waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
flexible parsing of discretely uttered sentences. in this paper we describe a syntactic semantic parser of spoken sentences pertaining to a subset of natural italian language. error-free and fast analysis, partial interpretation ability, man-machine dialogue trend, different semantic environment adaptability and natural language usage are its main characteristics. all of these features are supported by a technique of input reliability evaluation. particular attention is devoted to the description of the knowledge internal representation and of the mechanism that manages, at different points of the anlysis, the whole process.
you'll take the high road and i'll take the low road: using a third language to improve bilingual word alignment. while language-independent sentence alignment programs typically achieve a recall in the 90 percent range, the same cannot be said about word alignment systems, where normal recall figures tend to fall somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, in the language-independent case. as words (and phrases) for various reasons are more interesting to align than sentences, we need methods to increase word alignment recall, preferably without sacrificing precision. this paper reports on a series of experiments with pivot alignment, which is the use of one or more additional languages to improve bilingual word alignment. the conclusion is that in a multilingual parallel corpus, pivot alignment is a safe way to increase word alignment recall without lowering the precision.
two-component teaching system that understands and correct mistakes. this paper presents a computer-tool teaching system supplied by a language processor. its aim is to correct mistakes in texts written by foreign students learning russian as a second language. since a text may include grammar mistakes, the system cannot use morphological analysis to fool extent. so one must compile a programm capable of finding and correcting mistakes without traditional means of analysis.to solve this problem we propone a system that includes a vocabulary and rules of finding and re-writing words. so the process consists of finding word stems and than correcting word endings. semantic and syntactic information("a model of ruling"/mel'&ccaron;uk 1974/) necessary for that is written in the vocabulary of verbs as a frame. the slots of this frame contain semantic and morphological information about words that depend on this word.the vocabulary containing now approximately 200 lexemes is enough for beginners
an inference-based approach to dialogue system design. we present an architecture for spoken dialogue systems where first-order inference (both theorem proving and model building) plays a crucial role in interpreting utterances of dialogue participants and deciding how the system should respond and carry out instructions. the dialogue itself is represented as a drs which is translated into first-order logic for inference tasks. the system is implemented as a society of oaa-agents, and evaluated against a specific application (home automation).
processing metonymy- a domain-model heuristic graph traversal approach. we address here the treatment of metonymic expressions from a knowledge representation perspective, that is, in the context of a text understanding system which aims to build a conceptual representation from texts according to a domain model expressed in a knowledge representation formalism. we focus in this paper on the part of the semantic analyser which deals with semantic composition. we explain how we use the domain model to handle metonymy dynamically, and more generally, to underlie semantic composition, using the knowledge descriptions attached to each concept of our ontology as a kind of concept-level, multiple-role qualia structure. we rely for this on a heuristic path search algorithm that exploits the graphic aspects of the conceptual graphs formalism. the methods described have been implemented and applied on french texts in the medical domain.
mental state adjectives: the perspective of generative lexicon. this paper focusses on mental state adjectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of generative lexicon (pustejovsky, 1991, 1995). we show that, instead of enumerating the various syntactic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is posible to give them a rich typed semantic representation which will explain both their semantic and syntactic polymorphism.
a lexicalist account of icelandic case marking. recent theoretical descriptions of the icelandic case system distinguish between lexical and structural case. lexical case is assigned in the lexicon, whereas structural case is assigned in syntax, under the provision that it does not override lexical case assignment. this analysis is problematic for grammatical theories such as categorial unification grammar (cug) and head driven phrase structure grammar (hpsg) as the introduction of a syntactic case component is incompatible with the lexicalist ideology underlying these frameworks. furthermore, the default character of syntactic case introduces a procedural aspect into the grammar which goes against the declarative spirit of unification-based frameworks in general. in this paper, i propose an alternative analysis, formulated in terms of cug, in which all case constraints are expressed lexically and in which default reasoning is restricted to nonmonotonic inheritance of lexical information only.
surface grammatical analysis for the extraction of terminological noun phrases. lexter is a software package for extracting terminology. a corpus of french language texts on any subject field is fed in, and lexter produces a list of likely terminological units to be submitted to an expert to be validated. to identify the terminological units, lexter takes their form into account and proceeds in two main stages: analysis, parsing. in the first stage, lexter uses a base of rules designed to indentify frontier markers in view to analysing the texts and extracting maximal-length noun phrases. in the second stage, lexter parses these maximal-length noun phrases to extract subgroups which by virtue of their grammatical structure and their place in the maximal-length noun phrases are likely to be terminological units. in this article, the type of analysis used (surface grammatical analysis) is highlighted, as the methodological approach adopted to adapt the rules (experimental approach).
