waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
an efficient context-free parser for augmented phrase-structure grammars. in this paper we present an efficient context-free (cf) bottom-up, non deterministic parser. it is an extension of the ica (immediate constituent analysis) parser proposed by grishman (1976), and its major improvements are described.it has been designed to run augmented phrase-structure grammars (apsg) and performs semantic interpretation in parallel with syntactic analysis.it has been implemented in franz lisp and runs on vax 11/780 and, recently, also on a sun workstation, as the main component of a transportable natural language interface (sail = sistema per l'analisi e l'interpretazione del linguaggio). subsets of grammars of italian written in different formalisms and for different applications have been experimented with sail. in particular, a toy application has been developed in which sail has been used as interface to build a knowledge base in mrs (genesereth et al. 1980, genesereth 1981) about ski paths in a ski environment, and to ask for advice about the best touristic path under specific weather and physical conditions.
stochastic modeling of language via sentence space partitioning. in some computer applications of linguistics (such as maximum-likelihood decoding of speech or handwriting), the purpose of the language-handling component (language model) is to estimate the linguistic (a priori) probability of arbitrary natural-language sentences. this paper discusses theoretical and practical issues regarding an approach to building such a language model based on any equivalence criterion defined on incomplete sentences, and experimental results and measurements performed on such a model of the italian language, which is a part of the prototype for the recognition of spoken italian built at the ibm rome scintific center.
computing term translation probabilities with generalized latent semantic analysis. term translation probabilities proved an effective method of semantic smoothing in the language modelling approach to information retrieval tasks. in this paper, we use generalized latent semantic analysis to compute semantically motivated term and document vectors. the normalized cosine similarity between the term vectors is used as term translation probability in the language modelling framework. our experiments demonstrate that glsa-based term translation probabilities capture semantic relations between terms and improve performance on document classification.
enhancing explanation coherence with rhetorical strategies. this paper discusses the application of a previously reported theory of explanation rhetoric (maybury, 1988b) to the task of explaining constraint violations in a hybrid rule/frame based system for resource allocation (dawson et al, 1987). this research illustrates how discourse strategies of explanation, textual connectives, and additional justification knowledge can be applied to enhance the cohesiveness, structure, and clarity of knowledge based system explanations.
a computational theory of prose style for natural language generation. in this paper we report on initial research we have conducted on a computational theory of prose style. our theory speaks to the following major points:1. where in the generation process style is taken into account.2. how a particular prose style is represented; what "stylistic rules" look like;3. what modifications to a generation algorithm are needed; what the decision is that evaluates stylistic alternatives;4. what elaborations to the normal description of surface structure are necessary to make it usable as a plan for the text and a reference for these decisions;5. what kinds of information decisions about style have access to.our theory emerged out of design experiments we have made over the past year with our natural language generation system, the zetalisp program mumble. in the process we have extended mumble through the addition of an additional process that now mediates between content planning and linguistic realization. this new process, which we call "attachment", provides the further significant benefit that text structure is no longer dictated by the structure of the message: the sequential order and dominance relationships of concepts in the message no longer force one form onto the words and phrases in the text. instead, rhetorical and intentional directives can be interpreted flexibly in the context of the ongoing discourse and stylistic preferences. the text is built up through composition under the direction of linguistic organizing principles, rather than having to follow conceptual principles in lockstep.we will begin by describing what we mean by prose style and then introducing the generation task that lead us to this theory, the reproduction of short encyclopedia articles on african tribes. we will then use that task to outline the parts of our theory and the operations of the attachment process. finally we will compare our techniques to the related work of davey, mckeown and derr, and gabriel, and consider some of the possible psycholinguistic hypotheses that it may lead to.
the generation of term definitions from an on-line terminological thesaurus. a new type of machine dictionary is described, which uses terminological relations to build up a semantic network representing the terms of a particular subject field, through interaction with the user. these relations are then used to dynamically generate outline definitions of terms in on-line query mode. the definitions produced are precise, consistent and informative, and allow the user to situate a query term in the local conceptual environment. the simple definitions based on terminological relations are supplemented by information contained in facets and modifiers, which allow the user to capture different views of the data.
abductive explanation of dialogue misunderstandings. to respond to an utterance, a listener must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. misunderstandings occur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. our work combines intentional and social accounts of discourse, unifying theories of speech act production, interpretation, and the repair of misunderstandings. a unified theory has been developed by characterizing the generation of utterances as default reasoning and using abduction to characterize interpretation and repair.
