waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
communication in large distributed ai systems for natural language processing. we are going to describe the design and implementation of a communication system for large ai projects, capable of supporting various software components in a heterogeneous hardware and programming-language environment. the system is based on a modification of the channel approach introduced by hoare (1978). it is a three layered approach with a de facto standard network layer (pvm), core routines, and interfaces to five different programming languages together with support for the transparent exchange of complex data types. a special component takes over name service functions. it also records the actual configuration of the modules present in the application and the created channels.we describe the intergration of this communication facility in two version of a speech-to-speech translation system, which differ with regard to quality and quantity of data distributed within the applications and with regard to the degree of interactivity involved in processing.
connotation as a form of inference. story-processing systems have to deal, or avoid dealing, with inference control..6, 11, 13; when designing one such system2, we were greatly helped by the "(erc)rc" expression for connotation1. our system is specialised in multifaceted descriptions of characters (not, however, in the most difficult problems of beliefs about beliefs4 and 8): here we present another aspect of the story character processing, namely the recursive explanation of inconsistencies appearing in the description of a character.we give a very schematic system overview, then some details about the connotation rules and an example of their application to a story.
rapid development of translation tools: application to persian and turkish. the computing research laboratory (crl) is developing a machine translation toolkit that allows rapid deployment of translation capabilities. this toolkit has been used to develop several machine translation systems, including a persian-english and a turkish-english system, which will be demonstrated. we present the architecture of these system as well as the development methodology.
bounded context parsing and easy learnability. natural languages are often assumed to be constrained so that they are either easily learnable or parsable, but few studies have investigated the connection between these two "functional" demands. without a formal model of parsability or learnability, it is difficult to determine which is more "dominant" in fixing the properties of natural languages. in this paper we show that if we adopt one precise model of "easy" parsability, namely, that of bounded context parsability, and a precise model of "easy" learnability, namely, that of degree 2 learnability, then we can show that certain families of grammars that meet the bounded context parsability condition will also be degree 2 learnable. some implications of this result for learning in other subsystems of linguistic knowledge are suggested.1
a karaka based approach to parsing of indian languages. a karaka based approach for parsing of indian languages is described. it has been used for building a parser of hindi for a prototype machine translation system.a lexicalised grammar formalism has been developed that allows constraints to be specified between 'demand' and 'source' words (e.g., between verb and its karaka roles). the parser has two important novel features: (i) it has a local word grouping phase in which word groups are formed using 'local' information only. they are formed based on finite state machine specifications thus resulting in a fast grouper. (ii) the parser is a general constraint solver. it first transforms the constraints to an integer programming problem and then solves it.
multilingual text processing in a two-byte code. national and international standards committees are now discussing a two-byte code for multilingual information processing. this provides for 65,536 separate character and control codes, enough to make permanent code assignments for all the characters of all national alphabets of the world, and also to include chinese/japanese characters.this paper discusses the kinds of flexibility required to handle both roman and non-roman alphabets. it is crucial to separate information units (codes) from graphic forms, to maximize processing power.comparing alphabets around the world, we find that the graphic devices (letters, digraphs, accent marks, punctuation, spacing, etc.) represent a very limited number of information units. it is possible to arrange alphabet codes to provide transliteration equivalence, the best of three solutions compared as a framework for code assignments.
parsing free word order languages in prolog. the prolog programming language allows the user to write powerful parsers in the form of metamorphosis grammars. however, the metamorhosis grammars, as defined by colmerauer2, have to specify strictly the order of terminal and nonterminal symbols. a modification of prolog has been implemented which allows "floating terminals" to be included in a metamorphosis grammar together with some information enabling to control the search for such a terminal in the unprocessed part of the input. the modification is illustrated by several examples from the polish language and some open questions are discussed.
referring to world objects with text and pictures. it often makes sense to employ both text and pictures when referring to world objects. in this paper, we present a model for referring which is based on the assumption that concepts may be activated not only by text, but also by pictures and text-picture combinations. by means of a case study, we demonstrate that failure and success of referring acts can be explained by the user's ability to infer certain links between mental representations and object descriptions. finally, we show how the model has been incorporated into a plan-based multimedia presentation system by defining operators for concept activation.
