waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
modeling syntactic constraints on anaphoric binding. syntactic constraints on antecedent-anaphor relations can be stated within the theory of lexical functional grammar (henceforth lfg) through the use of functional uncertainty (kaplan and maxwell 1988; halvorsen and kaplan 1988; kaplan and zaenen 1989). in the following, we summarize the general characteristics of syntactic constraints on anaphoric binding. next, we describe a variation of functional uncertainty called inside-out functional uncertainty and show how it can be used to model anaphoric binding. finally, we discuss some binding constraints claimed to hold in natural language to exemplify the mechanism. we limit our attention throughout to coreference possibilities between definite antecedents and anaphoric elements and ignore interactions with quantifiers. we also limit our discussion to intrasentential relations.
on the satisfiability of complex constraints. the main problem arising from the use of complex constraints in computational linguists is due to the np-hardness of checking whether a given set of constraints is satisfiable and, in the affirmative case, of generating the set of minimal models which satisfy the constraints. in this paper we show how the clg approach to rewriting constraints while constructing a partial model can greatly reduce the size of the original constraints and thus contribute to reduce the computational problem.
pronouncing text by analogy. pronunciation-by-analogy (pba) is an emerging technique for text-phoneme conversion based on a psychological model of reading aloud. this paper explores the impact of certain basic implementational choices on the performance of various pba models. these have been tested on their ability to pronounce sets of short pseudowords previously used in similar studies, as well as lexical words temporarily removed from the dictionary. best results of 85.7% and 67.9% words correct are obtained for the pseudowords and lexical words respectively, casting doubt on certain previous-reported performance figures in the literature.
simple features for chinese word sense disambiguation. in this paper we report on our experiments on automatic word sense disambiguation using a maximum entropy approach for both english and chinese verbs. we compare the difficulty of the sense-tagging tasks in the two languages and investigate the types of contextual features that are useful for each language. our experimental results suggest that while richer linguistic features are useful for english wsd, they may not be as beneficial for chinese.
integrating compositional semantics into a verb lexicon. we present a class-based approach to building a verb lexicon that makes explicit the close association between syntax and semantics for levin classes. we have used lexicalized tree adjoining grammars to capture the syntax associated with each verb class and have augmented the trees to include selectional restrictions. in addition, semantic predicates are associated with each tree, which allow for a compositional interpretation.
conceptual and linguistic decisions in generation. generation of texts in natural language requires making conceptual and linguistic decisions. this paper shows first that these decisions involve the use of a discourse grammar, secondly that they are all dependent on one another but that there is a priori no reason to give priority to one decision rather than another. as a consequence, a generation algorithm must not be modularized in components that make these decisions in a fixed order.
a complete integrated nlg system using ai and nlu tools. a standard architecture for an nlg system has been defined in (reiter and dale, 2000). their work describes the modularization of an nlg system and the tasks of each module. however, they do not indicate what kind of tools can be used by each module. nevertheless, we believe that certain tools widely used by the ai or nlu community are appropriate for nlg tasks. this paper presents a complete integrated nlg system which uses a description logic for the content determination module, segmented discourse representation theory for the document structuring module and a lexicalized formalism for the tactical component. the nlg system, which takes into account a user model, is illustrated with a generator which produces texts explaining the steps taken by a proof assistant.
synthesis of spoken messages from semantic representations. semantic-representation-to-speech system. a semantic-representation-to-speech system communicates orally the information given in a semantic representation. such a system must integrate a text generation module, a phonetic conversion module, a prosodic module and a speech synthesizer. we will see how the syntactic information elaborated by the text generation module is used for both phonetic conversion and prosody, so as to produce the data that must be supplied to the speech synthesizer, namely a phonetic chain including prosodic information.
morphology and cross dependencies in the synthesis of personal pronouns in romance languages. this paper describes some of the problems that arise from the synthesis of personal pronouns in a system that generates texts in romance languages. it puts the emphasis first on the fact that the morphological level has to be taken into account early in the generation process, second on the numerous "cross dependency" phenomena which are to be found when the synthesis of an element x depends upon that of another element y and when the synthesis of y depends upon that of x. the linguistic examples are taken from french and italian languages, for which a robust generation system has been implemented.
