waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
using the same system for analyzing and synthesizing sentences. we specify the advantages of guided composition of sentences and illustrate them with examples from leader, a natural language interface we have developped. guided composition is achieved by using the same grammar for analysis and for synthesis. we detail the problems we have encountered and we provide solutions for partial synthesis. we give the principles of the analysis-synthesis algorithm.
a rational reconstruction of the proteus sentence planner. a revised and more structured version of davey's discourse generation program has been implemented, which constructs the underlying forms for sentences and clauses by using rules which annotate and segment the initial sequence of events in various ways.
a statistical theory of dependency syntax. a generative statistical model of dependency syntax is proposed based on tesni&egrave;re's classical theory. it provides a stochastic formalization of the original model of syntactic structure and augments it with a model of the string realization process, the latter which is lacking in tesni&egrave;re's original work. the resulting theory models crossing dependency links, discontinuous nuclei and string merging, and it has been given an efficient computational rendering.
the computational complexity of sentence derivation in functional unification grammar. functional unification (fu) grammar is a general linguistic formalism based on the merging of feature-sets. an informal outline is given of how the definition of derivation within fu grammar can be used to represent the satisfiability of an arbitrary logical formula in conjunctive normal form. this suggests that the generation of a structure from an arbitrary arbitrary fu grammar is np-hard, which is an undesirably high level of computational complexity.
text disambiguation by finite state automata, an algorithm and experiments on corpora. consulting a dictionary for the words of a given text provides multiple solutions, that is, ambiguities; thus, the sequence of words pilot studies could lead for example to:pilot: n singular, v infinitive, v (conjugated)studies: n plural, v (conjugated)pilot studies: n plural (compound).these informations could be organized in the form of a finite automaton such as:[see pdf for figure]the exploration of the context should provide clues that eliminate the non-relevant solutions. for this purpose we use local grammar constraints represented by finite automata. we have designed and implemented an algorithm which performs this task by using a large variety of linguistic constraints. both the texts and the rules (or constraints) are represented in the same formalism, that is finite automata. performing subtraction operations between text automata and constraint automata reduce the ambiguities. experiments were performed on french texts with large scale dictionaries (one dictionary of 600.000 simple inflected forms and one dictionary of 150.000 inflected compunds). syntactic patterns represented by automata, including shapes of compound nouns such as noun followed by an adjective (in gender-number agreement) (cf 5.1), can be matched in texts.this process is thus an extension of the classic matching procedures because of the on-line dictionary consultation and because of the grammar constraints. it provides a simple and efficient indexing tool.
handling sparse data by successive abstraction. a general, practical method for handling sparse data that avoids held-out data and iterative reestimation is derived from first principles. it has been tested on a part-of-speech tagging task and out-performed (deleted) interpolation with context-independent weights, even when the latter used a globally optimal parameter setting determined a posteriori.
two parsing algorithms by means of finite state transducers. we present a new approach, illustrated by two algorithms, for parsing not only finite state grammars but also context free grammars and their extension, by means of finite state machines. the basis is the computation of a fixed point of a finite-state function, i.e. a finite-state transducer. using these techniques, we have built a program that parses french sentences with a grammar of more than 200,000 lexical rules with a typical response time of less than a second. the first algorithm computes a fixed point of a non-deterministic finite-state transducer and the second computes a fixed point of a deterministic bidirectional device called a bimachine. these two algorithms point out a new connection between the theory of parsing and the theory of representation of rational transductions.
a mechanism for ellipsis resolution in dialogued systems. an ellipsi resolution mechanism is presented. the mechanism is a part of a natural language understanding system developed in the last years in order to be included as a main component of several projects based on man/machine interactions. capra, an intelligent system for teaching programming, and guai, a natural language interfaces generator, are two of such applications. in our approach, syntactic and knowledge-based techniques are combined in order to get a great coverage of elliptical cases.
temporal structure of discourse. in this paper discourse segments are defined and a method for discourse segmentation primarily based on abduction of temporal relations between segments is proposed. this method is precise and computationally feasible and is supported by previous work in the area of temporal anaphora resolution.
word knowledge acquisition, lexicon construction and dictionary compilation. we describe an approach to semiautomatic lexicon development from machine readable dictionaries with specific reference to verbal diatheses, envisaging ways in which the results obtained can be used to guide word classification in the construction of dictionary databases.
