waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
the resolution of quantificational ambiguity in the tendum system. a method is described for handling the ambiguity and vagueness that is often found in quantifications - the semantically complex relations between nominal and verbal constituents. in natural language certain aspects of quantification are often left open; it is argued that the analysis of quantification in a model-theoretic framework should use semantic representation in which this may also be done. this paper shows a form for such a representation and how "ambiguous" representations are used in an elegant and efficient procedure for semantic analysis, incorporated in the tendum dialogue system.
feaspar - a feature structure parser learning to parse spoken language. we describe and experimentally evaluate a system, feaspar, that learns parsing spontaneous speech. to train and run feaspar (feature structure parser), only limited handmodeled knowledge is required.the feaspar architecture consists of neural networks and a search. the networks split the incoming sentence into chunks, which are labeled with feature values and chunk relations. then, the search finds the most probable and consistent feature structure.feaspar is trained, tested and evaluated with the spontaneous scheduling task, and compared with a handmodeled lr-parser. the handmodeling effort for feaspar is 2 weeks. the handmodeling effort for the lr-parser was 4 months. feaspar performed better than the lr-parser in all six comparisons that are made.
tagging of very large corpora: topic-focus articulation. after a brief characterization of the theory of the topic-focus articulation of the sentence (tfa), rules are formulated that determine the assignment of appropriate values of the tfa attribute in the process of syntactico-semantic tagging of a very large corpus of czech.
a constructive view of gpsg or how to make it work. using the formalism of generalized phrase structure grammar (gpsg) in an nl system (e.g. for machine translation (mt) is promising since the modular structure of the formalism is very well suited to meet some particular needs of mt. however, it seems impossible to implement gpsg in its 1985 version straightforwardly. this would involve a vast overgeneration of structures as well as processes to filter out everything but the admissible tree(s). we therefore argue for a constructive version of gpsg where information is gathered in subsequent steps to produce syntactic structures. as a result, we consider it necessary to incorporate procedural aspects into the formalism in order to use it as a linguistic basis for nl parsing and generation. the paper discusses the major implications of such a modified view of gpsg.
semantic case role detection for information extraction. if information extraction wants to make its results more accurate, it will have to resort increasingly to a coherent implementation of natural language semantics. in this paper, we will focus on the extraction of semantic case roles from texts. after setting the essential theoretical framework, we will argue that it is possible to detect case roles on the basis of morphosyntactic and lexical surface phenomena. we will give a concise overview of our methodology and of a preliminary test that seems to confirm our hypotheses.
gramcheck: a grammar and style checker. this paper presents a grammar and style checker demonstrator for spanish and greek native writers developed within the project gramcheck. besides a brief grammar error typology for spanish, a linguistically motivated approach to detection and diagnosis is presented, based on the generalized use of prolog exteusions to highly typed unification-based grammars. the demonstrator, currently including full coverage for agreement errors and certain head-argument relation issues, also provides correction by means of an analysis-transfer-synthesis cycle. finally, future extensions to the current system are discussed.
syntactic analyses for parallel grammars: auxiliaries and genitive nps. this paper focuses on two disparate aspects of german syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. as part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive nps in german. the lfg-based implementation presented here avoids unnessary structural complexity in the representation of auxiliaries by challenging the traditional analysis of auxiliaries as raising verbs. the approach developed for multiple genitive nps provides a more abstract, language independent representation of genitives associated with nominalized verbs. taken together, the two approaches represent a step towards providing uniformly applicable treatments for differing languages, thus lightening the burden for machine translation.
syllable-based morphology. this paper presents a language for the description of morphological alternations which is based on syllable structure. the justification for such an approach is discussed with reference to examples from a variety of languages and the approach is compared to koskenniemi's two-level account of morphonology.
cross linguistic phoneme correspondences. cross-linguistic phoneme correspondences, or metaphonemes, can be defined across languages which are relatively closely related in exactly the same way as correspondences can be defined for dialects, or accents, of a single language (e.g. o'connor, 1973; fitt, 2001). in this paper we present the theory of metaphonemes, comparing them with traditional archi- and morphophonemes as well as with similar work using "keysymbols" done for accents of english. we describe the metaphoneme inventory defined for dutch, english and german, comparing the results for vowels and consonants. we also describe some of the unexpected information that arose from the analysis of cognate forms we undertook to find the metaphoneme correspondences.