corpus-based annotated test set for machine translation evaluation by an industrial user. this article is concerned with the building of a test data set for assisting the industrial user in machine translation evaluation. the emphasis is laid on the interest of an approach based on the study of bilingual corpus pragmatic characteristics. the study of one chapter of the maintenance manual of the super puma helicopter made it possible to identify the pragmatic characteristics relevant in the choice of the morpho-syntactic structures and translation processes actually used. the textual test set consists in a sgml file including the source text sequences aligned with the reference translation sequences and also including the pragmatic, formal and translational characteristics in the form of annotations (labels and formal descriptions).
aligning sentences in bilingual texts french - english and french - arabic. in this paper, we will tackle the problem raised by the automatic alignment of sentences belonging to bilingual text pairs. the method that we advocate here is inspired by what a person with a fair knowledge of the other langage would do intuitively. it is based on the matching of the elements which are similar in both sentences. however, to match these elements correctly, we first have to match the sentences that contain them. there seems to be a vicious circle here. we will show how to break it. on the one hand, we will describe the hypotheses we made, and, on the other hand, the algorithms which ensued. the experiments are carried out with french-english and french-arabic text pairs.we will show that matching sentences and, later, expressions, amounts to raising a new problem in the machine translation field, i. e. the problem of recognition instead of that of translation, strictly speaking.
dealing with cross-sentential anaphora resolution in alep. the experiments described here have been done in connection with the ls-gram project, which is concerned with the development of large scale grammars and thus foreseen the coverage of "real life texts". but in order to deal with such texts, it is also necessary to process linguistic units which are larger than sentences. the resolution of cross-sentential anaphora is one of the problems we have to deal with, when we switch towards the analysis of such larger linguistic units. in order to propose an analysis of the cross-sentential anaphora, one has to be able to refer back to an antecedent, which is to be found in a preceding sentence. this will be done on the basis of an information-passing framework. using also the simple unification technique a resolution of the pronoun can then be tried out: parts of the content information of the pronoun are going to be compared (unified) with specific parts of the content information of the (possible) antecedent.
authoring multimedia documents using wysiwym editing. (1)this paper outlines a future 'ideal' multimedia document authoring system that allows authors to specify content and form of the document independently of each other and at a high level of abstraction;(2)it describes a working system that implements a small but significant part of the functionality of such an ideal system, based on semantic modeling of the pictures as well as the text of the document; and(3)it explains what needs to be done to bridge the gap between the implemented system and the ideal one.
theory refinement and natural language learning. this paper presents a learning system for identifying syntactic structures. this system relies on the use of background knowledge and default values in order to build up an initial grammar and the use of theory refinement in order to improve this grammar. this combination provides a good machine learning framework for natural language learning. we illustrate this point with the presentation of allis, a learning system which generates a regular expression grammar of non-recursive phrases from bracketed corpora.
an approach based on multilingual thesauri and model combination for bilingual lexicon extraction. this paper focuses on exploiting different models and methods in bilingual lexicon extraction, either from parallel or comparable corpora, in specialized domains. first, a special attention is given to the use of multilingual thesauri, and different search strategies based on such thesauri are investigated. then, a method to combine the different models for bilingual lexicon extraction is presented. our results show that the combination of the models significantly improves results, and that the use of the hierarchical information contained in our thesaurus, umls/mesh, is of primary importance. lastly, methods for bilingual terminology extraction and thesaurus enrichment are discussed.
a message processing system with object-centered semantics. this paper presents a report processing method with object-centered semantics. the syntactic analysis is performed along classical generative principles, though with a deliberately simple output as a list of index-value doublets, which the semantic module processes using methods in an object-oriented framework. the final representation is made of two types of object-centered structures: first, case like, event level dated structures corresponding to the input clauses: second, detailed representation of the current state of an agent of the reference world, plus records for the follow-up of a task over time. uncertainty, imprecision and prevision are handled using specialized fields. this framework is applied to the processing of daily naval reports in english.
language-specific mappings from semantics to syntax. we present a study of the mappings from semantic content to syntactic expression with the aim of isolating the precise locus and role of pragmatic information in the generation process. from a corpus of english, french, and portuguese instructions for consumer products, we demonstrate the range of expressions of two semantic relations, generation and enablement (goldman, 1970) in each language, and show how the available choices are constrained syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. the study reveals how multilingual nlg can be informed by language-specific principles for syntactic choice.
