waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
creating a multilingual collocations dictionary from large text corpora. this paper describes a system of terminological extraction capable of handling multi-word expressions, using a powerful syntactic parser. the system includes a concordancing tool enabling the user to display the context of the collocation, i.e. the sentence or the whole document where the collocation occurs. since the corpora are multilingual, the system also offers an alignment mechanism for the corresponding translated documents.
a bidirectional model for natural language processing. in this paper i will argue for a model of grammatical processing that is based on uniform processing and knowledge sources. the main feature of this model is to view parsing and generation as two strongly interleaved tasks performed by a single parametrized deduction process. it will be shown that this view supports flexible and efficient natural language processing.
resolving zero anaphora in japanese. the paper presents a computational theory for resolving japanese zero anaphora, based on the notion of discourse segment. we see that the discourse segment reduces the domain of antecedents for zero anaphora and thus leads to their efficient resolution.also we make crucial use of functional notions such as empathy hierarchy and minimal semantics thesis to resolve reference for zero anaphora [kuno, 1987]. our approach differs from the centering analysis [walker et al., 1990] in that the resolution works by matching one empathy hierarchy against another, which makes it possible to deal with discourses with no explicit topic and those with cataphora [halliday and hassan, 1990].the theory is formalized through the definite clause grammar (dcg) formalism [pereira and warren, 1980], [gazdar and mellish, 1989; longacre, 1979].finally, we show that graphology i.e., quotation mark, spacing, has an important effect on the interpretation of zero anaphora in japanese discourse.
an approach to sentence-level anaphora in machine translation. theoretical research in the area of machine translation usually involves the search for and creation of an appropriate formalism. an important issue in this respect is the way in which the compositionality of translation is to be defined. in this paper, we will introduce the anaphoric component of the mimo formalism. it makes the definition and translation of anaphoric relations possible, relations which are usually problematic for systems that adhere to strict compositionality. in mimo, the translation of anaphoric relations is compositional. the anaphoric component is used to define linguistic phenomena such as wh-movement, the passive and the binding of reflexives and pronouns monolingually. the actual working of the component will be shown in this paper by means of a detailed discussion of wh-movement.
an object-oriented approach to the design of dialogue management functionality. dialogues may be seen as comprising commonplace routines on the one hand and specialized, task-specific interactions on the other. object-orientation is an established means of separating the generic from the specialized. the system under discussion combines this object-oriented approach with a self-organizing, mixed-initiative dialogue strategy, raising the possibility of dialogue systems that can be assembled from ready-made components and tailored, specialized components.
the organization of the rosetta grammars. in this paper the organization of the grammars in the rosetta machine translation system is described and it is shown how this organization makes it possible to translate between words of different syntactic categories in a systematic way. it is also shown how the organization chosen makes it possible to translate 'small clauses' into full clauses and vice versa. the central concept worked out here in some detail is the concept of 'partial isomorphy' between subgrammars. the system as described here has been implemented and is currently being tested.
formal properties of metrical structure. this paper offers a provisional mathematical typology of metrical representations. first, a family of algebras corresponding to different versions of grid and bracketed grid theory is introduced. it is subsequently shown in what way bracketed grid theory differs from metrical theories using trees. finally, we show that there are no significant differences between the formalism of bracketed grids (for metrical structure) and the representation used in the work of [kaye, et al., 1985], [1990] for subsyllabic structure.
cast: a computer-aided summarisation tool. in this paper we propose computer-aided summarisation (cas) as an alternative approach to automatic summarisation, and present an ongoing project which aims to develop a cas system. the need for such an alternative approach is justified by the relatively poor performance of fully automatic methods used in summarisation. our system combines several summarisation methods, allowing the user of the system to interact with their parameters and output in order to improve the quality of the produced summary.
how to build a qa system in your back-garden: application for romanian. even though the question answering (qa) field appeared only in recent years, there are systems for english which obtain good results for open-domain questions. the situation is very different for other languages, mainly due to the lack of nlp resources which are normally used by qa systems. in this paper, we present a project which develops a qa system for romanian. the challenges we face and decisions we have to make are discussed.
pos disambiguation and unknown word guessing with decision trees. this paper presents a decision-tree approach to the problems of part-of-speech disambiguation and unknown word guessing as they appear in modern greek, a highly inflectional language. the learning procedure is tag-set independent and reflects the linguistic reasoning on the specific problems. the decision trees induced are combined with a high-coverage lexicon to form a tagger that achieves 93, 5% overall disambiguation accuracy.