clg(n): constraint logic grammars. clg(2) is the latest member of a family of grammar formalisms centered around the notion of complex constraint expression for describing phrasal and lexical information and principles of language. complex constrains can be expressed in a slightly restriced form of first order predicate logic, which makes clg(2) well suited for expressing, amongst others, hpsg-style of grammars. a sound implementation of the formal semantics of clg(2) is achieved by resorting to delayed evaluation of non equational constraints.
encoding standards for large text resources: the text encoding initiative. the text encoding initiative (tei) is an international project established in 1988 to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for research, and to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries more generally. the need for standardized encoding practices has become inxreasingly critical as the need to use and, most importantly, reuse vast amounts of electronic text has dramatically increased for both research and industry, in particular for natural language processing. in january 1994, the tei issued its guidelines for the encoding and interchange of machine-readable texts, which provide standardized encoding conventions for a large range of text types and features relevant for a broad range of applications.
coping with ambiguity in a large-scale machine translation system. in an interlingual knowledge-based machine translation system, ambignuity arises when the source language analyzer produces more than one interlingua expression for a source sentence. this can have a negative impact on translation quality, since a target sentence may be produced from an unintended meaning. in this paper we describe the methods used in the kant machine translation system to reduce or eliminate ambiguity in a large-scale application domain. we also test these methods on a large corpus of test sentences, in order to illustrate how the different disambiguation methods reduce the average number of parses per sentence.
chinese segmentation disambiguation. a technique of reasoning under uncertainty is studied in an attempt to solve disambiguation problems of chinese segmentation. a knowledge-based inexact reasoning theory incorporating knowledge in morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics is presented.
the effects of word order and segmentation on translation retrieval performance. this research looks at the effects of word order and segmentation on translation retrieval performance for an experimental japanese-english translation memory system. we implement a number of both bag-of-words and word order-sensitive similarity metrics, and test each over character-based and word-based indexing. the translation retrieval performance of each system configuration is evaluated empirically through the notion of word edit distance between translation candidate outputs and the model translation. our results indicate that character-based indexing is consistently superior to word-based indexing, suggesting that segmentation is an unnecessary luxury in the given domain. word order-sensitive approaches are demonstrated to generally outperform bag-of-words methods, with source language segment-level edit distance proving the most effective similarity metric.
automatic dictionary organization in nlp systems for oriental languages. this paper presents a description of automatic dictionaries (ads) and dictionary entry (de) schemes for nlp systems dealing with oriental languages. the uniformity of the ad organization and of the de pattern does not prevent the system from taking into account the structural differences of isolating (analytical), agglutinating and internal-flection languages.the "speech statistics" (spst) project team has been designing a linguistic automaton aimed at nl processing in a variety of forms.in addition to germanic and romance languages the system under development is to handle text processing of a number of oriental languages. the strategy adopted by the spst group is characterized by a lexicalized approach: the nlp algorithms for any language are entirely ad dependent, i.e., a large lexicon database has been provided, its entries being loaded with information including not only lexical, but also morphological, syntactic and semantic data. this information concentrated in dictionary entries (des) is essential for both source text analysis and target (russian) text generation.the de structure is largely determined by the typological features of the source language. the spst group has hitherto had to deal with european languages and it was for these languages (inflective and inflective-analytical) that the prototype entry schemes were elaborated and adopted. no doubt, the typological characteristics of oriental languages required certain modifications to be made to the basic scheme. hence in the present paper each of the language types is given consideration. agglutinating languages proved to be the most suitable to process according to the spst strategy. but an isolating language will be the first to be proposed for discussion.
from shallow to deep parsing using constraint satisfaction. we present in this paper a technique allowing to choose the parsing granularity within the same approach relying on a constraint-based formalism. its main advantage lies in the fact that the same linguistic resources are used whatever the granularity. such a method is useful in particular for systems such as text-to-speech that usually need a simple bracketing, but in some cases requires a precise syntactic structure. we illustrate this method in comparing the results for three different granularity levels and give some figures about their respective performance in parsing a tagged corpus.