rapid prototyping for spoken dialogue systems. we implemented a spoken dialogue system architecture for rapid prototyping. the features that support rapid prototyping include a clear separation of generic dialogue processing algorithms from domain and language specific knowledge sources. in an experiment, it could be shown that six individuals could specify these domain and language specific knowledge sources within 8 to 12 hours to come up with a prototypical implementation of a spoken dialogue system. to that end, no dialogue strategy had to be specified. rather, it was sufficient to provide an ontology, a description of the services offered by the system, parsing grammars, database conversion rules and generation templates. furthermore, the experiment shows that it is possible to formulate dialogue strategies in a domain and language independent manner; thus not requiring a system designer to be knowledgeable about dialogue processing.
using focus to generate complex and simple sentences. one problem for the generation of natural language text is determining when to use a sequence of simple sentences and when a single complex one is more appropriate. in this paper, we show how focus of attention is one factor that influences this decision and describe its implementation in a system that generates explanations for a student advisor expert system. the implementation uses tests on functional information such as focus of attention within the prolog definite clause grammar formalism to determine when to use complex sentences, resulting in an efficient generator that has the same benefits as a functional grammar system.
generation of thesaurus in different languages a computer based system. the development of the theory of library classification and of subject indexing, for the organisation, storage and retrieval of subjects embodied in documents has a striking parallelism to the search for 'universal forms' and deep structure' in language and linguistic studies. the significant contributions of the theories of classification and subject indexing are the subject analysis techniques of ranganathan and bhattacharyya's popsi. a computer based system, for generating an information retrieval thesaurus, from modulated subject-propositions, formulated according to the subject analysis techniques, enriched with certain codes for relating the terms in the subject-propositions has been developed. the system generates hierarchic, associative, coordinate and synonymous relationships between terms and presents them as an alphabetical thesaurus. also, once a thesaurus is generated in one language it is possible to produce the same thesaurus in different languages by just forming a table of equivalent terms in the required language.
the parallel expert parser (pep): a thoroughly revised descendent of the word expert parser (wep). in this paper we present pep (the parallel expert parser, devos 1987), a radically revised descendant of wep (the word expert parser, small 1980). wep's idea of linguistic entities as interacting processes has been retained, but its adherence to the word as the only entity has been rejected. experts exist at different levels, communicate through rigidly defined protocols and are now fully designed to run in parallel. a prototype of pep is implemented in flat concurrent prolog and runs in a logix environment.
gpsg parsing, bidirectional charts, and connection graphs. this paper describes a tractable method for parsing gpsg grammars without altering the modularity and expressiveness of this formalism. the proposed method is based on a constraint propagation mechanism which reduces the number of unnecessary structures built at parse time through the early detection of inadmissible local trees. the propagation of constraints is rendered efficient by indexing constraints and categories in a connection graph and by using a bidirectional chart parser together with a bottom-up strategy centered around head constituents.
stylistic grammars in language translation. we are developing stylistic grammars to provide the basis for a french and english stylistic parser. our stylistic grammar is a branching stratificational model, built upon a foundation dealing with lexical, syntactic, and semantic stylistic realizations. its central level uses a vocabulary of constituent stylistic elements common to both english and french, while the top level correlates stylistic goals, such as clarity and concreteness, with patterns of these elements.overall, we are implementing a computational schema of stylistics in french-to-english translation. we believe that the incorporation of stylistic analysis into machine translation systems will significantly reduce the current reliance on human post-editing and improve the quality of the systems' output.
tree directed grammars. tree directed grammars as a special kind of translation grammars are defined. it is shown that a loop-free tree directed grammar can be transformed into an equivalent top-down tree transducer, and from this fact it follows that given an arbitrary context-free language as input, a tree directed grammar produces an output language which is at most context-sensitive.
communicative triad as a structural element of language interaction. researches on dialogue natural-language interaction with intellectual "human-computer" systems are based on models of language "human-to-human" interaction, these models representing descriptions of communication laws. an aspect of developing language interaction models is an investigation of dialogue structure. in the paper a notion of elementary communicative triad (sr-triad) is introduced to model the "stimulus-reaction" relation between utterances in the dialogue. the use of the sr-triad apparatus allows us to represent a scheme of any dialogue as a triad structure. sr-triad structure being inherent both to natural and programming language dialogues, sr-system is claimed to be necessary while developing dialogue processors.
