on an exact localization of rule violations, but - if desired - is able to infer information about factual faults as well.
hypothesis scoring over theta grids information in parsing chinese sentences with serial verb constructions. serial verb constructions (svcs) in chinese are popular structural ambiguities which make parsing difficult. in this paper, we propose a quantitative model, 's-model'. based on theta grids information, that can systematically resolve ambiguities of svcs to arbitrate competence between verbs in parsing svcs sentences. s-model has three major characteristics: (1) it can resolve svcs without relying on specific types of svcs classified by linguists; (2) it can handle long svcs, i.e., svcs with more than two verbs; (3) it can simultaneously determine whether a verb candidate is really acts as a verb in the sentence.
a corpus study of negative imperatives in natural language instructions. in this paper, we define the notion of a preventative expression and discuss a corpus study of such expressions in instructional text. we discuss our coding schema, which takes into account both form and function features, and present measures of inter-coder reliability for those features. we then discuss the correlations that exist between the function and the form features.
solving some persistent presupposition problems. /soames 1979/ provides some counterexamples to the theory of natural language presuppositions that is presented in /gazdar 1979/. /soames 1982/ provides a theory which explains these counterexamples. /mercer 1987/ rejects the solution found in /soames 1982/ leaving these counterexamples unexplained. by reappraising these insightful counterexamples, the inferential theory for natural language presuppositions described in /mercer 1987, 1988/ gives a simple and straightforward explanation for the presuppositional nature of these sentences.
ambiguity resolution and the retrieval of idioms: two approaches. when an idiomatic expression is encountered during natural language processing, the ambiguity between its idiomatic and non-idiomatic meaning has to be resolved. rather than including both meanings in further processing, a conventionality-principle could be applied. this results in best-first processing of the idiomatic analysis. two models are discussed fot the lexical representation of idioms. one extends the notion continuation class from two-level morphology, the other is a localist, connectionist model. the connectionist model has an important advantage over the continuation class model: the conventionality principle follows naturally from the architecture of the connectionist model.
a novel analysis of temporal frame-adverbials. in this paper interpretation principles for simple and complex frame-adverbial expressions are presented. central to these principles is a distinction between phases and periods together with the temporal hierarchy, where multiple scales of time and relations can be expressed. a system, clockwise, has been implemented which interprets swedish temporal expressions according to the principles outlined in the paper.
a plan recognition model for clarification subdialogues. one of the promising approaches to analyzing task-oriented dialogues has involved modeling the plans of the speakers in the task domain. in general, these models work well as long as the topic follows the task structure closely, but they have difficulty in accounting for clarification subdialogues and topic change. we have developed a model based on a hierarchy of plans and metaplans that accounts for the clarification subdialogues while maintaining the advantages of the plan-based approach.
parsing dependency grammar using ale. this paper describes a technique for parsing dependency grammars using a bottom-up chart parser originally designed for phrase-structure grammars, using typed feature structures as the only data structure. each lexical item is represented as a tree where nodes indicate lexical elements (the anchor, its dependents and governor) and edges (branches) indicate dependency relations between these elements. nodes may carry additional features, including one for node saturation. trees combine into derived trees provided that node and edge features unify. the ale system is used to implement an active chart parser where a chart edge represents a tree, and two adjacent edges are combined into a more saturated tree.
disambiguating cue phrases in text and speech. cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as 'now' and 'well' that may explicitly mark the structure of a discourse. for example, while the cue phrase 'incidentally' may be used sententially as an adverbial, the discourse use initiates a digression. in [8], we noted the ambiguity of cue phrases with respect to discourse and sentential usage and proposed an intonational model for their disambiguation. in this paper, we extend our previous characterization of cue phrases and generalize its domain of coverage, based on a larger and more comprehensive empirical study: an examination of all cue phrases produced by a single speaker in recorded natural speech. we also associate this prosodic model with orthographic and part-of-speech analyses of cue phrases in text. such a dual model provides both theoretical justification for current computational models of discourse and practical application to the generation of synthetic speech.
strategies for effective paraphrasing. in this paper we present a new dimension to paraphrasing text in which characteristics of the original text motivate strategies for effective paraphrasing. our system combines two existing robust components: the irus-ii natural language understanding system and the spokesman generation system. we describe the architecture of the system and enhancements made to these components to facilitate paraphrasing. we particularly look at how levels of representation in these two systems are used by specialists in the paraphraser which define potential problems and paraphrasing strategies. finally, we look at the role of paraphrasing in a cooperative dialog system. we will focus here on paraphrasing in the context of natural language interfaces and particularly on how multiple interpretations introduced by various kinds of ambiguity can be conbasted in paraphrases using both sentence structure and highlighting and formating the text itself.