selectional restrictions in hps. selectional restrictions are semantic sortal constraints imposed on the participants of linguistic constructions to capture contextually-dependent constraints on interpretation. despite their limitations, selectional restrictions have proven very useful in natural language applications, where they have been used frequently in word sense disambiguation, syntactic disambiguation, and anaphora resolution. given their practical value, we explore two methods to incorporate selectional restrictions in the hpsg theory, assuming that the reader is familiar with hpsg. the first method employs hpsg's background feature and a constraint-satisfaction component pipe-lined after the parser. the second method uses subsorts of referential indices, and blocks readings that violate selectional restrictions during parsing. while theoretically less satisfactory, we have found the second method particularly useful in the development of practical systems.
bringing the dictionary to the user: the foks system. the dictionary look-up of unknown words is particularly difficult in japanese due to the complicated writing system. we propose a system which allows learners of japanese to look up words according to their expected, but not necessarily correct, reading. this is an improvement over previous systems which provide no handling of incorrect readings. in preprocessing, we calculate the possible readings each kanji character can take and different types of phonological and conjugational changes that can occur, and associate a probability with each. using these probabilities and corpus-based frequencies we calculate a plausibility measure for each generated reading given a dictionary entry, based on the naive bayes model. in response to a reading input, we calculate the plausibility of each dictionary entry corresponding to the reading and display a list of candidates for the user to choose from. we have implemented our system in a web-based environment and are currently evaluating its usefulness to learners of japanese.
a tool for collecting domain dependent sortal constraints from corpora. in this paper, we describe a tool designed to generate semi-automatically the sortal constraints specific to a domain to be used in a natural language (nl) understanding system. this tool is evaluated using the sri gemini nl understanding system in the atis domain.
a robust approach for handling oral dialogues. present limits of speech recognition and understanding in the context of free spoken language (although with a limited vocabulary) have perverse effects on the flow of the dialogue with a system. typically a non robust dialogue manager will fail to face with these limits and conversations will often be a failure. this paper presents some possibilities of a structural approach for handling communication failures in task-oriented oral dialogues. several types of communication failures are presented and explained. they must be dealt with by the dialogue manager if we strike to have a robust system. the exposed strategies for handling these failures are based on a structural approach of the conversation and are implemented in the sundial system. we first recall some aspects of the model and then describe the strategies for preventing and repairing communication failure in oral conversations with a system.
nl domain explanations in knowledge based mat. this paper discusses an innovative approach to knowledge based machine aided translation (mat) where the translator is supported by an user-friendly environment providing linguistic and domain knowledge explanations. our project aims at integration of a knowledge base (kb) in a mat system and studies the integration principles as well as the internal interface between language and knowledge. the paper presents some related work, reports the solutions applied in our project and tries to generalize our evaluation of the selected mat approach.
a high-level morphological description language exploiting inflectional paradigms. a high-level language for the description of inflectional morphology is presented, in which the organization of word formation rules into an inheritance hierarchy of paradigms allows for a natural encoding of the kinds of rules typically presented in grammar books. we show how the language, composed of orthographic rules, word formation rules, and paradigm inheritance, can be compiled into a run-time data structure for efficient morphological analysis and generation with a dynamic secondary storage lexicon.
automatic processing of written french language. an automatic processor of written french language is described. this processor uses syntactic and semantic informations about words in order to construct a semantic net representing the meaning of the sentences. the structure of the network and the principles of the parser are explained. an application to the processing of the medical records is then discussed.
an application of lexical semantics to knowledge acquisition from corpora. in this paper, we describe a program of research designed to explore how a lexical semantic theory may be exploited for extracting information from corpora suitable for use in information retrieval applications. unlike with purely statistical collocational analyses, the framework of a semantic theory allows the automatic construction of predictions about semantic relationships among words appearing in collocational systems. we illustrate the approach for the acquisition of lexical information for several classes of nominals.
finite-state phonology in hpsg. attention on constraint-based grammar formalisms such as head-driven phrase structure grammar (hpsg) has focussed on syntax and semantics to the exclusion of phonology. this paper investigates the incorporation of a non-procedural theory of phonology into hpsg, based on the 'one-level' model of bird & ellison (1992). the standard rule-representation distinction is replaced by the description-object distinction which is more germane in the context of constraint-based grammar. prosodic domains, which limit the applicability of phonological constraints, are expressed in a prosodic type hierarchy modelled on hpsg's lexical type hierarchy. interactions between phonology and morphology and between phonology and syntax are discussed and exemplified.
