waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
a prolog implementation of lexical functional grammar as a base for a natural language processing system. the aim of this paper is to present parts of our system [2], which is to construct a database out of a narrative natural language text. we think the parts are of interest in their own. the paper consists of three sections:(1) we give a detailed description of the prolog - implementation of the parser which is based on the theory of lexical functional grammar (lfg). the parser covers the fragment described in [1,&sect;;4]. i.e., it is able to analyse constructions involving functional control and long distance dependencies. we will to show that- prolog provides an efficient tool for lfg-implementation: a phrase structure rule annotated with functional schemata likes s &rarr; np vp is to be interpreted as, first, indetifying the special grammatical relation of subject position of any sentence analyzed by this clause to be the np appearing in it, and second, as identifying all grammatical relations of the sentence with those of the vp. this universal interpretation of the lfg-metavariables &uarr; and &darr; corresponds to the universal quantification of variables appearing in prolog-clauses. the procedural semantics of prolog is such that the instantiation of the variables in a clause is inherited from the instantiation given by its subgoals, if they succeed. thus there is no need for a separate component which solves the set of equations obtained by applying the lfg algorithm.-there is a canonical way of translating lfg into a prolog programme.(ii) for the semantic representation of texts we use the discourse representation theory developped by hans kamp. at present the implementation includes the fragment described in [4]. in addition it analyses different types of negation and certain equi- and raising-verbs. we postulate some requirements a semantic representation has to fulfill in order to be able to analyse whole texts. we show how kamp's theory meets these requirements by analyzing sample discourses involving anaphoric np's.(iii) finally we sketch how the parser formalism can be augmented to yield as output discourse representation structures. to do this we introduce the new notion of 'logical head' in addition to the lfg notion of 'grammatical head'. the reason is the wellknown fact that the logical structure of a sentence is induced by the determiners and not by the verb which on the other hand determiners the thematic structure of the sentence. however the verb is able to restrict quantifier scope ambiguities or to induce a preference ordering on the set of possible quantifier scope relations. therefore there must be an interaction between the grammatical head and the logical head of a phrase.
automatic construction of machine translation knowledge using translation literalness. when machine translation (mt) knowledge is automatically constructed from bilingual corpora, redundant rules are acquired due to translation variety. these rules increase ambiguity or cause incorrect mt results. to overcome this problem, we constrain the sentences used for knowledge extraction to "the appropriate bilingual sentences for the mt." in this paper, we propose a method using translation literalness to select appropriate sentences or phrases. the translation correspondence rate (tcr) is defined as the literalness measure.based on the tcr, two automatic construction methods are tested. one is to filter the corpus before rule acquisition. the other is to split the acquisition process into two phases, where a bilingual sentence is divided into literal parts and the other parts before different generalizations are applied. the effects are evaluated by the mt quality, and about 4.9% of mt results were improved by the latter method.
automatic acquisition of script knowledge from a text collection. in this paper, we describe a method for automatic acquisition of script knowledge from a japanese text collection. script knowledge represents a typical sequence of actions that occur in a particular situation. we extracted sequences (pairs) of actions occurring in time order from a japanese text collection and then chose those that were typical of certain situations by ranking these sequences (pairs) in terms of the frequency of their occurrence. to extract sequences of actions occurring in time order, we constructed a text collection in which texts describing facts relating to a similar situation were clustered together and arranged in time order.we also describe a preliminary experiment with our acquisition system and discuss the results.
a natural language interface using a world model. databases are nowadays used by varied and diverse users, many of whom are unfamiliar with the workings of a computer, but who, nevertheless, want to use those databases more easily. rising to meet this demand, authors are developing a japanese language interface, called kid, as a database front-end system. kid incorporates a world model representing application and database knowledge to help make databases easier to use. kid has the following features: (1) parser extendability and robustness, (2) independence from the application domain, (3) ease of knowledge editing, (4) independence from the database. this paper focuses on the first three features. kid has already been applied to the fields of housing, sales, and drug testing, thus confirming its transportability and practicality.
word sense disambiguation in untagged text based on term weight learning. this paper describes unsupervised learning algorithm for disambiguating verbal word senses using term weight learning. in our method, collocations which characterise every sense are extracted using similarity-based estimation. for the results, term weight learning is performed. parameters of term weighting are then estimated so as to maximise the collocations which characterise every sense and minimise the other collocations. the results of experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.