semantic features and selection restrictions. one of the essential aspects is described of an expert system (called lexicographer), designed to supply the user with diverse information about russian words, including bibliographic information concerning individual lexical entries. the lexical database of the system contains semantic information that cannot be elicited from the existing dictionaries. the priority is given to semantic features influencing lexical or grammatical co-occurrence restrictions. possibilities are discussed of predicting selectional restrictions on the basis of semantic features of a word in the lexicon.
information structure and pauses in a corpus of spoken danish. this paper describes a study in which a corpus of spoken danish annotated with focus and topic tags was used to investigate the relation between information structure and pauses. the results show that intra-clausal pauses in the focus domain, tend to precede those words that express the property or semantic type whereby the object in focus is distinguished from other ones in the domain.
investigating nlg architectures: taking style into consideration. in this paper we propose a methodology for investigating the relationship between architectures of natural language generation (nlg) systems and stylistic properties of texts. biber's (1988) methodology is used to obtain both the characterisation of style of our corpus and the division of the corpus into sets of linguistically similar texts. these sets will be used for studying the architectural aspects.
gems: a model of sentence production. the paper describes gems, a system for generating and expressing the meaning of sentences, focussing on the generation task, i.e. how gems extracts a set of propositional units from a knowledge store that can be expressed with a well-formed sentence in a target language. gems is lexically distributed. after a central processor has selected the first unit(s) from the knowledge store and activated the corresponding lexical entry, the further construction of the sentences meaning is entrusted to the entries in the vocabulary. examples of how gems constructs the meaning of a number of english sentence types are briefly described.
saumer: sentence analysis using metarules. the saumer system uses specifications of natural language grammars, which consist of rules and metarules, to provide a semantic interpretation of an input sentence. the saumer specification language (ssl) is a programming language which combines some of the features of generalised phrase structure grammars (gazdar, 1981), like the correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules. with definite clause grammars (dcgs) (pereira and warren, 1980) to create an executable grammar specification. ssl rules are similar to dcg rules except that they contain a semantic component and may also be left recursive. metarules are used to generate new rules from existing rules before any parsing is attempted. an implementation is tested which can provide semantic interpretations for sentences containing topicalisation, relative clauses, passivisation, and questions.
a problem solving approach to generating text from systemic grammars. systemic grammar has been used for ai text generation work in the past, but the implementations have tended be ad hoc or inefficient. this paper presents an approach to systemic text generation where ai problem solving techniques are applied directly to an unadulterated systemic grammar. this approach is made possible by a special relationship between systemic grammar and problem solving: both are organized primarily as choosing from alternatives. the result is simple, efficient text generation firmly based in a linguistic theory.
generating referring expressions with a unification grammar. a simple formalism is proposed to represent the contexts in which pronouns, definite/indefinite descriptions, and ordinal descriptions (e.g. 'the second book') can be used, and the way in which these expressions change the context. it is shown that referring expressions can be generated by a unification grammar provided that some phrase-structure rules are specially tailored to express entities in the current knowledge base.
a structured representation of word-senses for semantic analysis. a framework for a structured representation of semantic knowledge (e.g. word-senses) has been defined at the ibm scientific center of roma, as part of a project on italian text understanding. this representation, based on the conceptual graphs formalism [sow84], expresses deep knowledge (pragmatic) on word-senses. the knowledge base data structure is such as to provide easy access by the semantic verification algorithm. this paper discusses some important problem related to the definition of a semantic knowledge base, as depth versus generality, hierarchical ordering of concept types, etc., and describes the solutions adopted within the text understanding project.
using grammatical relations to compare parsers. we use the grammatical relations (grs) described in carroll et al. (1998) to compare a number of parsing algorithms. a first ranking of the parsers is provided by comparing the extracted grs to a gold standard gr annotation of 500 susanne sentences: this required an implementation of gr extraction software for penn treebank style parsers. in addition, we perform an experiment using the extracted grs as input to the lappin and leass (1994) anaphora resolution algorithm. this produces a second ranking of the parsers, and we investigate the number of errors that are caused by the incorrect 'grs.
selecting the "right" number of senses based on clustering criterion functions. this paper describes an unsupervised knowledge-lean methodology for automatically determining the number of senses in which an ambiguous word is used in a large corpus. it is based on the use of global criterion functions that assess the quality of a clustering solution.