automatic optimization of dialogue management. designing the dialogue strategy of a spoken dialogue system involves many nontrivial choices. this paper presents a reinforcement learning approach for automatically optimizing a dialogue strategy that addresses the technical challenges in applying reinforcement learning to a working dialogue system with human users. we then show that our approach measurably improves performance in an experimental system.
a corpus-based learning technique for building a self-extensible parser. human intervention and/or training corpora tagged with various kinds of information were often assumed in many natural language acquisition models. this assumption is a major source of inconsistencies, errors, an d inefficiency in learning. in this paper, we explore the extent to which a parser may extend it-self without relying on extra input from the outside world. a learning technique called sep is proposed and attached to the parser. the input to sep is raw sentences, while the output is the knowledge that is missing in the parser. since parsers and raw sentences are commonly available and no human intervention is needed in learning, sep could make fully automatic large-scale acquisition more feasible.
building a bilingual wordnet-like lexicon: the new approach and algorithms. a bilingual concept mrd is of significance for ie, mt, wsd and the like. however, it is reasonably difficult to build such a lexicon for there exist two ontologies, also, the evolution of such a lexicon is quite challenging. in this paper, we would like to put forth the new approach to building a bilingual wordnet-like lexicon and to dwell on some of the pivotal algorithms.a characteristic of this new approach is to emphasize the inheritance and transformation of the existent monolingual lexicon. on the one hand, we have extracted all the common knowledge in wordnet as the semantic basis for further use. on the other hand, we have developed a visualized developing tool for the lexicographers to interactively operate on to express the bilingual semantics. the bilingual lexicon has thus gradually come into being in this natural process.icl now has benefited a lot by employing this new approach to build ccd (chinese concept dictionary), a bilingual wordnet-like lexicon, in peking university.
an earley-type recognizer for dependency grammar. the paper is a first attempt to fill a gap in the dependency literature, by providing a mathematical result on the complexity of recognition with a dependency grammar. the paper describes an improved earley-type recognizer with a complexity o(igi2n3). the improvement is due to a precompilation of the dependency rules into parse tables, that determine the conditions of applicability of two primary actions, predict and scan, used in recognition.
inheritance in hierarchical relational structures. a brief survey is conducted of the inheritance principle - the conveyance of properties between components within a hierarchical relational structure. the standard form of inheritance is considered, using the subset (is-a) relation and highlighted as an example of downward inheritance. downward inheritance is extended to specialisation of actions, and cases are presented in which the rule fails.an alternative and less well-known form of inheritance is introduced - upward inheritance. several examples in which upward inheritance is valid and others in which it is not valid are given, in a treatment highlighting the analogy with downward inheritance. the validity of the rule, in those case in which it operates, is underlined, to distinguish it from induction.a brief account is given of the search for the underlying reasons for the validity of inheritance rules and these are then given. the solution turns out to be due to a hidden or implicit quantifier within the relations that are used. the semantical nature of the problem and of its solution are stressed, emphasising the impossibility of a purely syntactic analysis and solution to the problem. various points of interest arising from the analysis are listed and discussed.
towards a new generation of terminological resources: an experiment in building a terminological knowledge base. this paper describes a project to construct a terminological knowledge base, called cogniterm. first, we position our research framework in relationship to recent developments in computational lexicology and knowledge engineering. second, we describe the cogntterm prototype and discuss its advantages over conventional term banks. finally, we outline some of the methodological issues that have emerged from our work.
chart-based transfer rule application in machine translation. transfer-based machine translation systems require a procedure for choosing the set of transfer rules for generating a target language translation from a given source language sentence. in an mt system with many competing transfer rules, choosing the best set of transfer rules for translation may involve the evaluation of an explosive number of competing sets. we propose a solution to this problem based on current best-first chart parsing algorithms.
a new predictive analyzer of english. aspects of syntactic predictions made during the recognition of english sentences are investigated. we reinforce kuno's original predictive analyzer[1] by introducing five types of predictions. for each type of prediction, we discuss and present its necessity, its description method, and recognition mechanism. we make use of three kinds of stacks whose behavior is specified by grammar rules in an extended version of greibach normal form. we also investigate other factors that affect the predictive recognition process, i.e., preferences among syntactic ambiguities and necessary amount of lookahead. these factors as well as the proposed handling mechanisms of predictions are tested by analyzing two kinds of articles. in our experiment, more than seventy percent of sentences are recognized and looking two words ahead seems to be the critical length for the predictive recognition.
