waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
open-domain voice-activated question answering. voice-activated question answering (vaqa) systems represent the next generation capability for universal access by integrating state-of-the-art in question answering q&a and automatic speech recognition (asr) in such a way that the performance of the combined system is better than the individual components. this paper presents an implemented vaqa system and describes the techniques that enable the terative refinement of both q&a and asr. the results of our experiments show that spoken questions can be processed with surprising accuracy when using our vaqa implementation.
experiments with open-domain textual question answering. this paper describes the integration of several knowledge-based natural language processing techniques into a question answering system, capable of mining textual answers from large collections of texts. surprizing quality is achieved when several lightweight knowledge-based nlp techniques complement mostly shallow, surface-based approaches.
constraining tree adjoining grammars by unification. in a proposal, vijay-shanker and joshi presented a definition for combining the two formalisms tree adjoining grammars and patr unification. the essential idea for that combination is the separation of the two recursion operations - adjoining and unification - to preserve all properties of both formalisms which is not desirable for natural language applications. in this paper, a definition for the integrated use of both processes is given and the remaining properties of the resulting formalism are discussed - especially weighing the appropriateness of this definition for natural language processing.
a quantitative model of word order and movement in english, dutch and german complement constructions. we present a quantitative model of word order and movement constraints that enables a simple and uniform treatment of a seemingly heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in english, dutch and german complement constructions (wh-extraction, clause union, extraposition, verb clustering, particle movement, etc.). underlying the scheme are central assumptions of the psycholinguistically motivated performance grammar (pg). here we describe this formalism in declarative terms based on typed feature unification. pg allows a homogenous treatment of both the within- and between-language variations of the ordering phenomena under discussion, which reduce to different settings of a small number of quantitative parameters.
default handling in incremental generation. natural language generation must work with insufficient input. underspecifications can be caused by shortcomings of the component providing the input or by the preliminary state of incrementally given input. the paper aims to escape from such dead-end situations by making assumptions. we discuss global aspects of default handling. two problem classes for defaults in the incremental syntactic generator vm-gen are presented to substantiate our discussion.
vp ellipsis and contextual interpretation. a computational account of vp ellipsis is described, in which vp's are represented in the discourse model as contextually dependent semantic objects. it is argued that this approach can handle examples that are not allowed by alternative accounts. an implementation is defined in terms of extensions to the incremental interpretation system. the treatment of vp ellipsis is analogous to that of pronominal anaphora. it is suggested that the recency and salience constraints commonly thought to apply to pronominal anaphora might apply in a similar way to vp ellipsis.
centering in dynamic semantics. centering theory posits a discourse center, a distinguished discourse entity that is the topic of a discourse. a simplified version of this theory is developed in a dynamic semantics framework. in the resulting system, the mechanism of center shift allows a simple, elegant analysis of a variety of phenomena involving sloppy identity in ellipsis and "paycheck pronouns".
word boundary identification from phoneme sequence constraints in automatic continouos speech recognition. this paper explores the extent to which phoneme sequence constraints can be used to identify word boundaries in continuous speech recognition. the input cousists of phonemic transcriptions (without word boundaries indicated) of 145 utterances produced by 1 rp speaker. the constraints are derived by matching the complete set of 3 phoneme sequences that can occur across word boundaries to entries in large lexicons containing both citation and reduced form pronunciations. phonemic assimilatory adjustments across word boundaries are also taken into account. the results show that around 37% of all word boundaries can be correctly identified from a knowledge of such phoneme sequence contraints alone, and that this figure rises to 45% when a knowledge of one-and two-phoneme words and all legal, word-initial and word-final, two-phoneme sequences are taken into account. the possibility of including such constraints in the architecture of a continuous speech recogniser is discussed.
learning bilingual collocations by word-level sorting. this paper proposes a new method for learning bilingual collocations from sentence-aligned parallel corpora. our method comprises two steps: (1) extracting useful word chunks (n-grams) by word-level sorting and (2) constructing bilingual collocations by combining the word-chunks acquired in stage (1). we apply the method to a very challenging text pair: a stock market bulletin in japanese and its abstract in english. domain specific collocations are well captured even if they were not contained in the dictionaries of economic terms.