thistle and interarbora. we present a system for manipulating a wide class of linguistic diagrams, which is configurable and extensible, and allows deployment as a web-delivered system. a major theme of this work is the transfer of the devices of formal grammar into the analysis and construction of diagrams.
unification categorial grammar: a concise, extenable grammar for natural language processing. unification categorial grammar (ucg) combines the syntactic insights of categorial grammar with the semantic insights of discourse representation theory. the addition of unification to these two frameworks allows a simple account of interaction between different linguistic levels within a constraining, monostraial theory. the resulting, computationally efficient, system provides an explicit formal framework for linguistic description, within which large fragments of grammars for french and english have already been developed. we present the formal basis of ucg, with independent definitions of well-formedness for syntactic and semantic dimensions. we will also focus on the concept of modifier within the theory.
detecting patterns in a lexical data base. in a well-structured lexical data base, a number of relations among lexical entries can be interactively evidenced. the present article examines hyponymy, as an example of paradigmatic relation, and "restriction" relation, as a syntagmatic relation. the theoretical results of their implementation are illustrated.
acquisition of semantic information from an on-line dictionary. after the first work on machine-readable dictionaries (mrds) in the seventies, and with the recent development of the concept of a lexical database (ldb) in which interaction, flexibility and multidimensionality can be achieved, but everything must be explicitly stated in advance, a new possibility which is now emerging is that of a procedural exploitation of the full range of semantic information implicitly contained in mrds. the dictionary is considered in this framework as a primary source of basic general knowledge. in the paper we describe a project to develop a system which has word-sense acquisition from information contained in computerized dictionaries and knowledge organization as its main objectives. the approach consists in a discovery procedure technique operating on natural language definitions, which is recursively applied and refined. we start from free-text definitions, in natural language linear form, analyzing and converting them into informationally equivalent structured forms. this new approach, which aims at reorganizing free text into elaborately structured information, could be called the lexical knowledge base (lkb) approach.
computation of modifier scope in np by a language-neutral method. the relative logical scope of multiple modifiers within np is often semantically significant. this paper proposes a structurally based method for computing the relative scope of such modifiers, based on their order, type, and syntactic complexity. the algorithm is language-neutral, in that it works with minimal errors for a wide range of languages without language-specific stipulations.
speech-rate variation and the prediction of duration. a comparison between the output from a set of duration rules based on klatt '76 and measured durations in a text allows quantification of speech rate at a local as well as a global level. the rules account for known correlates of duration change, such as stress, phonetic and phrasal context, and inherent differences in the durations of each segment, but make no allowance for local changes of rate within a text. the degree of fit of the output from such a system to the observed durations in the text provides a guide both to the accuracy of the rule-set and to the rate-related variation within that text. statistical procedures can be applied to reduce the rule-related error and thereby strengthen both the predictions of the rules and the quantification of the rate variation. this paper describes research in progress.
a principle-based hierarchical representation of ltags. lexicalized tree adjoining grammars have proved useful for nlp. however, numerous redundancy problems face ltags developers, as highlighted by vijay-shanker and schabes (92).we present a compact hierarchical organization of syntactic descriptions, that is linguistically motivated and a tool that automatically generates the tree families of an ltag. the tool starts from the syntactic hierarchy and principles of well-formedness and carries out all the relevant combinations of linguistic phenomena.
base noun phrase translation using web data and the em algorithm. we consider here the problem of base noun phrase translation. we propose a new method to perform the task. for a given base np, we first search its translation candidates from the web. we next determine the possible translation(s) from among the candidates using one of the two methods that we have developed. in one method, we employ an ensemble of na&iuml;ve bayesian classifiers constructed with the em algorithm. in the other method, we use tf-idf vectors also constructed with the em algorithm. experimental results indicate that the coverage and accuracy of our method are significantly better than those of the baseline methods relying on existing technologies.
user models: the problem of disparity. a significant component of a user model in an information-seeking dialogue is the task-related plan motivating the information-seeker's queries. a number of researchers have modeled the plan inference process and used these models to design more robust natural language interfaces. however in each case, it has been assumed that the system's context model and the plan under construction by the information-seeker are never at variance. this paper addresses the problem of disparate plans. it presents a four phase approach and argues that handling disparate plans requires an enriched context model. this model must permit the addition of components suggested by the information seeker but not fully supported by the system's domain knowledge, and must differentiate among its components according to the kind of support accorded each component as a correct part of the information-seeker's overall plan. it is shown how a component's support should affect the system's hypothesis about the source of error once plan disparity is suggested.