automated reasoning about natural language correctness. automated reasoning techniques applied to the problem of natural language correctness allow the design of flexible training aids for the teaching of foreign languages. the approach involves important advantages for both the student and the teacher by detecting possible errors and pointing out their reasons. explanations may be given on four distinct levels, thus offering differently instructive error messages according to the needs of the student.
generalised pp-attachment disambiguation using corpus-based linguistic diagnostics. we propose a new formulation of the pp attachment problem as a 4-way classification which takes into account the argument or adjunct status of the pp. based on linguistic diagnostics, we train a 4-way classifier that reaches an average accuracy of 73.9% (baseline 66.2%). compared to a sequence of binary classifiers, the 4-way classifier reaches better performance and individuates a verb's arguments more accurately, thus improving the acquisition of a crucial piece of information for many nlp applications.
towards a workbench for acquisition of domain knowledge from natural language. in this paper we describe an architecture and functionality of main components of a workbench for an acquisition of domain knowledge from large text corpora. the workbench supports an incremental process of corpus analysis starting from a rough automatic extraction and organization of lexico-semantic regularities and ending with a computer supported analysis of extracted data and a semiautomatic refinement of obtained hypotheses. for doing this the workbench employs methods from computational linguistics, information retrieval and knowledge engineering. although the work-bench is currently under implementation some of its components are already implemented and their performance is illustrated with samples from engineering for a medical domain.
named entity recognition without gazetteers. it is often claimed that named entity recognition systems need extensive gazetteers---lists of names of people, organisations, locations, and other named entities. indeed, the compilation of such gazetteers is sometimes mentioned as a bottleneck in the design of named entity recognition systems.we report on a named entity recognition system which combines rule-based grammars with statistical (maximum entropy) models. we report on the system's performance with gazetteers of different types and different sizes, using test material from the muc-7 competition. we show that, for the text type and task of this competition, it is sufficient to use relatively small gazetteers of well-known names, rather than large gazetteers of low-frequency names. we conclude with observations about the domain independence of the competition and of our experiments.
incremental interpretation of categorial grammar. the paper describes a parser for categorial grammar which provides fully word by word incremental interpretation. the parser does not require fragments of sentences to form constituents, and thereby avoids problems of spurious ambiguity. the paper includes a brief discussion of the relationship between basic categorial grammar and other formalisms such as hpsg, dependency grammar and the lambek calculus. it also includes a discussion of some of the issues which arise when parsing lexicalised grammars, and the possibilities for using statistical techniques for tuning to particular languages.
selective magic hpsg parsing. we propose a parser for constraint-logic grammars implementing hpsg that combines the advantages of dynamic bottom-up and advanced top-down control. the parser allows the user to apply magic compilation to specific constraints in a grammar which as a result can be processed dynamically in a bottom-up and goal-directed fashion. state of the art top-down processing techniques are used to deal with the remaining constraints. we discuss various aspects concerning the implementation of the parser as part of a grammar development system.
off-line optimization for earley-style hpsg processing. a novel approach to hpsg based natural language processing is described that uses an off-line compiler to automatically prime a declarative grammar for generation or parsing, and inputs the primed grammar to an advanced earley-style processor. this way we provide an elegant solution to the problems with empty heads and efficient bidirectional processing which is illustrated for the special case of hpsg generation. extensive testing with a large hpsg grammar revealed some important constraints on the form of the grammar.
lexicalized grammar acquisition. this paper presents a formalization of automatic grammar acquisition that is based on lexicalized grammar formalisms (e.g. ltag and hpsg). we state the conditions for the consistent acquisition of a unique lexicalized grammar from an annotated corpus.
expressing generalizations in unification-based grammar formalisms. this paper shows how higher levels of generalization can be introduced into unification grammars by exploiting methods for typing grammatical objects. we discuss the strategy of using global declarations to limit possible linguistic structures, and sketch a few unusual aspects of our type-checking algorithm. we also describe the sort system we use in our semantic representation language and illustrate the expressive power gained by being able to state global constraints over these sorts. finally, we briefly illustrate the sort system by applying it to some agreement phenomena and to problems of adjunct resolution.