a metric space defined on english and its relation to error correction. a distance function is proposed that maps pairs of strings to the real numbers. it has been shown that given suitable constraints the function is a metric over the free monoid generated from a set of grammatical symbols. the necessary constraints modify the metric so that it maps pairs of strings to a lattice of real numbers. thus for each string the metric defines a countable set of nested neighbourhoods. this aspect of the space has proved useful for the correction of certain kinds of grammatical errors that occur in english sentences. an english parser was written that used the metric to propose corrections to a variety of ungrammatical sentences. experience with the program suggests that in many cases the intuitive notion of grammatical similarity corresponds closely to the mathematical definition of nearest neighbour in the space.
binding constraints as instructions of binding machines. binding constraints have resisted to be fully integrated into the course of grammatical processing despite its practical relevance and cross-linguistic generality. the ultimate root for this is to be found in the exponential "overgenerate & filter" procedure of the mainstream rationale for their satisfaction. in this paper we design an alternative approach based on the view that nominals are binding machines.
branching split obliqueness at the syntax-semantics interface. in this paper it is argued that the accuracy of the syntax-semantics interface is improved by adopting a non-linear obliqueness hierarchy for subcategorized arguments.
probabilistic parsing and psychological plausibility. given the recent, evidence for probabilistic mechanisms in models of human ambiguity resolution, this paper investigates the plausibility of exploiting current wide-coverage, probabilistic parsing techniques to model human linguistic performance. in particular, we investigate the performance of standard stochastic parsers when they are revised to operate incrementally, and with reduced memory resources. we present techniques for ranking and filtering analyses, together with experimental results. our results confirm that stochastic parsers which adhere to these psychologically motivated constraints achieve good performance. memory can be reduced down to 1% (compared to exhausitve search) without reducing recall and precision. additionally, these models exhibit substantially faster performance. finally, we argue that this general result is likely to hold for more sophisticated, and psycholinguistically plausible, probabilistic parsing models.
lexical rules: what are they? horizontal redundancy is inherent to lexica consisting of descriptions of fully formed objects. this causes an unwelcome expansion of the lexical database and increases parsing time. to climinate it, direct relations between descriptions of fully formed objects are often defined. these are additional to the (typed multiple) inheritance network which already structures the lexicon. many implementations of horizontal relations, however, fail to generate lexical entries on a needs-driven basis, so eliminate neither the problem of lexicon expansion nor that of inefficient parsing. alternatively, we propose that lexical entries are descriptions of objects open to contextual specification of their properties on the basis of constraints defined within the type system. this guarantees that only those grammatical lexical entries are infered that are needed for efficient parsing. the proposal is extremely modest, making use of only basic inference power and expressivity.
linking propositions. the function words of a language provide explicit information about how propositions are to be related. we have examined a subset of these function words, namely the subordinating conjunctions which link propositions within a sentence, using sentences taken from corpora stored on magnetic tape. on the basis of this analysis, a computer program for dutch language generation and comprehension has been extended to deal with the subordinating conjunctions. we present an overview of the underlying dimensions that were used in describing the semantics and pragmatics of the dutch subordinating conjunctions. we propose a universal set of linking dimensions, sufficient to specify the subordinating conjunctions in any language. this uld is a first proposal for the representation required for a computer program to understand or translate the subordinating conjunctions of any natural language.
formal description of multi-word lexemes with the finite-state formalism idarex. most multi-word lexemes (mwls) allow certain types of variation. this has to be taken into account for their description and their recognition in texts. we suggest to describe their syntactic restrictions and their idiosyncratic peculiarities with local grammar rules, which at the same time allow to express in a general way regularities valid for a whole class of mwls. the local grammars can be written in a very convenient and compact way as regular expressions in the formalism idarex which uses a two-level morphology. idarex allows to define various types of variables, and to mix canonical and inflected word forms in the regular expressions.
partial descriptions and systemic grammar. this paper examines the properties of featurebased partial descriptions built on top of halliday's systemic networks. we show that the crucial operation of consistency checking for such descriptions is np-complete, and therefore probably intractable, but proceed to develop algorithms which can sometimes alleviate the unpleasant consequences of this intractability.