conditioned unification for natural language processing. this paper presents what we call a conditional unification a new method of unification for processing natural languages. the key idea is to annotate the patterns with a certain sort of conditions, so that they carry abundant information. this method transmits information from one pattern to another more efficiently than procedure attachments, in which information contained in the procedure is embedded in the program rather than directly attached to patterns. coupled with techniques in formal linguistics, moreover, conditioned unification serves most types of operations for natural language processing.
a cognitive account of unbounded dependency. a computational approach is employed here to explicate human language faculty. some phenomena involving unbounded dependency are thus provided with cognitive account based on the processing load imposed by relevant syntactic operations. in particular, a consideration on local structural ambiguity accounts for some island effect (the noun-complement cases of complex np constraint) which is currently unexplained by static approaches in traditional theories of syntax. this exemplifies that some rules of syntax handle local ambiguity, suggesting insufficiency of traditional approaches to to syntax.
a constraint-based approach to linguistic performance. this paper investigates linguistic performance, from the viewpoint that the information processing in cognitive systems should be designed in terms of constraints rather than procedures in order to deal with partiality of information. in this perspective, the same grammar, the same belief and the same processing architecture should underly both sentence comprehension and production. a basic model of sentence processing, for both comprehension and production, is derived along this line of reasoning. this model is demonstrated to account for diverse linguistic phenomena apparently unrelated to each other, lending empirical support to the constraint paradigm.
effects of adjective orientation and gradability on sentence subjectivity. subjectivity is a pragmatic, sentence-level feature that has important implications for text processing applications such as information extraction and information retrieval. we study the effects of dynamic adjectives, semantically oriented adjectives, and gradable adjectives on a simple subjectivity classifier, and establish that they are strong predictors of subjectivity. a novel trainable method that statistically combines two indicators of gradability is presented and evaluated, complementing existing automatic techniques for assigning orientation labels.
improving search strategies: an experiment in best-first parsing. viewing the syntactic analysis of natural language as a search problem, the right choice of parsing strategy plays an important role in the performance of natural language parsers. after a motivation of the use of various heuristic criteria, a framework for defining and testing parsing strategies is presented. on this basis systematic tests on different parsing strategies have been performed, the results of which are dicussed. generally these tests show that a "guided" depth oriented strategy gives a considerable reduction of search effort compared to the classical depth-first strategy.
a three-level revision model for improving japanese bad-styled expressions. this paper proposes a three-level revision model for improving badly-styled japanese expressions, especially in the field of technical communication. the model is a mixture of the regeneration-based model and the rewriting-based model. the first level divides long sentences, while the second level improves several badly-styled expressions with iterative partial rewriting operations. the last level performs regeneration, in which word ordering and punctuation to reduce the reading ambiguity are currently involved. experimental results show that our model is effective in realizing practical revision support systems.
entity-oriented parsing. an entity-oriented approach to restricted-domain parsing is proposed. in this approach, the definitions of the structure and surface representation of domain entities are grouped together. like semantic grammar, this allows easy exploitation of limited domain semantics. in addition, it facilitates fragmentary recognition and the use of multiple parsing strategies, and so is particularly useful for robust recognition of extragrammatical input. several advantages from the point of view of language definition are also noted. representative samples from an entity-oriented language definition are presented, along with a control structure for an entity-oriented parser, some parsing strategies that use the control structure, and worked examples of parses. a parser incorporating the control structure and the parsing strategies is currently under implementation.
parsing spoken language: a semantic caseframe approach. parsing spoken input introduces serious problems not present in parsing typed natural language. in particular, indeterminacies and inaccuracies of acoustic recognition must be handled in an integral manner. many techniques for parsing typed natural language do not adapt well to these extra demands. this paper describes an extension of semantic caseframe parsing to restricted-domain spoken input. the semantic caseframe grammar representation is the same as that used for earlier work on robust parsing of typed input. due to the uncertainty inherent in speech recognition, the caseframe grammar is applied in a quite different way, emphasizing island growing from caseframe headers. this radical change in application is possible due to the high degree of abstraction in the caseframe representation. the approach presented was tested successfully in a preliminary implementation.
automatic acquisition of hyponyms from large text corpora. we describe a method for the automatic acquisition of the hyponymy lexical relation from unrestricted text. two goals motivate the approach: (i) avoidance of the need for pre-encoded knowledge and (ii) applicability across a wide range of text. we identify a set of lexico-syntactic patterns that are easily recognizable, that occur frequently and across text genre boundaries, and that indisputably indicate the lexical relation of interest. we describe a method for discovering these patterns and suggest that other lexical relations will also be acquirable in this way. a subset of the acquisition algorithm is implemented and the results are used to augment and critique the structure of a large hand-built thesaurus. extensions and applications to areas such as information retrieval are suggested.