exploiting reference interaction in resolving temporal reference. this paper provides an account of the role that the interaction between nominal and temporal reference plays in resolving temporal reference. exploiting this interaction in resolving temporal reference clarifies how the process of resolving nominal reference interacts with the process of resolving temporal reference, and how a restricted set of world knowledge contributes to resolving temporal reference.
a computational model of incremental utterance production in task-oriented dialogues. this paper presents a computational model of incremental utterance production in task-oriented dialogues. this model incrementally produces utterances to propose the solution of a given problem, while simultanceously solving the problem in a stepwise manner. even when the solution has been partially determined, this model starts utterances to satisfy time constraints where pauses in mid-utterance must not exceed a certain length. the results of an analysis of discourse structure in a dialogue corpus are presented and the fine structure of discourse that contributes to the incremental strategy of utterance production is described. this model utilizes such a discourse structure to incrementally produce utterances constituting a discourse. pragmatic constraints are exploited to guarantee the relevance of discourses, which are evaluated by an utterance simulation experiment.
translation ambiguity resolution based on text corpora of source and target languages. we propose a new method to resolve ambiguity in translation and meaning interpretation using linguistic statistics extracted from dual corpora of source and target languages in addition to the logical restrictions described on dictionary and grammar rules for ambiguity resolution. it provides reasonable criteria for determining a suitable equivalent translation or meaning by making the dependency relation in the source language be reflected in the translated text. the method can be tractable because the required statistics can be computed semi-automatically in advance from a source language corpus and a target language corpus, while an ordinal corpus-based translation method needs a large volume of bilingual corpus of strict pairs of a sentence and its translation. moreover, it also provides the means to compute the linguistic statistics on the pairs of meaning expressions.
word sense ambiguation: clustering related senses. this paper describes a heuristic approach to automatically identifying which senses of a machinereadable dictionary (mrd) headword are semantically related versus those which correspond to fundamentally different senses of the word. the inclusion of this information in a lexical database profoundly alters the nature of sense disambiguation: the appropriate "sense" of a polysemous word may now correspond to some set of related senses. our technique offers benefits both for on-line semantic processing and for the challenging task of mapping word senses across multiple mrds in creating a merged lexical database.
word manager: a system for the definition, access and maintenance of lexical databases. this paper describes word manager, a system which is currently the object of a research project at the university of z&uuml;rich computer science department. word manager supports the definition, access and maintenance of lexical databases. it comprises a formal language for the implemenation of morphological knowledge. this formal language is integrated in a graphics-oriented, high-level user interface and is language independent. the project is now in the prototyping phase where parts of the software are pretty far advanced (the user interface) and others are still rudimentary (the rule compiler/runtime system). the design of the system was strongly influenced by koskenniemi's two-level model /koskenniemi 1983/, its successors /bear 1986/, /black 1986/, /borin 1986/, /darymple 1987/, the ansi-sparc 3-schema concept /ansi-x3-sparc 1975/ and visual programming techniques /bocker 1986/, /myers 1986/; we will focus the discussion on one aspect: the user interfacing for the construction of the lexical data base.
lexeme-based morphology: a computationaily expensive approach intended for a server-architecture. this paper presents an approach to computational morphology which can be considered as being derived from the two-level model but differs from this substantially. lexemes rather than formatives are the most important entities distinguished in this approach. the consequence is that a new formalism for the specification of morphological knowledge is required. a short description of a system called word manager will outline the characteristics of such a formalism, the most prominent of which is that different subformalisms for inflectional rules and word-formation rules are distinguished. these rules are applied separately though not independently and support the concept of lexicalization. the primary advantage of this is that the system can build up a network of knowledge on how formatives, lexemes, and rules depend on each other while individual lexemes are lexicalized. thus, the system will know the inflectional forms of a lexeme, the destructuring of these forms into formatives, how the lexeme has been derived or composed if it is a word-formation, etc. this requires much memory, yet, the philosophy behind the approach is that the system runs as a server on a local area network, so that an entire machine can be dedicated to the task, if necessary.
towards a dedicated database management system for dictionaries. this paper argues that a lexical database should be implemented with a special kind of database management system (dbms) and outlines the design of such a system. the major difference between this proposal and a general purpose dbms is that its data definition language (ddl) allows the specification of the entire morphology, which turns the lexical database from a mere collection of 'static data into a real-time word-analyser. moreover, the dedication of the system conduces to the feasibility of user interfaces with very comfortable monitor-and manipulation functions.