anaphora resolution: a multy-strategy approach. anaphora resolution has proven to be a very difficult problem; it requires the integrated application of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. this paper examines the hypothesis that instead of attempting to construct a monolithic method for resolving anaphora, the combination of multiple strategies, each exploiting a different knowledge source, proves more effective - theoretically and computationally. cognitive plausibility is established in that human judgements of the optimal anaphoric referent accord with those of the strategy-based method, and human inability to determine a unique referent corresponds to the cases where different strategies offer conflicting candidates for the anaphoric referent.
coping with extragrammaticality. practical natural language interfaces must exhibit robust behaviour in the presence of extragrammatical user input. this paper classifies different types of grammatical deviations and related phenomena at the lexical and sentential levels, discussing recovery strategies tailored to specific phenomena in the classification. such strategies constitute a tool chest of computationally tractable methods for coping with extragrammaticality in restricted domain natural language. some of the strategies have been tested and proven viable in existing parsers.
a model of competence for corpus-based machine translation. in this paper i elaborate a model of competence for corpus-based machine translation (cbmt) along the lines of the representations used in the translation system. representations in cbmt-systems can be rich or austere, molecular or holistic and they can be fine-grained or coarse-grained. the paper shows that different cbmt architectures are required dependent on whether a better translation quality or a broader coverage is preferred according to boitet (1999)'s formula: "coverage * quality = k".
planning to fail, not failing to plan: risk-taking and recovery in task-oriented dialogue. we hypothesise that agents who engage in task oriented dialogue usually try to complete the task with the least effort which will produce a satisfactory solution. our analysis of a corpus of map navigation task dialogues shows that there are a number of different aspects of dialogue for which agents can choose either to expend extra effort when they produce their initial utterances, or to take the risk that they will have to recover from a failure in the dialogue. some of these decisions and the strategies which agents use to recover from failures due to high risk choices are simulated in the jam system. the human agents of the corpus purposely risk failure because this is generally the most efficient behaviour. incorporating the same behaviour in the jam system produces dialogue with more "natural" structure than that of traditional dialogue systems.
rug: regular unification grammar. the paper describes a new unification based grammar formalism called regular unification grammar (rug). the formalism is under development at the research unit of computational linguistics, university of helsinki. in outline, rug can be described as a combination of an extended graph unification formalism with a fixed minimal finite state syntax.section i of the paper outlines the rug formalism. section ii describes some aspects of its current implementation. section iii describes an experimental rug grammar for finnish.
independent transfer using graph unification. we present a mt system that applies graph unification in transfer from english to finnish. the work described below is an outgrowth of a multilingual mt project initiated by the ibm in 1987 with the aim of studying multilingual translation using a common english language parser.the transfer system presented here is independent of the parsing and generation modules. any source language parser can be used whose output can be expressed in a directed graph form. the transfer system is responsible for generating target language phrase structure. target language word order and morphology are left to the generation modules.the transfer system is lexically based. transfer rules, presented in the form of bilingual graphs, are declarative statements of symmetric transfer relationships between words, phrases or constructions in the two intertranslatable languages.transfer is structure driven in that the transfer algorithm traverses the source language graph, nondeterministically trying to apply the relevant transfer rules in the lexicon. each successful transfer yields a bilingual graph, whose target language half is extracted and subjected to linearization and morphological generation.the main focus of attention in our project is the development of the lexicon subsystem. the lexicon system consists of separate transfer and monolingual lexicons and a common lexicon of language independent definitions.
high precision extraction of grammatical relations. a parsing system returning analyses in the form of sets of grammatical relations can obtain high precision if it hypothesises a particular relation only when it is certain that the relation is correct. we operationalise this technique---in a statistical parser using a manually-developed wide-coverage grammar of english---by only returning relations that form part of all analyses licensed by the grammar. we observe an increase in precision from 75% to over 90% (at the cost of a reduction in recall) on a test corpus of naturally-occurring text.