an experimental parser. uppsala chart processor is a linguistic processor for phonological, morphological, and syntactic analysis. it incorporates the basic mechanisms of the general syntactic processor. linguistic rules as well as dictionary articles are presented to the processor in a procedural formalism, the ucp-formalism. the control of the processing rests upon the grammar and the dictionaries. special attention has been devoted to problems concerning the interplay between different kinds of linguistic processes.
design and evaluation of grammar checkers in multiple languages. this paper describes issues involved in the development of a grammar checker in multiple languages at microsoft corporation. focus is on design (selecting and prioritizing error identification rules) and evaluation (determining product quality).
dependency unification grammar. this paper describes the analysis component of the language processing system plain from the viewpoint of unification grammers. the principles of dependency unification grammar (dug) are discussed. the computer language drl (dependency representation language) is introduced in which dugs can be formulated. a unification-based parsing procedure is part of the formalism. plain is implemented at the universities of heidelberg, bonn, flensburg, kiel, zurich and cambridge u.k.
chart parsing according to the slot and filler principle. a parser is an algorithm that assigns a structural description to a string according to a grammar. it follows from this definition that there are three general issues in parser design: the structure to be assigned, the type of grammar, the recognition algorithm. common parsers employ phrase structure descriptions, rule-based grammars, and derivation or transition oriented recognition. the following choices result in a new parser: the structure to be assigned to the input is a dependency tree with lexical, morpho-syntactic and functional-syntactic information associated with each node and coded by complex categories which are subject to unification. the grammar is lexicalized, i.e. the syntactical relationships are stated as part of the lexical descriptions of the elements of the language. the algorithm relies on the slot and filler principle in order to draw up complex structures. it utilizes a well-formed substring table (chart) which allows for discontinuous segments.
using syntactic analysis to increase efficiency in visualizing text collections. self-organizing maps (soms) are a good method to cluster and visualize large collections of documents, but they are computationally expensive. in this paper, we investigate linguistically motivated reductions on the usual bag-of-words representation, to improve efficiency. we find that reducing the document representation to heads of verb and noun phrases reduces the heavy computational cost without degrading the quality of the map, especially in combination with term reduction techniques. more severe reductions which focus on subject and object nominal phrases are not advantageous.
the merged upper model: a linguistic ontology for german and english. a detailed comparison of the penman upper model and the komet german upper model has been carried out in order to construct a new merged upper model capable of serving as the ideational basis for generation in both english and german. previously proposed criteria for conducting such a merge are expanded on and evaluated. it is established that no (semi-)automatic merging of such knowledge sources can be expected to produce a reasonable result and that detailed comparison of the kind reported is essential. the result of the merge is now being used as the basis for sentence generation in english, german and dutch.
pronominalization revisited. pronominalization has been related to the idea of a local focus - a set of discourse entities in the speaker's centre of attention, for example in gundel et al. (1993)'s givenness hierarchy or in centering theory. both accounts say that the determination of the focus depends on syntactic as well as pragmatic factors, but have not been able to pin those factors down. in this paper, we uncover the major factors which determine the focus set in descriptive texts. this new focus definition has been evaluated with respect to two corpora: museum exhibit labels, and newspaper articles. it provides an operationalizable basis for pronoun production, and has been implemented as the reusable module gnome-np. the algorithm behind gnome-np is compared with the most recent pronoun generation algorithm of mccoy and strube (1999).
normal form theorem proving for the lambek calculus. the possibility of multiple equivalent proofs presents a problem for efficient parsing of a number of flexible categorial grammar (cg) frameworks. in this paper i outline a normal form system for a sequent formulation of the product-free associative lambek calculus. this leads to a simple parsing approach that yields only normal form proofs. this approach is both safe in that all distinct readings for a sentence will be returned, and optimal in that there is only one normal form proof yielding each distinct meaning.
chart parsing lambek grammars: modal extensions and incrementality. this paper describes a method for chart parsing lambek grammars. the method is of particular interest in two regards. firstly, it allows efficient processing of grammars which use necessity operators, an extension proposed for handling locality phenomena. secondly, the method is easily adapted to allow incremental processing of lambek grammars, a possibility that has hitherto been unavailable.
