waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
transducers from rewrite rules with backreferences. context sensitive rewrite rules have been widely used in several areas of natural language processing, including syntax, morphology, phonology and speech processing. kaplan and kay, karttunen, and mohri & sproat have given various algorithms to compile such rewrite rules into finite-state transducers. the present paper extends this work by allowing a limited form of backreferencing in such rules. the explicit use of backreferencing leads to more elegant and general solutions.
towards an account of extraposition in hpsg. this paper investigages the syntax of extraposition in the hpsg framework. we present english and german data (partly taken from corpora), and provide an analysis using a nonlocal dependency and lexical rules. the condition for binding the dependency is formulated relative to the antecedent of the extraposed phrase, which entails that no fixed site for extraposition exists. our account allows to explains the interaction of extraposition with fronting and coordination, and predicts constraints on multiple extraposition.
what's there to talk about? a multi-modal model of referring behavior in the presence of shared visual information. this paper describes the development of a rule-based computational model that describes how a feature-based representation of shared visual information combines with linguistic cues to enable effective reference resolution. this work explores a language-only model, a visual-only model, and an integrated model of reference resolution and applies them to a corpus of transcribed task-oriented spoken dialogues. preliminary results from a corpus-based analysis suggest that integrating information from a shared visual environment can improve the performance and quality of existing discourse-based models of reference resolution.
a tractable extension of linear indexed grammars. vijay-shanker and weir (1993) show that linear indexed grammars (lig) can be processed in polynomial time by exploiting constraints which make possible the extensive use of structure-sharing. this paper describes a formalism that is more powerful than lig, but which can also be processed in polynomial time using similar techniques. the formalism, which we refer to as partially linear patr (plpatr) manipulates feature structures rather than stacks.
dialog control in a natural language system. in this paper a method for controlling the dialog in a natural language (nl) system is presented. it provides a deep modeling of information processing based on time dependent propositional attitudes of the interacting agents. knowledge about the state of the dialog is represented in a dedicated language and changes of this state are described by a compact set of rules. an appropriate organization of rule application is introduced including the initiation of an adequate system reaction. finally the application of the method in an nl consultation system is outlined.
finite structure query: a tool for querying syntactically annotated corpora. finite structure query (fsq for short) is a tool for querying syntactically annotated corpora. fsq employs a query language of high expressive power, namely full first order logic. it can be used to query arbitrary finite structures, not just trees.
finite state processing of tone systems. it is suggested in this paper that two--level morphology theory (kay, koskenniemi) can be extended to include morphological tone. this extension treats phonological features as i/o tapes for finite state transducers in a parallel sequential incrementation (psi) architecture; phonological processes (e.g. assimilation) are seen as variants of an elementary unification operation over feature tapes (linear unification phonology, lup). the phenomena analysed are tone terracing with tone---spreading (horizontal assimilation), downstep, upstep, downdrift, upsweep in two west african languages, tem (togo) and baule (c&ocirc;te d'ivoire). it is shown that an fst account leads to more insightful definitions of the basic phenomena than other approaches (e.g. phonological rules or metrical systems).
computational dialectology in irish gaelic. dialect groupings can be discovered objectively and automatically by cluster analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas. the first step in the analysis, the computation of linguistic distance between each pair of sites, can be computed as levenshtein distance between phonetic strings. this correlates closely with the much more laborious technique of determining and counting isoglosses, and is more accurate than the more familiar metric of computing hamming distance based on whether vocabulary entries match. in the actual clustering step, traditional agglomerative clustering works better than the top-down technique of partitioning around medoids. when agglomerative clustering of phonetic string comparison distances is applied to gaelic, reasonable dialect boundaries are obtained, corresponding to national and (within ireland) provincial boundaries.
the simulation of stress patterns in synthetic speech - a two-level problem. this paper is part of an msc. report on a program called genie (generator of inflected english), written in cprolog, that acts as a front end to an existing speech synthesis program. it allows the user to type a sentence in english text, and then processes it so that the synthesiser will output it with natural-sounding inflection; that is, as well as transcribing text to a phonemic form that can be read by the system, it assigns this text an fo contour. the assigning of this stress is described in this paper, and it is asserted that the problem can be solved with reference to two main levels, the sentential and the syllabic.