learning translations of named-entity phrases from parallel corpora. we develop a new approach to learning phrase translations from parallel corpora, and show that it performs with very high coverage and accuracy in choosing french translations of english named-entity phrases in a test corpus of software manuals. analysis of a subset of our results suggests that the method should also perform well on more general phrase translation tasks.
user modelling, dialog structure, and dialog strategy in ham-ans. ai dialog systems are now developing from question-answering systems toward advising systems. this includes:- structuring dialog- understanding and generating a wider range of speech acts than simply information request and answer- user modellinguser modelling in ham-ans is closely connected to dialog structure and dialog strategy. in advising the user, the system generates and verbalizes speech acts. the choice of the speech act is guided by the user profile and the dialog strategy of the system.
higher-order linear logic programming of categorial deduction. we show how categorial deduction can be implemented in higher-order (linear) logic programming, thereby realising parsing as deduction for the associative and non-associative lambek calculi. this provides a method of solution to the parsing problem of lambek categorial grammar applicable to a variety of its extensions.
geometry of lexico-syntactic interaction. interaction of lexical and derivational semantics ---for example substitution and lambda conversion--- is typically a part of the on-line interpretation process. proof-nets are to categorial grammar what phrase markers are to phrase structure grammar: unique graphical structures underlying equivalence classes of sequential syntactic derivations; but the role of proof-nets is deeper since they integrate also semantics. in this paper we show how interaction of lexical and derivational semantics at the lexico-syntactic interface can be precomputed as a process of off-line lexical compilation comprising cut elimination in partial proof-nets.
tuples, discontinuity, and gapping in categorial grammar. this paper solves some puzzles in the formalisation of logic for discontinuity in categorial grammar. a 'tuple' operation introduced in [solias, 1992] is defined as a mode of prosodic combination which has associated projection functions, and consequently can support a property of unique prosodic decomposability. discontinuity operators are defined model-theoretically by a residuation scheme which is particularly ammenable proof-theoretically. this enables a formulation which both improves on the logic for wrapping and infixing of [moortgat, 1988] which is only partial, and resolves some problems of determinacy of insertion point in the application of these proposals to in-situ binding phenomena. a discontinuous product is also defined by the residuation scheme, enabling formulation of rules of both use and proof for a 'substring' product that would have been similarly doomed to partial logic.we show how the apparatus enables characterisation of discontinous functors such as particle verbs and phrasal idioms, and binding phenomena such as quantifier raising and pied piping. we conclude by showing how the apparatus enables a simple categorial analysis of (svo) gapping using the discontinuity product and the wrapping operator.
determination of syntactic functions in estonian constraint grammar. this article describes the current state of syntactic analysis of estonian using constraint grammar. constraint grammar framework divides parsing into two different modules: morphological disambiguation and determination of syntactic functions. this article focuses on the last module in detail. if the morphological disambiguator achieves the precision more than 85% and error rate is smaller than 2% then 80--88% of words becomes syntactically unambiguous. the error rate of parser is 1--4% depending on the ambiguity rate of input. the main goal of this work is to elaborate an efficient parser for estonian and annotate the corpus of estonian written texts syntactically. it is the first attempt to write a parser for estonian.
augmented dependency grammar: a simple interface between the grammar rule and the knowledge. this paper describes some operational aspects of a language comprehension model which unifies the linguistic theory and the semantic theory in respect to operations. the computational model, called augmented dependency grammar (adg), formulates not only the linguistic dependency structure of sentences but also the semantic dependency structure using the extended deep case grammar and field-oriented fact-knowledge based inferences. fact knowledge base and adg model clarify the qualitative difference between what we call semantics and logical meaning. from a practical view point, it provides clear image of syntactic/semantic computation for language processing in analysis and synthesis. it also explains the gap in semantics and logical meaning, and gives a clear computational image of what we call conceptual analysis.this grammar is used for analysis of japanese and synthesis of english, in the japanese-to-english machine translation system called venus (vehicle for natural language understanding and synthesis) currently developed by nec.
an extended lr parsing algorithm for grammars using feature-based syntactic categories. this paper proposes an lr parsing algorithm modified for grammars with feature-based categories. the proposed algorithm does not instantiate categories during preprocessing of a grammar as proposed elsewhere. as a result, it constructs a minimal size of goto/action table and eliminates the necessity of search for goto table entries during parsing.