dynamic logic with possible world. this paper introduces a semantic theory dlpw, dynamic logic with possible world, which extends groenendijk's dpl and cresswell's indices semantics. the semantics can interpret the temporal and modal sense and anaphora.
alignment of shared forests for bilingual corpora. research in example-based machine translation (ebmt) has been hampered by the lack of efficient tree alignment algorithms for bilingual corpora. this paper describes an alignment algorithm for ebmt whose running time is quadratic in the size of the input parse trees. the algorithm uses dynamic programming to score all possible matching nodes between structure-sharing trees or forests. we describe the algorithm, various optimizations, and our implementation.
a transitive model for extracting translation equivalents of web queries through anchor text mining. one of the existing difficulties of cross-language information retrieval (clir) and web search is the lack of appropriate translations of new terminology and proper names. different from conventional approaches, in our previous research we developed an approach for exploiting web anchor texts as live bilingual corpora and reducing the existing difficulties of query term translation. although web anchor texts, undoubtedly, are very valuable multilingual and wide-scoped hypertext resources, not every particular pair of languages contains sufficient anchor texts in the web to extract corresponding translations in the language pair. for more generalized applications, in this paper we extend our previous approach by adding a phase of transitive (indirect) translation via an intermediate (third) language, and propose a transitive model to further exploit anchor-text mining in term translation extraction applications. preliminary experimental results show that many query translations which cannot be obtained using the previous approach can be extracted with the improved approach.
exploiting a large data base by longman. we wish to explore some of the aspects of the exploitation of two dictionary files by longman ltd, one for 'core' english and one for english idioms.we'll try to show the feasibility of an approach to language processing based on a lexicon, conceived of as the repository of grammatical, semantic and knowledge-of-the-world information.after giving a brief description of the computer files (section i) we'll focus on the following points:(a)a lexical approach to grammar allows a considerable simplification of the psg component of a parsing system (section ii, part one);(b)the syntactic potential of many lexemes (at surface structure level) can serve as a guide to their deep structure configurations (section ii, part two);(c)provided that a dictionary makes use of a limited defining vocabulary, the texts of the dictionary definitions can be processed on the basis of correlations between syntactic structures (filled with individual lexemes or lexemes belonging to specifiable classes) and semantic relationships such as that between a process verb and an instrument (section iii).
learning chinese bracketing knowledge based on a bilingual language model. this paper proposes a new method for automatic acquisition of chinese bracketing knowledge from english-chinese sentence-aligned bilingual corpora. bilingual sentence pairs are first aligned in syntactic structure by combining english parse trees with a statistical bilingual language model. chinese bracketing knowledge is then extracted automatically. the preliminary experiments show automatically learned knowledge accords well with manually annotated brackets. the proposed method is particularly useful to acquire bracketing knowledge for a less studied language that lacks tools and resources found in a second language more studied. although this paper discusses experiments with chinese and english, the method is also applicable to other language pairs.
approaches to thesaurus production. we contrast two approaches to thesaurus production: the traditional and intuitive one versus the amsler-type procedure, which interactively generates filiations among the genus words in a computerized dictionary. we discuss the application of such a procedure to our lexical data base (longman dictionary of contemporary english).
controlled active procedures as a tool for linguistic engineering. controlled active procedures are productions that are grouped under and activated by units called 'scouts'. scouts are controlled by units called 'missions', which also select relevant sections from the data structure for rule application. following the problem reduction method, the parsing problem is subdivided into ever smaller subproblems, each one of which is represented by a mission. the elementary problems are represented by scouts. the cap grammar formalism is based on experience gained with natural language (nl) analysis and translation by computer in the sonderforschungsbereich 100 at the university of saarbr&uuml;cken over the past twelve years and dictated by the wish to develop an efficient parser for random nl texts on a sound theoretical basis. the idea has ripened in discussions with colleagues from the eurotra-project and is based on what heinz-dieter maas has developed in the framework of the susy-ii system.in the present paper, cap is introduced as a means of linguistic engineering (cf. simmons 1985), which covers aspects like rule writing, parsing strategies, syntactic and semantic representation of meaning, representation of lexical knowledge etc.
instance based learning with automatic feature selection applied to word sense disambiguation. we describe an algorithm for word sense disambiguation (wsd) that relies on a lazy learner improved with automatic feature selection. the algorithm was implemented in a system that achieves excellent performance on the set of data released during the senseval-2 competition. we present the results obtained and discuss the performance of various features in the context of supervised learning algorithms for wsd.