generating english paraphrasis from formal relational calculus expressions. this paper discusses a system for producing english descriptions (or "paraphrases") of the content of formal relational calculus (rc) formulae expressing a database (db) query. it explains the underlying design motivations and describes a conceptual model and focus selection mechanism necessary for delivering coherent paraphrases. the general paraphrasing strategy is discussed, as are the notions of "desirable" paraphrase and "paraphrasable query". two examples are included. the system was developed and implemented in prolog at the university of essex under a grant from icl.
effective structural inference for large xml documents. this paper investigates methods to automatically infer structural information from large xml documents. using xml as a reference format, we approach the schema generation problem by application of inductive inference theory. in doing so, we review and extend results relating to the search spaces of grammatical inferences for large data set. we evaluate the result of an inference process using the concept of minimum message length. comprehensive experimentation reveals our new hybrid method to be the most effective for large documents. finally tractability issues, including scalability analysis, are discussed.
virtual polysemy. we present an approach to lexical knowledge representation where different uses of the same word can be conflated into a single meta-entry which encodes regularities about sense/usage extensibility. this approach makes it possible to solve lexical ambiguities by using contextual information during language processing to ground underspecified word entries, and can be efficiently implemented within a typed feature structure formalism.
formalization of argumentation structures in newspaper texts. the paper discusses the role of argumentation schemata and their interaction with other knowledge sources within a computer model for in-depth understanding of newspaper texts about jobmarket developments. some of these schemata are presented; the "although ..."-argumentation (german: "trotz...") and its formalization are discussed in detail.
applying system combination to base noun phrase identification. we use seven machine learning algorithms for one task: identifying base noun phrases. the results have been processed by different system combination methods and all of these outperformed the best individual result. we have applied the seven learners with the best combinator, a majority vote of the top five systems, to a standard data set and managed to improve the best published result for this data set.
lexical gaps and idioms in machine translation. this paper describes the treatment of lexical gaps, collection information and idioms in the english to portuguese machine translation system portuga.the perspective is strictly bilingual, in the sense that all problems referenced above are considered to belong to the transfer phase, and not, as in other systems, to analysis or generation.the solution presented invokes a parser for the target language (portuguese) that analyses, producing the corresponding graph structure, the multiword expression selected as the result of lexical transfer.this process seems to bring considerable advantage in what readability and ease of bilingual dictionary development is concerned, and to furnish maximal flexibility together with minimal storage requirements. finally, it also provides complete independence between dictionary and grammar formalisms.
a tense and aspect calculus. this paper focuses on a theory of tense and aspect (the representation of time in natural language) that attempts a formal representation of the relevant linguistic devices as implication rules in first order logic.it presents a rich ontology as far as verb aspect is concerned, distinguishing between complex patterns and vagueness.examples and conclusions are drawn from the comparison between english and portuguese, pinpointing the importance of contrastive studies both for the understanding and for the evaluation of a general theory of tense and aspect.in the paper, we present the actual translations of a wide range of phenomena, and a short example.
linguistic bases for machine translation. my aim in organizing this panel is to stimulate the discussion between researchers working on mt and linguists interested in formal syntax and semantics. i am convinced that a closer cooperation will be fruitful for both sides. i will be talking about experimental mt or mt as a research project and not as a development project.[1]
coordination in tree adjoining grammars: formalization and implementation. in this paper we show that an account for coordination can be constructed using the derivation structures in a lexicalized tree adjoining grammar (ltag). we present a notion of derivation in ltags that preserves the notion of fixed constituency in the ltag lexicon while providing the flexibility needed for coordination phenomena. we also discuss the construction of a practical parser for ltags that can handle coordination including cases of non-constituent coordination.
des heuristiques pour la recherche du theme d'un discours et de l'antecedent d'un pronom. un des probl&egrave;mes r&eacute;siduels pour le traitement des r&eacute;f&eacute;rences dans les interfaces en langage naturel est le grand nombre d'ambiguit&eacute;s que g&eacute;n&eacute;re un pronom du point de vue de la recherche d'ant&eacute;c&eacute;dent. dans cet article, nous allons montrer comment l'utilisation de crit&eacute;res issus d'&eacute;tudes de psychologie exp&eacute;rimentale sur des m&eacute;thodes de construction d'un discours par des locuteurs peut apporter un plus pour r&eacute;soudre ce probl&egrave;me. nous pr&eacute;sentons tout d'abord des r&eacute;sultats de tests faits par des psychologues autour de la notion de th&egrave;me et de repr&eacute;sentation interne du discours; puis, nous utilisons ces r&eacute;sultats pour &eacute;noncer un certain nombre de crit&egrave;res pragmatiques concernant la recherche d'ant&eacute;c&eacute;dents. nous montrons enfin que ces crit&egrave;res, tout &eacute;tant concis et facilement programmables, sont assez g&eacute;n&eacute;raux au regard de ceux pr&eacute;sent&eacute;s dans des cadres similaires.