a proposal for modifications in the formalism of gpsg. recent investigations show a remarkable convergence among contemporary unification-based formalisms for syntactic description. this convergence is now itself becoming an object of study, and there is an increasing recognition of the need for explicit characterizations of the properties that relate and distinguish similar grammar formalisms. the paper proposes a series of changes in the formalism of generalized phrase structure grammar that throw light on its relation to functional unification grammar.the essential contribution is a generalization of cooccurrence restrictions, which become the principal and unifying device of gpsg. introducing category cooccurrence restrictions (ccrs) for local trees (in analogy to feature cooccurrence restrictions for categories) provides a genuine gain in expressiveness for the formalism. other devices, such as feature instantiation principles and linear precedence statements can be regarded as special cases of ccrs. the proposals lead to a modified notion of unification itself.
automatic learning of word transducers from examples. this paper describes the application of markovian learning methods to the inference of word transducers. we show how the proposed method dispenses from the difficult design of hand-crafted rules, allows the use of weighed non deterministic transducers and is able to translate words by taking into account their whole rather than by making decisions locally. these arguments are illustrated on two examples: morphological analysis and grapheme-to-phoneme transcription.
datr as a lexical component for patr. the representation of lexical entries requires special means which basic patr systems do not include. the language datr, however, can be used to define an inheritance network serving as the lexical component. the integration of such a module into an existing patr system leads to various problems which are discussed together with possible solutions in this paper.
inheriting verb alternations. the paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be formalised in a way that captures and exploits generalisations about the alternation behaviour of verb classes. an alternation is a pattern in which a number of words share the same relationship between a pair of senses. the alternations captured are ones where the different senses specify different relationships between syntactic complements and semantic arguments, as between bake in "john is baking the cake" and "the cake is baking". the formal language used is datr. the lexical entries it builds are as specified in hpsg. the complex alternation behaviour shared between families of verbs is elegantly represented in a way that makes generalisations explicit, avoids redundancy, and offers practical benefits to computational lexicographers.
a computational treatment of sentence-final 'then'. we describe a computational system which parses discourses consisting of sequences of simple sentences. these contain a range of temporal constructions, including time adverbials, progressive aspect and various aspectual classes. in particular, the grammar generates the required readings, according to the theoretical analysis of (glasbey, forthcoming), for sentence-final 'then'.
the god model. god (general ontology discovery) is an unsupervised system to extract semantic relations among domain specific entities and concepts from texts. operationally, it acts as a search engine returning a set of true predicates regarding the query instead of the usual ranked list of relevant documents. our approach relies on two basic assumptions: (i) paradigmatic relations can be established only among terms in the same semantic domain an (ii) they can be inferred from texts by analyzing the subject-verb-object patterns where two domain specific terms co-occur. a qualitative analysis of the system output shows that god provide true, informative and meaningful relations in a very efficient way.
ambiguity resolution in the dmtrans plus. we present a cost-based (or energy-based) model of disambiguation. when a sentence is ambiguous, a parse with the least cost is chosen from among multiple hypotheses. each hypothesis is assigned a cost which is added when: (1) a new instance is created to satisfy reference success, (2) links between instances are created or removed to satisfy constraints on concept sequences, and (3) a concept node with insufficient priming is used for further processing. this method of ambiguity resolution is implemented in dmtrans plus, which is a second generation bi-directional english/japanese machine translation system based on a massively parallel spreading activation paradigm developed at the center for machine translation at carnegie mellon university.
towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena. the interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. for instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. we show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. the solution is formulated in the hpsg formalism, where the lexical description of heads includes a specification of the argument and articulates syntax and semantics. we propose that the properties attached to the complement remain the same as they are outside the construction, but that the semantics of the predicate is enriched to include an abstract predicate of which the complement is an argument.
collocation map for overcoming data sparseness. statistical language models are useful because they can provide probabilistic information upon uncertain decision making. the most common statistic is n-grams measuring word cooccurrences in texts. the method suffers from data shortage problem, however. in this paper, we suggest bayesian networks be used in approximating the statistics of insufficient occurrences and of those that do not occur in the sample texts with graceful degradation. collocation map is a sigmoid belief network that can be constructed from bigrams. we compared the conditional probabilities and mutual information computed from bigrams and collocation map. the results show that the variance of the values from collocation map is smaller than that from frequency measure for the infrequent pairs by 48%. the predictive power of collocation map for arbitrary associations not observed from sample texts is also demonstrated.