parsing spoken language without syntax. parsing spontaneous speech is a difficult task because of the ungrammatical nature of most spoken utterances. to overpass this problem, we propose in this paper to handle the spoken language without considering syntax. we describe thus a microsemantic parser which is uniquely based on an associative network of semantic priming. experimental results on spontaneous speech show that this parser stands for a robust alternative to standard ones.
the <c, a>, t framework in eurotra: a theoretically committed notation for mt. this paper describes a model for mt, developed within the eurotra mt project, based on the idea of <u>compositional translation</u>, by describing a basic, experimental notation which embodies the idea. the introduction provides background, section 1 introduces the basic ideas and the notation, and section 2 discusses some of the theoretical and practical implications of the model, including some concrete extensions, and some more speculative discussion.
using active constraints to parse gpsgs. active constraints of the constraint logic programming paradigm allow (1) the reduction of the search space of programs and (2) a very concise representation of the problems. these two properties are particularly interesting for parsing problems: they can help us to reduce non-determinism and to use large coverage grammars. in this paper, we describe how to use such constraints for parsing id/lp grammars and propose an implementation in prolog iii.
bottom-up filtering: a parsing strategy for gpsg. in this paper, we propose an optimized strategy, called bottom-up filtering, for parsing gpsgs. this strategy is based on a particular, high level, interpretation of gpsgs. it permits a significant reduction of the non-determinism inherent to the rule selection process.
ebl2: an approach to automatic lexical acquisition. a method for automatic lexical acquisition is outlined. an existing lexicon that, in addition to ordinary lexical entries, contains prototypical entries for various non-exclusive paradigms of open-class words, is extended by inferring new lexical entries from texts containing unknown words. this is done by comparing the constraints placed on the unknown words by the natural language system's grammar with the prototypes and a number of hand-coded phrase templates specific for each paradigm. once a sufficient number of observations of the word in different contexts have been made, a lexical entry is constructed for the word by assigning it to one or several paradigm(s).parsing sentences with unknown words is normally very time-consuming due to the large number of grammatically possible analyses. to circumvent this problem, other phrase templates are extracted automatically from the grammar and domain-specific texts using an explanation-based learning method. these templates represent grammatically correct sentence patterns. when a sentence matches a template, the original parsing component can be bypassed, reducing parsing times dramatically.
embedding drt in a situation theoretic framework. this paper proposes the use of situation theory as a basic semantic formalism for defining general semantic theories. astl, a computational situation theoretic language, is described which goes some way to offering such a system. after a general description of discourse representation theory an encoding of drt in astl is given. advantages and disadvantages of this method are then discussed.
integrating linguistic and performance-based constraints for assigning phrase breaks. the mapping between syntactic structure and prosodic structure is a widely discussed topic in linguistics. in this work we use insights gained from research on syntax-to-prosody mapping in order to develop a computational model which assigns prosodic structure to unrestricted text. the resulting structure is intended to help a text-to-speech (tts) system to predict phrase breaks. in addition to linguistic constraints, the model also incorporates a performance-oriented parameter which approximates the effect of speaking rate. the model is rule-based rather than probabilistic, and does not require training. we present the model and implementations for both english and german, and give evaluation results for both implementations. we then examine how far the approach can account for the different break patterns which are associated with slow, normal and fast speech rates.
action relations in rationale clauses and means clauses. communication among agents collaborating on a task often involves complex utterances about multiple action. in this paper, we analyze two particular multiaction constructions, utterances with means clauses and utterances with rationale clauses. we present the distinctive features of these constructions, describe their logical form, and define interpretation rules for deriving their meaning in terms of the generation, enablement and contributes relations between actions which have been motivated independently by research in plan recognition. we also demonstrate that these rules yield the appropriate properties of rationale clauses and means clauses and show how these constructions can be distinguished algorithmically.
functional unification grammar: a formalism for machine translation. functional unification grammar provides an opportunity to encompass within one formalism and computational system the parts of machine translation systems that have usually been treated separately, natably analysis, transfer, and synthesis. many of the advantages of this formalism come from the fact that it is monotonic allowing data structures to grow differently as different nondeterministic alternatives in a computation are pursued, but never to be modified in any way. a striking feature of this system is that it is fundamental reversible, allowing a to translate as b only if b could translate as a.