knowledge engineering approach to morphological analysis. finnish is a highly inflectional language. a verb can have over ten thousand different surface forms - nominals slightly fewer. consequently, a morphological analyzer is an important component of a system aiming at "understanding" finnish. this paper briefly describes our rule-based heuristic analyzer for finnish nominal and verb forms. our tests have shown it to be quite efficient: the analysis of a finnish word in a running text takes an average of 15 ms of dec 20 cpu-time.
a rule-based approach to evaluating importance in descriptive texts. importance evaluation is one of the most challenging problems in the field of text processing. in the paper we focus on the notion of importance from a computational standpoint, and we propose a procedural, rule-based approach to importance evaluation. this novel approach is supported by a prototype experimental system, called importance evaluator, that can deal with descriptive texts taken from computer science literature on operating systems. the evaluator relies on a set of importance rules that are used to assign importance values to the different parts of a text and to resolve or explain conflicting evaluations. the system utilizes world knowledge on the subject domain contained in an encyclopedia and takes into account a goal assigned by the user for specifying the pragmatic aspects of the understanding activity. the paper describes the role of the evaluator in the frame of a larger system for text summarization (susy); it illustrates its overall mode of operation, and discusses some meaningful examples.
a general feature space for automatic verb classification. we develop a general feature space for automatic classification of verbs into lexical semantic classes. previous work was limited in scope by the need for manual selection of discriminating features, through a linguistic analysis of the target verb classes (merlo and stevenson, 2001). we instead analyze the classification structure at a higher level, using the possible defining characteristics of classes as the basis for our feature space. the general feature space achieves reductions in error rates of 42--69%, on a wider range of classes than investigated previously, with comparable performance to feature sets manually selected for the particular classification tasks. our results show that the approach is generally applicable, and avoids the need for resource-intensive linguistic analysis for each new task.
tense generation in an intelligent tutor for foreign language teaching: some issues in the design of the verb expert. the paper presents some of the results obtained within a research project aimed at developing et (english tutor), an intelligent tutoring system which supports italian students in learning the english verbs. we concentrate on one of the most important modules of the system, the domain (i.e. verb) expert which is devoted to generate, in a cognitively transparent way, the right tense for the verb(s) appearing in the exercises presented to the student. an example which highlights the main capabilities of the verb expert is provided. a prototype version of et has been fully implemented.
automatic annotation for all semantic layers in framenet. we describe a system for automatic annotation of english text in the framenet standard. in addition to the conventional annotation of frame elements and their semantic roles, we annotate additional semantic information such as support verbs and prepositions, aspectual markers, copular verbs, null arguments, and slot fillers. as far as we are aware, this is the first system that finds this information automatically.
teaching the english tense: integrating naive and formal grammars in an intelligent tutor for foreign language teaching. a basic problem that must be dealt with in order to build an intelligent tutoring system (its) in the domain of foreign language teaching is that of establishing what kind of grammatical knowledge has to be included in the domain expert module. two basic options are possible: (i) to use a naive or pedagogical grammar, comprising knowledge derived from textbooks and school grammars or (ii) to use one of the formal grammars developed by theoretical and computational linguists. the paper discusses the relationships between naive and formal grammars in foreign language teaching and presents, as a case study, an attempt to integrate the two approaches within et (english tutor), an its aimed at helping italian students master english verb usage. more particularly, the paper focuses on the possibility of integrating a naive grammar into a systemic framework. the reliability of the proposed approach is currently being evaluated by means of a series of computational experiments with the verb generation expert of et.
a rich environment for experimentation with unification grammars. this paper describes some of the features of a sophisticated language and environment designed for experimentation with unification-oriented linguistic descriptions. the system, which is called und, has to date been used successfully as a development and prototyping tool in a research project on the application of situation schemata to the representation of real text, and in extensive experimentation in machine translation.while the ud language bears close resemblances to all the well-known unification grammar formalisms, it offers a wider range of features than any single alternative, plus powerful facilities for notational abstraction which allow users to simulate different theoretical approaches in a natural way.after a brief discussion of the motivation for implementing yet another unification device, the main body of the paper is devoted to a description of the most important novel features of und.the paper concludes with a discussion of some questions of implementation and completeness.
encoding a parallel corpus for automatic terminology extraction. we present a status report about an ongoing research project in the field of (semi-) automatic terminology acquisition at the european academy bolzano. the main focus will be on encoding a text corpus, which serves as a basis for applying term extraction programs.