the role of semantic processing in an automatic speech understanding system. we present the semantics component of a speech understanding and dialogue system that is developed at our institute. due to pronunciation variabilities and vagueness of the word recognition process, semantics in a speech understanding system has to resolve additional problems. its main task is not only to build up a representation structure for the meaning of an utterance, as in a system for written input, semantic knowledge is also employed to decide between alternative word hypotheses, to judge the plausibility of syntactic structures, and to guide the word recognition process by expectations resulting from partial analyses.
a rule-based approach to prepositional phrase attachment disambiguation. in this paper, we describe a new corpus-based approach to prepositional phrase attachment disambiguation, and present results comparing performance of this algorithm with other corpus-based approaches to this problem.
terminology data banks as a basis for high-quality translation. currently existing terminology data banks serve various purposes. two major groups, i.e. standardization-oriented and translation-oriented terminology data banks are of special significance. this paper deals exclusively with translation-oriented banks and uses as an example the team terminology data bank system developed by the language services department of siemens.
control structures and theories of interaction in speech understanding systems. in this paper, we approach the problem of organisation and control in automatic speech understanding systems firstly, by presenting a theory of the non-serial interactions necessary between two processors in the system: namely, the morphosyntactic and the prosodic, and secondly, by showing how, when generalised, this theory allows one to specify a highly efficient architecture for a speech understanding system with a simple control structure and genuinely independent components. the theory of non-serial interactions we present predicts that speech is temporally organised in a very specific way; that is, the system would not function effectively if the temporal distribution of various types of information in speech were different. the architecture we propose is developed from a study of the task of speech understanding and, furthermore, is specific to this task. consequently, the paper argues that general problem solving methods are unnecessary for speech understanding.
betatext: an event driven text processing and text analyzing system. betatext can be described as an <u>event driven</u> production system, in which (combinations of) text events lead to certain actions, such as the printing of sentences that exhibit certain, say, syntactic phenomena. the analysis mechanism used allows for arbitrarily complex parsing, but is particularly suitable for finite state parsing. a careful investigation of what is actually needed in linguistically relevant text processing resulted in a rather small but carefully chosen set of "elementary actions" to be implemented.
the use of instrumentation in grammar engineering. this paper explores the usefulness of a technique from software engineering, code instrumentation, for the development of large-scale natural language grammars. information about the usage of grammar rules in test and corpus sentences is used to improve grammar and testsuite, as well as adapting a grammar to a specific genre. results show that less than half of a large-coverage grammar for german is actually tested by two large testsuites, and that 10--30% of testing time is redundant. this methodology applied can be seen as a re-use of grammar writing knowledge for testsuite compilation. the construction of genre-specific grammars results in performance gains of a factor of four.
concurrent lexicalized dependency parsing: the parsetalk model. a grammar model for concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing is introduced. complete lexical distribution of grammatical knowledge is achieved building upon the head-oriented notions of valency and dependency, while inheritance mechanisms are used to capture lexical generalizations. the underlying concurrent computation model relies upon the actor paradigm. we consider message passing protocols for establishing dependency relations and ambiguity handling.
advice-giving dialogue: an integrated system. in this paper we present the implementation of an advice-giving system for financial investment for the final phase of the project esteam-316. this system integrates multiple agents in a single architecture allowing cooperation between a natural language dialoguer, "intelligent" data base access modules, and a problem solver in the financial domain. using a user model, this system adapts the mixed initiative dialogue during both the formulation of the problem and its resolution by the expert. a novice user thus has access to expert knowledge despite the weakness of his own knowledge.
automated generalization of translation examples. previous work has shown that adding generalization of the examples in the corpus of an example-based machine translation (ebmt) system can reduce the required amount of pretranslated example text by as much as an order of magnitude for spanish-english and french-english ebmt. using word clustering to automatically generalize the example corpus can provide the majority of this improvement for french-english with no manual intervention; the prior work required a large bilingual dictionary tagged with parts of speech and the manual creation of grammar rules. by seeding the clustering with a small amount of manually-created information, even better performance can be achieved. this paper describes a method whereby bilingual word clustering can be performed using standard monolingual document clustering techniques, and its effectiveness at reducing the size of the example corpus required.