generating contextually appropriate intonation. one source of unnaturalness in the output of text-to-speech systems from the involvement of algorithmically generated default intonation contours, applied under minimal control from syntax and semantics. it is a tribute both to the resilience of human language understanding and to the ingenuity of the inventors of these algorithms that the results are as intelligible as they are. however, the result is very frequently unnatural, and may on occasion mislead the hearer. this paper extends earlier work on the relation between syntax and intonation in language understanding in combinatory categorial grammar (ccg). a generator with a simple and domain-independent discourse model can be used to direct synthesis of intonation contours for responses to data-base queries, to convey distinctions of contrast and emphasis determined by the discourse model.
example-based metonymy recognition for proper nouns. metonymy recognition is generally approached with complex algorithms that rely heavily on the manual annotation of training and test data. this paper will relieve this complexity in two ways. first, it will show that the results of the current learning algorithms can be replicated by the 'lazy' algorithm of memory-based learning. this approach simply stores all training instances to its memory and classifies a test instance by comparing it to all training examples. second, this paper will argue that the number of labelled training examples that is currently used in the literature can be reduced drastically. this finding can help relieve the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in metonymy recognition, and allow the algorithms to be applied on a wider scale.
extended access to the left context in an atn parser. some italian sentences related to linguistic phenomena largely known and recently discussed by many computational linguists are discussed in the framework of atn. they offer certain difficulties which seem to suggest a substantial revision of the atn formalism. the theoretical assumptions and an experimental implementation of such a revision are presented, together with examples. many related theoretical points such as some psycholinguistic implications and the relationship between deterministic and non-jeterministic hypothesis are also briefly discussed.
word classification based on combined measures of distributional and semantic similarity. the paper addresses the problem of automatic enrichment of a thesaurus by classifying new words into its classes. the proposed classification method makes use of both the distributional data about a new word and the strength of the semantic relatedness of its target class to other likely candidate classes.
a modular approach to story generation. one way of characterising texts is in terms of the discourse structures on which they appear to be built. each type of text, or genre, e.g. the sports report, the recipe, the sermon, the proverb, will have associated with it a characteristic organisation of units. in this paper, a general model of the structure of one text type, the story, is described. this model forms the basis of a program which combines the general story structure principles with rules governing a particular sub-genre, the old french epic, in order to generate story summaries.
a parser that doesn't. this paper describes an implemented parser-interpreter which is intended as an abstract formal model of part of the process of sentence comprehension. it is illustrated here for phrase structure grammars with a translation into a familiar type of logical form, although the general principles are intended to apply to any grammatical theory sharing certain basic assumptions, which are discussed in the paper. the procedure allows for incremental semantic interpretation as a sentence is parsed, and provides a principled explanation for some familiar observations concerning properties of deeply recursive constructions.
passives. the english passive construction has played a central role in the to-ings and fro-ings of grammatical theory over the last 30 years, from the earliest days of transformational grammar, to more recent, surface oriented theories of syntax. the casual reader of the linguistic literature might therefore suppose that the computational linguist looking for an off the shelf analysis of passives would be able to choose from among several competing analyses, each of which accommodated the facts. but perhaps derived them from (or from them) different theoretical principles. unfortunately. this is not the case. as we shall see. all of the analyses that i am familiar with are incomplete, or inaccurate in some respects, or simply unprogrammable in any straightforward form. the present paper is an attempt to remedy this situation, and to provide such an off the shelf analysis of the syntax and semantics of passives. the analysis of this central construction will be couched within a simple and computationally tractable syntactic and semantic formalism, and should translated easily to most currently popular formalisms. it will be quite eclectic, freelyborrowing from several different grammatical theories.
avm description compilation using types as modes. this paper provides a method for generating compact and efficient code to implement the enforcement of a description in typed feature logic. it does so by viewing information about types through the course of code generation as modes of instantiation --- a generalization of the common practice in logic programming of the binary instantiated/variable mode declarations that advanced prolog compilers use. section 1 introduces the description language. sections 2 and 3 motivate the view of mode and compilation taken here, and outline a mode declaration language for typed feature logic. sections 4 through 7 then present the compiler. an evaluation on two grammars is presented at the end.
comparatives and ellipsis. this paper analyses the syntax and semantics of english comparatives, and some types of ellipsis. it improves on other recent analyses in the computational linguistics literature in three respects: (i) it uses no tree- or logical-form rewriting devices in building meaning representations (ii) this results in a fully reversible linguistic description, equally suited for analysis or generation (iii) the analysis extends to types of elliptical comparative not elsewhere treated.