a dialogue manager using initiative-response units and distributed control. this paper describes a system for managing dialogue in a natural language interface. the proposed approach uses a dialogue manager as the overall control mechanism. the dialogue manager accesses domain independent resources for interpretation, generation and background system access. it also uses information from domain dependent knowledge sources, which are customized for various applications.instead of using complex plan-based reasoning, the dialogue manager uses information about possible interaction structures and information from the specific dialogue situation to manage the dialogue. this is motivated from the analysis of a series of experiments where users interacted with a simulated natural language interface. the dialogue manager integrates information about segment types and moves into a hierarchical dialogue tree. the dialogue tree is accessed through a scoreboard which uses exchangeable access functions. the control is distributed and the dialogue is directed from action plans in the nodes in the dialogue tree.
a unification-based approach to multiple vp ellipsis resolution. an assumption shared by many theories of discourse is that discourse structure constrains anaphora resolution (cf. [grosz and sidner 1986] for definite nps, [lascarides and asher 1991], [nakhimovsky 1988] for temporal anaphora, [webber 1990] for deictic pronouns and [gardent 1991], [pr&uuml;st and scha 1990] for vp ellipsis). the aim of this paper is (i) to show that this assumption also applies to multiple vp ellipsis (vpe), (ii) to argue that other levels of linguistics information (such as syntax and semantics) interact with discourse structure in determining multiple vpe acceptability and (iii) to make these intuitions precise by providing a unification-based account of multiple vpe resolution.
plan revision in person-machine dialogue. dialogue is a cooperative process in which each speech act of the participants contributes to the overall purpose of the dialogue. participating in a full dialogue implies understanding at each point of the dialogue session the role of each speech act with respect to the rest of the dialogue. we concentrate in this paper on speech acts that diverge from the straight-forward unfolding of the dialogue. such speech acts represent dialogue deviations. we analyze the representation of different types and degrees of deviations and present a plan revision mechanism for dialogue management that permits their treatment in the context of advice giving dialogues between a novice user and an expert problem solver.
a probabilistic parser. the ucrel team at the university of lancaster is engaged in the development of a robust parsing mechanism, which will assign the appropriate grammatical structure to sentences in unconstrained english text. the techniques used involve the calculation of probabilities for competing structures, and are based on the techniques successfully used in tagging (i.e. assigning grammatical word classes) to the lob (lancaster-oslo/bergen) corpus.the first step in the parsing process involves dictionary lookup of successive pairs of grammatically tagged words, to give a number of possible continuations to the current parse. since this lookup will often not be able unambiguously to distinguish the point at which a grammatical constituent should be closed, the second step of the parsing process will have to insert closures and distinguish between alternative parses. it will generate trees representing these possible alternatives, insert closure points for the constituents, and compute a probability for each parse tree from the probability of each constituent within the tree. it will then be able to select a preferred parse or parses for output.the probability of a grammatical constituent is derived from a bank of manually parsed sentences.
parsing without lexicon: the morp system. morp is a system for automatic word class assignment on the basis of surface features. it has a very small lexicon of form words (&permil; entries), and for the rest works entirely on morphological and configurational patterns. this makes it robust and fast, and in spite of the (deliberate) restrictedness of the system, its performance reaches an average accuracy level above 91% when run on unrestricted swedish text.
rule-based acquisition and maintenance of lexical and semantic knowledge. the lexicons for knowledge-based machine translation systems require knowledge intensive morphological, syntactic and semantic information. this information is often used in different ways and usually formatted for a specific nlp system. this tends to make both the acquisition and maintenance of lexical databases cumbersome, inefficient and error-prone. in order to solve these problems, we have developed a program called cool which automates the acquisition and maintenance processes and allows us to standardize and centralize the databases. this system is currently being used in the estrato machine translation project at the center for machine translation.
representation of feature systems in a non-connectionist molecular machine. this paper is part of an enterprise whose aim is to represent linguistic knowledge in the form of a molecular machine (a dynamic network). that is, the molecules of the network not only store, but also send, receive, and process information. it is claimed that such a network can be conceived of as a model of the coalition structure of a connectionist network. the paper describes how the class of feature systems called unary feature hierarchies (whose importance is supported by phonological theory but will not be argued for in the paper) can be represented in the molecular machine.