unification and transduction in computational phonology. in this paper unification and transduction mechanisms are applied in a new approach to phonological parsing. it is shown that unification in the sense of kay as used in unification grammars, and transduction, a process deriving from automata theory, are both valuable tools for use in computational phonology. by way of illustration, a brief outline of the allophonic parser described by church is given. then a linear unification parser for english syllables is introduced. this parser takes phonetic input in the form of feature bundles and uses phonological rules represented by networks of transduction relations together with unification, and an iterative finite-state process to produce phonemic output with marked syllable boundar les. a fundamental distinction is made between two domains: the representations at the phonetic and phonological levels, and the processing of these representations. on this basis, a distinction is made between networks of transduction relations e.g. between allophones and phonemes), and a set of possible processors (i.e. parsers and transducers) for the interpretation of such networks.
phonological processing of speech variants. this paper describes a strategy for the extension of the phonological lexicon in order that nonstandard forms which arise in fast speech may be processed by a speech recognition system. by way of illustration, an outline of the phonological processing of standard wordforms by the phonological parser (phopa) is given and then the extension procedure which is based on this phonological parser is discussed. the lexicon extension procedure has two stages: phonotactic extension which involves the introduction of additional restrictions into the phonotactic network for the standard language in the form of metarules describing phonological processes, and specialised word model construction whereby for each standard phonemic wordform a verification net which contains all variants of this standard form is compiled. the complete system serves as a phonologically oriented lexicon development tool, and its theoretical interest lies in its contribution to the field of speech variant learning.
efficient disjunctive unification for bottom-up parsing. this paper describes two novel techniques which, when applied together, in practice significantly reduce the time required for unifying disjunctive feature structures. the first is a safe but fast method for discarding irrelevant disjunctions from newly-created structures. the second reduces the time required to check the consistency of a structure from exponential to polynomial in the number of disjunctions, except in cases that, it will be argued, should be very unusual in practical systems. the techniques are implemented in an experimental japanese analyser that uses a large, existing disjunctive japanese grammar and lexicon. observations of the time behaviour of this analyser suggest that a significant speed gain is achieved.
simplifying deterministic parsing. this paper presents a model for deterministic parsing which was designed to simplify the task of writing and understanding a deterministic grammar. while retaining structures and operations similar to those of marcus' parsifal parser [marcus 80] the grammar language incorporates the following changes. (1) the use of productions operating in parallel has essentially been eliminated and instead the productions are organized into sequences. not only does this improve the understandability of the grammar, it is felt that this organization corresponds more closely to the task of performing the sequence of buffer transformations and attachments required to parse the most common constituent types. (2) a general method for interfacing between the parser and a semantic representation system is introduced. this interface is independent of the particular semantic representation used and hides all details of the semantic processing from the grammar writer. (3) the interface also provides a general method for dealing with syntactic ambiguities which arise from the attachment of optional modifiers such as prepositional phrases. this frees the grammar writer from determining each point at which such ambiguities can occur.
repair work in human-computer dialogue. if human-computer interaction is to be effective, it is vital that there are opportunities to check on understanding, and repair that understanding when it fails. this paper discusses this idea of repair in human-computer interaction, and provides a number of examples of different types of repair work in an interactive explanation system.
exogeneous and endogeneous approaches to semantic categorization of unknown technical terms. acquiring and updating terminological resources are difficult and tedious tasks, especially when semantic information should be provided. this paper deals with term semantic categorization. the goal of this process is to assign semantic categories to unknown technical terms. we propose two approaches to the problem that rely on different knowledge sources. the exogeneous approach exploits contextual information extracted from corpora. the endogeneous approach relies on a lexical analysis of the technical terms. after describing the two implemented methods, we present the experiments that we conducted on significant test sets. the results demonstrate that term categorization can provide a reliable help in the terminology acquisition processes.
structural disambiguation of morpho-syntactic categorial parsing for korean. the korean combinatory categorial grammar (kccg) formalism can uniformly handle word order variation among arguments and adjuncts within a clause as well as in complex clauses and across clause boundaries, i.e., long distance scrambling. in this paper, incremental parsing technique of a morpheme graph is developed using the kccg. we present techniques for choosing the most plausible parse tree using lexical information such as category merge probability, head-head co-occurrence heuristic, and the heuristic based on the coverage of subtrees. the performance results for various models for choosing the most plausible parse tree are compared.