temporal reasoning in natural language understanding: the temporal structure of the narrative. this paper proposes a new framework for discourse analysis, in the spirit of grosz and sidner (1986), webber (1987a,b) but differentiated with respect to the type or genre of discourse. it is argued that different genres call for different representations and processing strategies; particularly important is the distinction between subjective, performative discourse and objective discourse, of which narrative is a primary example. this paper concentrates on narratives and introduces the notions of temporal focus (proposed also in webber (1987b)) and narrative move. the processing tasks involved in reconstructing the temporal structure of a narrative (webber's e/s structure) are formulated in terms of these two notions. the remainder of the paper analyzes the durational and aspectual knowledge needed for those tasks. distinctions are established between grammatical aspect, aspectual class and the aspectual perspective of a sentence in discourse; it is shown that in english, grammatical aspect under-determines the aspectual perspective.
subject erasing and pronominalization in italian text generation. certain romance languages such as italian, spanish and portuguese allow the subject to be erased in tensed clauses. this paper studies subject erasing in the framework of a text generation system for italian. we will prove that it is first necessary to try to pronominalize the subject. therefore, we are led to study the synthesis of subject and complement personal pronouns. in romance languages, personal pronouns raise many syntactic problems, whose solution is complex in a generation system. we will see that pronominalization plays a fundamental role in the order in which the elements of a clause are synthesized, and consequently in the synthesis of this clause. moreover, the synthesis of a clause must take into account the fact that subject erasing and the synthesis of complements are phenomena which depend on each other. the complex algorithm that must be used for the synthesis of a clause will be illustred in various examples.
on abstract finite-state morphology. aspects of abstract finite-state morphology are introduced and demonstrated. the use of two-way finite automata for arabic noun stem and verb root inflection leads to abstractions based on finite-state transition network topology as well as the form and content of network arcs. nonconcatenative morphology is distinguished from concatenative morphology by its use of movement on the output tape rather than the input tape. the idea of specific automata for classes of inflection inheriting some or all of the nodes, arc form and arc content of the abstract automaton is also introduced. this can lead to novel linguistic generalities and application, as well as advantages in terms of procedural efficiency and representation.
the structure of communicative context of dialogue interaction. we propose a draft scheme of the model formalizing the structure of communicative context in dialogue interaction. the relationships between the interacting partners are considered as system of three automata representing the partners of the dialogue and environment.the communicative competence of the partners is defined by- the set m of all propositions reflecting the possible states of the three automata within the model;- the set k of "contracts" representing all kinds of human-to-human relationships (social, interpersonal, professional, etc.) which include fixation of particular roles for the partners;- the set t of possible topics related to given "contract".the authors believe the system of the notions presented may be used as a basis for forming the communicative component in the dialogue system.
online word sense disambiguation with structural semantic interconnections. in this paper we present an online implementation of a knowledge-based word sense disambiguation algorithm called structural semantic interconnections (ssi). we describe the system implementation and the user interface, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.
generalized left-corner parsing. we show how techniques known from generalized lr parsing can be applied to left-corner parsing. the resulting parsing algorithm for context-free grammars has some advantages over generalized lr parsing: the sizes and generation times of the parsers are smaller, the produced output is more compact, and the basic parsing technique can more easily be adapted to arbitary context-free grammars.the algorithm can be seen as an optimization of algorithms known from existing literature. a strong advantage of our presentation is that it makes explicit the role of left-corner parsing in these algorithms.
splitting the reference time: temporal anaphora and quantification in drt. this paper presents an analysis of temporal anaphora in sentences which contain quantification over events, within the framework of discourse representation theory. the analysis in (partee, 1984) of quantified sentences, introduced by a temporal connective, gives the wrong truth-conditions when the temporal connective in the subordinate clause is before or after. this problem has been previously analyzed in (de swart, 1991) as an instance of the proportion problem, and given a solution from a generalized quantifier approach. by using a careful distinction between the different notions of reference time, based on (kamp and reyle, 1993), we propose a solution to this problem, within the framework of drt. we show some applications of this solution to additional temporal anaphora phenomena in quantified sentences.
comparison and classification of dialects. this project measures and classifies language variation. in contrast to earlier dialectology, we seek a comprehensive characterization of (potentially gradual) differences between dialects, rather than a geographic delineation of (discrete) features of individual words or pronunciations. more general characterizations of dialect differences then become available. we measure phonetic (un)relatedness between dialects using levenshtein distance, and classify by clustering distances but also by analysis through multidimensional scaling.