a compilation-chart method for linear categorial deduction. recent work in categorial grammar has seen proposals for a wide range of systems, differing in their 'resource sensitivity' and hence, implicitly, their underlying notion of 'linguistic structure'. a common framework for parsing such systems is emerging, whereby some method of linear logic theorem proving is used in combination with a system of labelling that ensures that only deductions appropriate to the relevant categorial formalism are allowed. this paper presents a deduction method for implicational linear logic that brings with it the benefit that chart parsing provides for cfg parsing, namely avoiding the need to recompute intermediate results when searching exhaustively for all possible analyses. the method involves compiling possibly higher-order linear formulae to indexed first-order formulae, over which deduction is made using just a single inference rule.
kassys: a definition acquisition system in natural language. this paper is an introduction to kassys, a system that has been designed to extract information from defining statements in natural language. only hyperonymous definitions are dealt with here, for which systematic processing has been devised and implemented in the initial version of the system. the paper describes how kassys builds a taxinomic hierarchy by extracting the hyperonyms from these definitions. it also explains the way in which the system can answer closed questions (yes/no), thus enabling the user to check very quickly that a definition has been assimilated correctly. the under-lying formalism is that of conceptual graphs, with which the reader is assumed to be familiar.
crossing corefernece in discourse representation theory. sentences with crossing coreference (bach-peters-sentences) are notoriously difficult to explain in a natural manner. an intriguing parallel with certain properties of prolog suggests a modification to discourse representation theory which allows a simple and coherent explanation of these, and related, sentences.
knowledge representation and semantics in a complex domain: the unix natural language help system goethe. natural language help systems for complex domains require, in our view, an integration of semantic representation and knowledge base in order to adequately and efficiently deal with cognitively misconceived user input. we present such an integration by way of the notion of a frame-semantics that has been implemented for the purposes of a natural language help system for unix.
interactive paraphrasing based on linguistic annotation. we propose a method "interactive paraphrasing" which enables users to interactively paraphrase words in a document by their definitions, making use of syntactic annotation and word sense annotation. syntactic annotation is used for managing smooth integration of word sense definitions into the original document, and word sense annotation for retrieving the correct word sense definition for a word in a document. in this way, documents can be paraphrased so that they fit into the original context, preserving the semantics and improving the readability at the same time. no extra layer (window) is necessary for showing the word sense definition as in conventional methods, and other natural language processing techniques such as summarization, translation, and voice synthesis can be easily applied to the results.
communicating with multiple agents. previous dialogue systems have focussed on dialogues between two agents. many applications, however, require conversations between several participants. this paper extends speech act definitions to handle multi-agent conversations, based on a model of multi-agent belief attribution with some unique properties. our approach has the advantage of capturing a number of interesting phenomena in a straightforward way.
a compositional semantics for directional modifiers - locative case reopened. this paper presents a model-theoretic semantics for directional modifiers in english. the semantic theory presupposed for the analysis is that of montague grammar (cf. montague 1970, 1973) which makes it possible to develop a strongly compositional treatment of directional modifiers. such a treatment has significant computational advantages over case-based treatments of directional modifiers that are advocated in the al literature.
applying lexical rules under subsumption. lexical rules are used in constraint based grammar formalisms such as head-driven phrase structure grammar (hpsg) (pollard and sag 1994) to express generalizations among lexical entries. this paper discusses a number of lexical rules from recent hpsg analyses of german (hinrichs and nakazawa 1994) and shows that the grammar in some cases vastly overgenerates and in other cases introduces massive spurious structural ambiguity, if lexical rules apply under unification. such problems of overgeneration or spurious ambiguity do not arise, if a lexical rule applies to a given lexical entry iff the lexical entry is subsumed by the left-hand side of the lexical rule. finally, the paper discusses computational consequences of applying lexical rules under subsumption.
clustering words with the mdl principle. we address the problem of automatically constructing a thesaurus by clustering words based on corpus data. we view this problem as that of estimating a joint distribution over the cartesian product of a partition of a set of nouns and a partition of a set of verbs, and propose a learning algorithm based on the minimum description length (mdl) principle for such estimation. we empirically compared the performance of our method based on the mdl principle against the maximum likelihood estimator in word clustering, and found that the former outperforms the latter. we also evaluated the method by conducting pp-attachment disambiguation experiments using an automatically constructed thesaurus. our experimental results indicate that such a thesaurus can be used to improve accuracy in disambiguation.