how to parse gaps in spoken utterances. we describe glp, a chart parser that will be used as a syntax module of the erlangen speech understanding system. glp realizes an agenda-based multiprocessing scheme, which allows easily to apply various parsing strategies in a transparent way. we discuss which features have been incorporated into the parser in order to process speech data, in particular the ability to perform direction independent island parsing, to handle gaps in the utterance and its hypothesis scoring scheme.
xmg - an expressive formalism for describing tree-based grammars. in this paper we introduce extensible metagrammar, a system that facilitates the development of tree based grammars. this system includes both (1) a formal language adapted to the description of linguistic information and (2) a compiler for this language. it applies techniques of logic programming (e.g. warren's abstract machine), thus providing an efficient and theoretically motivated framework for the processing of linguistic meta-descriptions.
the textual development of non-stereotypic concepts. in this paper the text theoretical foundation of our text analysis system kontext is described. the basic premise of the kontext model is that new concepts are communicated by using the mechanisms of text constitution. the text model used assumes that the information conveyed in a text and the information describing its contextual organization can be structured into five layers (sentence structure, information on thematic progression, referential structure, conceptual representation of the text and conceptual background knowledge). the text analysis component constructs and traverses the information of these layers under control of the discourse development. in this way, it can incrementally construct a textual view on knowledge, rather than only recognizing precoded concepts.
linguistic knowledge acquisition from parsing failures. a semi-automatic procedure of linguistic knowledge acquisition is proposed, which combines corpus-based techniques with the conventional rule-based approach. the rule-based component generates all the possible hypotheses of defects which the existing linguistic knowledge might contain, when it fails to parse a sentence. the rule-based component does not try to identify the defects, but generates a set of hypotheses and the corpus-based component chooses the plausible ones among them. the procedure will be used for adapting or re-using existing linguistic resources for new application domains.
reftex - a context-based translation aid. the system presented in this paper produces bilingual passages of text from an original (source) text and one (or more) of its translated versions.the source text passage includes words or word compounds which a translator wants to retrieve for the current translating of another text. the target text passage is the equivalent version of the source text passage. on the basis of a comparison of the contexts of these words in the concorded passage and his own text, the translator has to decide on the utility of the translation proposed in the target text passage.the program might become a component of translator's work bench.
grammatical role labeling with integer linear programming. in this paper, we present a formalization of grammatical role labeling within the framework of integer linear programming (ilp). we focus on the integration of subcategorization information into the decision making process. we present a first empirical evaluation that achieves competitive precision and recall rates.
modelling knowledge for a natural language understanding system. in the field of knowledge based systems for natural language processing, one of the most challenging aims is to use parts of an existing knowledge base for different domains and/or different tasks. we support the point that this problem can only be solved by using adequate metainformation about the content and structuring principles of the representational systems concerned. one of the prerequisites in this respect is the transparency of modelling decisions.after a short introduction to our scenario, we will propose general dimensions for characterizing knowledge in knowledge based systems. these dimensions will be differentiated according to linguistic levels of investigation in order to deduce structuring principles for the modelling process. the resulting criteria will be evaluated in a detailed example taken from our prototypical implementation.we hope to contribute some promising steps towards a methodology of knowledge engineering with natural language and common sense orientation.
empirical methods for compound splitting. compounded words are a challenge for nlp applications such as machine translation (mt). we introduce methods to learn splitting rules from monolingual and parallel corpora. we evaluate them against a gold standard and measure their impact on performance of statistical mt systems. results show accuracy of 99.1% and performance gains for mt of 0.039 bleu on a german-english noun phrase translation task.
a cascaded finite-state parser for syntactic analysis of swedish. this report describes the development of a parsing system for written swedish and is focused on a grammar, the main component of the system, semiautomatically extracted from corpora. a cascaded, finite-state algorithm is applied to the grammar in which the input contains coarse-grained semantic class information, and the output produced reflects not only the syntactic structure of the input, but grammatical functions as well. the grammar has been tested on a variety of random samples of different text genres, achieving precision and recall of 94.62% and 91.92% respectively, and average crossing rate of 0.04, when evaluated against manually disambiguated, annotated texts.