example-based machine translation in the pangloss system. the pangloss example-based machine translation engine (panebmt) is a translation system requiring essentially no knowledge of the structure of a language, merely a large parallel corpus of example sentences and a bilingual dictionary. input texts are segmented into sequences of words occurring in the corpus, for which translations are determined by subsentential alignment of the sentence pairs containing those sequences. these partial translations are then combined with the results of other translation engines to form the final translation produced by the pangloss system. in an internal evaluation, panebmt achieved 70.2% coverage of unrestricted spanish news-wire text, despite a simplistic subsentential alignment algorithm, a suboptimal dictionary, and a corpus from a different domain than the evaluation texts.
a statistical approach to language translation. an approach to automatic translation is outlined that utilizes techniques of statistical information extraction from large data bases. the method is based on the availability of pairs of large corresponding texts that are translations of each other. in our case, the texts are in english and french.fundamental to the technique is a complex glossary of correspondence of fixed locutions. the steps of the proposed translation process are: (1) partition the source text into a set of fixed locutions. (2) use the glossary plus contextual information to select the corresponding set of fixed locutions into a sequence forming the target sentence. (3) arrange the words of the target fixed locutions into a sequence forming the target sentence.we have developed statistical techniques facilitating both the automatic creation of the glossary, and the performance of the three translation steps, all on the basis of an alignment of corresponding sentences in the two texts.while we are not yet able to provide examples of french / english translation, we present some encouraging intermediate results concerning glossary creation and the arrangement of target word sequences.
a conceptual framework for automatic and dynamic thesaurus updating in information retrieval systems. this paper aims at presenting a methodology for automatic thesaurus construction in order to help the search of documents and we want to obtain the development of classes for specific topics (for a given corpus) without a priori semantic information. information contained in the thesaurus lead to new search formulations via automatic and/or user feedback. this presentation even being theoretical is oriented toward a database implementation.
genus disambiguation: a study in weighted preference. the automatic construction of an is_a taxonomy of noun senses from a machine readable dictionary (mrd) has long been sought, but achieved with only limited success. the task requires the solution to two problems: 1) to define an algorithm to automatically identify the genus or hypernym of a noun definition, and 2) to define an algorithm for lexical disambiguation of the genus term. in the last few years, effective methods for solving the first problem have been developed, but the problem of creating an algorithm for lexical disambiguation of the genus terms is one that has proven to be very difficult. in coling 90 we described our initial work on the automatic creation of a taxonomy of noun senses from longman's dictionary of contemporary english (ldoce). the algorithm for lexical disambiguation of the genus term was accurate about 80% of the time and made use of the semantic categories, the subject area markings and the frequency of use information in ldoce. in this paper we report a series of experiments which weight the three factors in various ways, and describe our improvements to the algorithm (to about 90% accuracy).
a client/server architecture for word sense disambiguation. this paper presents a robust client/server implementation of a word sense disambiguator for english. this system associates a word with its meaning in a given context using dictionaries as tagged corpora in order to extract semantic disambiguation rules. semantic rules are used as input of a semantic application program which encodes a linguistic strategy in order to select the best disambiguation rule for the word to be disambiguated. the semantic disambiguation rule application program is part of the client/server architecture enabling the processing of large corpora.
formal specificaiton of natural language syntax using two-level grammar. the two-level grammar is investigated as a notation for giving formal specification of the context-free and context-sensitive aspects of natural language syntax. in this paper, a large class of english declarative sentences, including post-noun-modification by relative clauses, is formalized using a two-level grammar. the principal advantages of two-level grammar are: 1) it is very easy to understand and may be used to give a formal description using a structured form of natural language; 2) it is formal with many well-known mathematical properties; and 3) it is directly implementable by interpretation. the significance of the latter fact is that once we have written a two-level grammar for natural language syntax, we can derive a parser automatically without writing any additional specialized computer programs. because of the ease with which two-level grammars may express logic and their turing computability we expect that they will also be very suitable for future extensions to semantics and knowledge representation.
design of a machine translation system for a sublanguage. this paper describes the design of a prototype machine translation system for a sublanguage of job advertisements. the design is based on the hypothesis that specialized linguistic subsystems may require special computational treatment and that therefore a relatively shallow analysis of the text may be sufficient for automatic translation of the sublanguage. this hypothesis and the desire to minimize computation in the transfer phase has led to the adoption of a flat tree representation of the linguistic data.