translation by structural correspondences. we sketch and illustrate an approach to machine translation that exploits the potential of simultaneous correspondences between separate levels of linguistic representation, as formalized in the lfg notion of codescriptions. the approach is illustrated with examples from english, german and french where the source and the target language sentence show noteworthy differences in linguistic analysis.
restriction and correspondence-based translation. kaplan et al. (1989) present a framework for translation based on the description and correspondence concepts of lexical-functional grammar (kaplan and bresnan, 1982). certain phenomena, in particular the head-switching of adverbs and verbs, seem to be problematic for that approach. in this paper we suggest that these difficulties are more properly considered as the result of defective monolingual analyses. we propose a new description-language operator, restriction, to permit a succinct formal encoding of the informal intuition that semantic units sometimes correspond to subsets of functional information. this operator, in conjunction with an additional recursion provided by a description-by-analysis rule, is the basis of a more adequate account of head-switching that preserves the advantages of correspondence-based translation.
what humour tells us about discourse theories. many verbal jokes, like garden path sentences, pose difficulties to models of discourse since the initially primed interpretation needs to be discarded and a new one created based on subsequent statements. the effect of the joke depends on the fact that the second (correct) interpretation was not visible earlier. existing models of discourse semantics in principle generate all interpretations of discourse fragments and carry these until contradicted, and thus the dissonance criteria in humour cannot be met. computationally, maintaining all possible worlds in a discourse is very inefficient, thus computing only the maximum-likelihood interpretation seems to be a more efficient choice on average. in this work we outline a probabilistic lexicon based lexical semantics approach which seems to be a reasonable construct for discourse in general and use some examples from humour to demonstrate its working.
an approach to summarizing short stories. this paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of short works of literary fiction. the ultimate purpose of produced summaries is defined as helping a reader to determine whether she would be interested in reading a particular story. to this end, the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the settings of a story (such as characters, time and place) without revealing the plot. the approach presented here relies heavily on the notion of aspect. preliminary results show an improvement over two na&iuml;ve baselines: a lead baseline and a more sophisticated variant of it. although modest, the results suggest that using aspectual information may be of help when summarizing fiction. a more thorough evaluation involving human judges is under way.
a discourse copying algorithm for ellipsis and anaphora resolution. we give an analysis of ellipsis resolution in terms of a straightforward discourse copying algorithm that correctly predicts a wide range of phenomena. the treatment does not suffer from problems inherent in identity-of-relations analyses. furthermore, in contrast to the approach of dalrymple et al. [1991], the treatment directly encodes the intutive distinction between full nps and the referential elements that corefer with them through what we term role linking. the correct predictions for several problematic examples of ellipsis naturally result. finally, the analysis extends directly to other discourse copying phenomena.
a multilevel approach to handle non-standard input. in the project "procedural dialogue models" being carried on at the university of bielefeld we have developed an incremental multilevel parsing formalism to reconstruct task-oriented dialogues. a major difficulty we have had to overcome is that the dialogues are real ones with numerous ungrammatical utterances. the approach we have devised to cope with this problem is reported here.
l'idee de grammaire avec le contexte naturel. commonly used grammars which describe natural languages /ex. atn, metamorphosis grammars/ can be hardly applied in describing higly inflectional languages. so i propose a grammar called the grammar with natural context which takes into consideration properties of highly inflectional languages /ex. polish / as well as structural languages /ex. english/. i introduce its normal form.
peas, the first instantiation of a comparative framework for evaluating parsers of french. this paper presents peas, the first comparative evaluation framework for parsers of french whose annotation formalism allows the annotation of both constituents and functional relations. a test corpus containing an assortment of different text types has been built and part of it has been manually annotated. precision/recall and crossing brackets metrics will be adapted to our formalism and applied to the parses produced by one parser from academia and another one from industry in order to validate the framework.
the semantics of resource sharing in lexical-functional grammar. we argue that the resource sharing that is commonly manifest in semantic accounts of coordination is instead appropriately handled in terms of structure-sharing in lfg f-structures. we provide an extension to the previous account of lfg semantics (dalrymple et al., 1993a) according to which dependencies between f-structures are viewed as resources; as a result a one-to-one correspondence between uses of f-structures and meanings is maintained. the resulting system is sufficiently restricted in cases where other approaches overgenerate; the very property of resource-sensitivity for which resource sharing appears to be problematic actually provides explanatory advantages over systems that more freely replicate resources during derivation.