towards the semantics of sentence adverbials. in the present paper we argue that the so-called sentence adverbials (typically, adverbs like <u>probably, admittedly</u>,...) should be generated, in the framework of functional generative description, by means of a special deep case - complementation of attitude (ca) on grounds of their special behaviour in the topic-focus articulation (tfa) of a sentence. from the viewpoint of the translation of ca expressions (and also of the multiple occurrence thereof inside a sentence) into a calculus of intensional logic, it should be noted that the tfa properties of ca expressions are directly correlated to the scope properties thereof. our approach, which is stated in terms of a linguistic theory, serves as a basis for an algorithm of analysis of ca for purposes of a system of man-machine communication without a pre-arranged data base.
towards a new type of morphenic analysis. the present paper provides a report on a new system of an automated morphemic analysis of technical texts in czech as a highly inflectional language, which is being prepared by the linguistic team of the faculty of mathematics and physics in prague, within the project of man-machine communication without a pre-arranged data base (tibaq). the kind of morphemic analysis presented here is based on a retrograde (right-to-left) analysis of words by means of morphemically unambiguous or irresolvably ambiguous word-ends, which do not coincide with the etymological word-endings but correspond to the structure of the accidental cases of morphemic ambiguity in an inflectional language (word-endings being accountable for in a certain way by word-ends). the algorithm of analysis can thus dispense with any dictionary (of morphemic irregularities and exceptions), economically accounting especially for productive word-endings. the word-ends of the analysis are assigned several kinds of morphemic information, concerning morphemic categories and lemmatization. the analysis is based on the absolute frequency of word-ends in technical texts and is able to interact with the semantic analysis.
an experiment on synthesis of russian parametric constructions. the paper describes an experimental model of syntactic structure generation starting from the limited fragment of semantics that deals with the quantitative values of object parameters. to present the input information the basic semantic units of four types are proposed: "object", "parameter", "function" and "constant". for the syntactic structure representation the system of syntactic components is used that combines the properties of the dependency and constituent systems: the syntactic components corresponding to wordforms and exocentric constituents are introduced and two basic subordinate relations ("actant" and "attributive") are claimed to be necessary. special attention has been devoted to problems of complex correspondence between the semantic units and lexical-syntactic means, in the process of synthesis such sections of the model as the lexicon, the syntactic structure generation rules, the set of syntactic restrictions and morphological operators are utilized to generate the considerable enough subset of russian parametric constructions.
the key role of semantics in the development of large-scale grammars of natural language. the aim of this paper is to show how large-scale (computational) grammars of natural language benefit from an organization of semantics which is based on minimal recursion semantics (mrs; copestake et al. (1999)). this we are doing by providing an account of valence alternations in german based on mrs, showing how such an account makes a computational grammar more efficient and less complicated for the grammar writer.
classifying the hungarian web. in this paper we present some lessons learned from building vizsla, the keyword search and topic classification system used on the largest hungarian portal, [origo.hu]. based on a simple statistical language, model, and the large-scale supporting evidence from vizsla, we argue that in topic classification only positive evidence matters.
natural languages and the chomsky hierarchy. the central claim of the paper is that nl stringsets are regular. three independent arguments are offered in favor of this position: one based on parsimony considerations, one employing the mccullogh-pitts (1943) model of neuruns, and a purely linguistic one. it is possible to derive explicit upper bounds for the number of (live) states in nl acceptors: the results show that finite state nl parsers can be implemented on present-day computers. the position of nl stringsets within the regular family is also investigated: it is proved that nls are counter-free, but not locally testable.
"lexifanis" a lexical analyzer of modern greek. lexifanis is a software tool designed and implemented by the authors to analyze modern greek language ('&delta;&eta;&mu;&omicron;&tau;&iota;&chi;&eta;). this system assigns grammatical classes (parts of speech) to 95--98% of the words of a text which is read and normalized by the computer.by providing the system with the appropriate grammatical knowledge (i.e.: dictionaries of non-inflected words, affixation morphology and limited surface syntax rules) any "variant" of modern greek language (dialect or idiom) can be processed.in designing the system, special consideration is given to the greek language morphological characteristics, primarily to the inflection and the accentuation.in linguistics, lexifanis, can assist the generation of indexes or lemmata; on the other hand readability or style analysis can be performed using this software as a basic component. in word processing this software may serve as a background to build dictionaries for a spelling checking and error detection package.through this study our research group has set the basis in designing an "expert system" which is intended to "understand" and process modern greek texts. lexifanis is the first working tool for modern greek language.