learning verb argument structure from minimally annotated corpora. in this paper we investigate the task of automatically identifying the correct argument structure for a set of verbs. the argument structure of a verb allows us to predict the relationship between the syntactic arguments of a verb and their role in the underlying lexical semantics of the verb. following the method described in (merlo and stevenson, 2001), we exploit the distributions of some selected features from the local context of a verb. these features were extracted from a 23m word wsj corpus based on part-of-speech tags and phrasal chunks alone. we constructed several decision tree classifiers trained on this data. the best performing classifier achieved an error rate of 33.4%. this work shows that a subcategorization frame (sf) learning algorithm previously applied to czech (sarkar and zeman, 2000) is used to extract sfs in english. the extracted sfs are evaluated by classifying verbs into verb alternation classes.
machine translation: the languages network (versus the intermediate language). jonathan slocum/slocum, 1985/ divides mt techniques from a linguistic point of view into three two-way perspectives which are not quite disjunct: "direct versus indirect; interlingua versus transfer; and local versus global scope.".in this paper we present a research paradigm which, in fact, does not exactly match any of these perspectives: the languages network. in this paradigm each pair of languages will be treated as within a transfer application but with the characteristics of indirect translation: analysis of the source language and synthesis of the target language are not totally dependent on each other.the proces must be split up into a large number of pieces which can be connected into a huge network performing mt from and into several languages.implementations of this paradigm are being carried out by the author by means of the translator generator sygmart (see/chauch&eacute;/, chauch&eacute;, 1974/ and/rolf, 1985/), which permits the linguist to implement whatever he wants in the field of mt in an efficient way on a wide range of computers (from atari1040stf via sun's to ibm vm/gms mainframes).
automatic extraction of subcategorization frames for czech. we present some novel machine learning techniques for the identification of subcategorization information for verbs in czech. we compare three different statistical techniques applied to this problem. we show how the learning algorithm can be used to discover previously unknown subcategorization frames from the czech prague dependency treebank. the algorithm can then be used to label dependents of a verb in the czech treebank as either arguments or adjuncts. using our techniques, we are able to achieve 88% precision on unseen parsed text.
derivation of underlying valency frames from a learner's dictionary. the authors collect lexical data for a module of english syntactic analysis in the context of a bilingual research project. the computer usable version of oald (hornby, 1974) is used as the primary source. the main focus is on the structure and derivation of valency frames for verbal entries in the target lexicon, illustration of the complex relation between oald's verb subcategorization codes and the target complementation paradigms is provided, and an approach to the derivation procedure design suggested.
a new strategy for providing definitions in task-oriented dialogues. definitions may be made up of one or more components, which correspond to strategic predicates. the selection of which components to use in giving a definition in a task-oriented dialogue depends heavily on the needs of the user. the selection strategy we present involves weighting possible strategic predicates and the propositions used to fill them at multiple points throughout an ongoing dialogue and at the actual time of giving the definition. weighting will be influenced by a model of the user's domain knowledge, task-related plans and goals, and receptivity to the different kinds of information that could be presented. an utterance can then be produced that incorporates the most important information while adhering to common rhetorical practices.
lexical semantics in human-computer communication. most linguistic studies of human-computer communication have focused on the issues of syntax and discourse structure. however, another interesting and important area is the lexical semantics of command laguages. the names that users and system designers give the objects and actions of a computer system can greatly affect its usability, and the lexical issues involved are as complicated as those in natural languages. this paper presents an overview of the various studies of naming in computer systems, examining such issues as suggestiveness, memorability, descriptions of categories, and the use of non-words as names. a simple featural framework for the analysis of these phenomena is presented.
acquisition of a language computational model for nlp. this paper describes an approach to actively acquire a language computational model. the purpose of this acquisition is rapid development of nlp systems. the model is created with the syntax module of the boas knowledge elicitation system for a quick ramp up of a standard transfer-based machine translation system from l into english.
an xml-based document suite. we report about the current state of development of a document suite and its applications. this collection of tools for the flexible and robust processing of documents in german is based on the use of xml as unifying formalism for encoding input and output data as well as process information. it is organized in modules with limited responsibilities that can easily be combined into pipelines to solve complex tasks. strong emphasis is laid on a number of techniques to deal with lexical and conceptual gaps that are typical when starting a new application.