topological parsing. we present a new grammar formalism for parsing with freer word-order languages, motivated by recent linguistic research in german and the slavic languages. unlike cfgs, these grammars contain two primitive notions of constituency that are used to preserve the semantic or interpretational aspects of phrase structure, while at the same time providing a more efficient backbone for parsing based on word-order and contiguity constraints. a simple parsing algorithm is presented, and compilation of grammars into constraint handling rules is also discussed.
semantic role labeling for coreference resolution. extending a machine learning based coreference resolution system with a feature capturing automatically generated information about semantic roles improves its performance.
a model for preference. in this paper we address the problem of choosing the best solution(s) from a set of interpretations of the same object (in our case a segment of text). a notion of preference is stated, based on pairwise comparisons of complete interpretations in order to obtain a partial order among the competing interpretations. an experimental implementation is described, which uses prolog-like preference statements.
adaptivity in question answering with user modelling and a dialogue interface. most question answering (qa) and information retrieval (ir) systems are insensitive to different users' needs and preferences, and also to the existence of multiple, complex or controversial answers. we introduce adaptivity in qa and ir by creating a hybrid system based on a dialogue interface and a user model.
a morphological processor for modern greek. in this paper, we present a morphological processor for modern greek.from the linguistic point of view, we try to elucidate the complexity of the inflectional system using a lexical model which follows the recent work by lieber, 1980, selkirk 1982, kiparsky 1982, and others.the implementation is based on the concept of "validation grammars" (courtin 1977).the morphological processing is controlled by a finite automaton and it combinesa. a dictionary containing the stems for a representative fragment of modern greek and all the inflectional affixes withb. a grammar which carries out the transmission of the linguistic information needed for the processing. the words are structured by concatenating a stem with an inflectional part. in certain cases, phonological rules are added to the grammar in order to capture lexical phonological phenomena.
finding content-bearing terms using term similarities. this paper explores the issue of using different co-occurrence similarities between terms for separating query terms that are useful for retrieval from those that are harmful. the hypothesis under examination is that useful terms tend to be more similar to each other than to other query terms. preliminary experiments with similarities computed using first-order and second-order co-occurrence seem to confirm the hypothesis. term similarities could then be used for determining which query terms are useful and best reflect the user's information need. a possible application would be to use this source of evidence for tuning the weights of the query terms.
effective parsing with generalised phrase structure grammar. generalised phrase structure grammars (gpsg's) appear to offer a means by which the syntactic properties of natural languages may be very concisely described. the main reason for this is that the gpsg framework allows you to state a variety of meta-grammatical rules which generate new rules from old ones, so that you can specify rules with a wide variety of realisations via a very small number of explicit statements. unfortunately, trying to analyse a piece of text in terms of such rules is a very awkward task, as even a small set of gpsg statements will generate a large number of underlying rules.this paper discusses some of the difficulties of parsing with gpsg's, and presents a fairly straightforward bottom-up parser for them. this parser is, in itself, no more than adequate - all its components are implemented quite efficiently, but there is nothing tremendously clever about how it searches the space of possible rules to find an analysis of the text it is working on. its power comes from the fact that it learns from experience: not new rules, but how to recognise realisations of complex combinations of its existing rules. the improvement in the system's performance after even a few trials is dramatic. this is brought about by a mechanism for recording the analysis of text fragments. such recordings may be used very effectively to guide the subsequent analysis of similar pieces of text. given such guidance it becomes possible to deal even with text containing unknown or ambiguous words with very little search.
extended graph unification. we propose an apparently minor extension to kay's (1985) notation for describing directed acylic graphs (dags). the proposed notation permits concise descriptions of phenomena which out otherwise be difficult to describe, without incurring significant extra computational overheads in the process of unification. we illustrate the notation with examples from a categorial description of a fragment of english, and discuss the computational properties of unification of dags specified in this way.
on the syntactic-semantic analysis of bound anaphora. two well-known phenomena in the area of pronoun binding are considered: indirect binding of pronouns by indefinite nps ("donkey sentences") and surface-syntactic constraints on binding ("weak cross-over"). a common treatment is proposed, and general consequences for the relation between syntactic and semantic processing are discussed. it is argued that syntactic and semantic analysis must interact in a complex way, rather than in a simple sequential or strict rule-to-rule fashion.