learning semantic-level information extraction rules by type-oriented ilp. this paper describes an approach to using semantic representations for learning information extraction (ie) rules by a type-oriented inductive logic programming (ilp) system. nlp components of a machine translation system are used to automatically generate semantic representations of text corpus that can be given directly to an ilp system. the latest experimental results show high precision and recall of the learned rules.
named entity chunking techniques in supervised learning for japanese named entity recognition. this paper focuses on the issue of named entity chunking in japanese named entity recognition. we apply the supervised decision list learning method to japanese named entity recognition. we also investigate and incorporate several named-entity noun phrase chunking techniques and experimentally evaluate and compare their performance. in addition, we propose a method for incorporating richer contextual information as well as patterns of constituent morphemes within a named entity, which have not been considered in previous research, and show that the proposed method outperforms these previous approaches.
sgs: a system for mechanical generation of japanese sentences. sgs is a compact sentence generation system. inputs are the frames and specifications of a sentence. programs attached to context free rules carry out the generation task. output is a surface sentence with an associated derivation tree.
ctm: an example-based translation aid system. this paper describes a japanese-english translation aid system, ctm, which has a useful capability for flexible retrieval of texts from bilingual corpora or translation databases. translation examples (pairs of a text and its translation equivalent) are very helpful for us to translate the similar text. our character-based best match retrieval method can retrieve translation examples similar to the given input. this method has the following advantages: (1) this method accepts free-style translation examples, i.e., pairs of any text string and its translation equivalent, (2) morphological analysis is unneccessary, (3) this method accepts free-style inputs (i.e., any text strings) for retrieval. we show the retrieval examples with the following characteristic features: phrasal expression, long-distance dependency, idiom, synonym, and semantic ambiguity.
toward memory-based translation. an essential problem of example-based translation is how to utilize more than one translation example for translating one source sentence.this paper proposes a method to solve this problem. we introduce the representation, called matching expression, which represents the combination of fragments of translation examples. the translation process consists of three steps: (1) make the source matching expression from the source sentence. (2) transfer the source matching expression into the target matching expression. (3) construct the target sentence from the target matching expression.this mechanism generates some candidates of translation. to select the best translation out of them, we define the score of a translation.
extracting word sequence correspondences with support vector machines. this paper proposes a learning and extracting method of word sequence correspondences from non-aligned parallel corpora with support vector machines, which have high ability of the generalization, rarely cause over-fit for training samples and can learn dependencies of features by using a kernel function. our method uses features for the translation model which use the translation dictionary, the number of words, part-of-speech, constituent words and neighbor words. experiment results in which japanese and english parallel corpora are used archived 81.1% precision rate and 69.0% recall rate of the extracted word sequence correspondences. this demonstrates that our method could reduce the cost for making translation dictionaries.
disambiguation by prioritized circumscription. this paper presents a method of resolving ambiguity by using a variant of circumscription, prioritized circumscription. in a disambiguation task, human seems to use various preferences which have various strength. in prioritized circumscription, we can express these preferences as defeasible constraints with various strength and we infer the most preferable logical models which satisfy stronger constraints as much as possible. this representation is very natural for disambiguation since we can regard a logical interprentation as a possible reading and the most preferable logical models as the most preferable readings. we argue that prioritized circumscription is another promising method for the task. we also discuss an implementation of prioritized circumscription by a hirarchical logic programming (hclp) language.
knowledge representation and machine translation. this paper describes a new knowledge representation called "frame knowledge representation-0" (fkr-0), and an experimental machine translation system named atlas/i which uses fkr-0.the purpose of fkr-0 is to stored information required for machine translation processing as flexibly as possible, and to make the translation system as expandable as possible.
stochastic lexicalized tree-adjoining grammars. the notion of stochastic lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (sltag) is formally defined. the parameters of a sltag correspond to the probability of combining two structures each one associated with a word. the characteristics of sltag are unique and novel since it is lexieally sensitive (as n-gram models or hidden markov models) and yet hierarchical (as stochastic context-free grammars).then, two basic algorithms for sltag arc introduced: an algorithm for computing the probability of a sentence generated by a sltag and an inside-outside-like iterative algorithm for estimating the parameters of a sltag given a training corpus.finally, we should how sltag enables to define a lexicalized version of stochastic context-free grammars and we report preliminary experiments showing some of the advantages of sltag over stochastic context-free grammars.