waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
word-sense disambiguation using statistical models of roget's categories trained on large corpora. this paper describes a program that disambiguates english word senses in unrestricted text using statistical models of the major roget's thesaurus categories. roget's categories serve as approximations of conceptual classes. the categories listed for a word in roget's index tend to correspond to sense distinctions; thus selecting the most likely category provides a useful level of sense disambiguation. the selection of categories is accomplished by identifying and weighting words that are indicative of each category when seen in context, using a bayesian theoretical framework.other statistical approaches have required special corpora or hand-labeled training examples for much of the lexicon. our use of class models overcomes this knowledge acquisition bottleneck, enabling training on unrestricted monolingual text without human intervention. applied to the 10 million word grolier's encyclopedia, the system correctly disambiguated 92% of the instances of 12 polysemous words that have been previously studied in the literature.
lfg system in prolog. in order to design and maintain a large scale grammar, the formal system for representing syntactic knowledge should be provided. lexical functional grammar (lfg) [kaplan, bresnan 82] is a powerful formalism for that purpose. in this paper, the prolog implementation of lfg system is described. prolog provides a good tools for the implementation of lfg. lfg can be translated into dcg [pereira, warren 80] and functional structures (f-structures) are generated during the parsing process.
can subcategorization help a statistical dependency parser? today there is a relatively large body of work on automatic acquisition of lexico-syntactical preferences (subcategorization) from corpora. various techniques have been developed that not only produce machine-readable subcategorization dictionaries but also they are capable of weighing the various subcategorization frames probabilistically. clearly there should be a potential to use such weighted lexical information to improve statistical parsing, though published experiments proving (or disproving) such hypothesis are comparatively rare. one experiment is described in (carroll et al., 1998) --- they use subcategorization probabilities for ranking trees generated by unification-based phrasal grammar. the present paper, on the other hand, involves a statistical dependency parser. although dependency and constituency parsing are of quite a different nature, we show that a subcategorization model is of much use here as well.
voice simulation: factors affecting quality and naturalness. in this paper we describe a flexible analysis-synthesis system which can be used for a number of studies in speech research. the main objective is to have a synthesis system whose characteristics can be controlled through a set of parameters to realize any desired voice characteristics. the basic synthesis scheme consists of two steps: generation of an excitation signal from pitch and gain contours and excitation of the linear system model described by linear prediction coefficients. we show that a number of basic studies such as time expansion/compression, pitch modifications and spectral expansion/compression can be made to study the effect of these parameters on the quality of synthetic speech. a systematic study is made to determine factors responsible for unnaturalness in synthetic speech. it is found that the shape of the glottal pulse determines the quality to a large extent. we have also made some studies to determine factors responsible for loss of intelligibility in some segments of speech. a signal dependent analysis-synthesis scheme is proposed to improve the intelligibility of dynamic sounds such as stops. a simple implementation of the signal dependent analysis is proposed.
more accurate tests for the statistical significance of result differences. statistical significance testing of differences in values of metrics like recall, precision and balanced f-score is a necessary part of empirical natural language processing. unfortunately, we find in a set of experiments that many commonly used tests often underestimate the significance and so are less likely to detect differences that exist between different techniques. this underestimation comes from an independence assumption that is often violated. we point out some useful tests that do not make this assumption, including computationally-intensive randomization tests.
towards a noise-tolerant, representation-independent mechanism for argument interpretation. we describe a mechanism for the interpretation of arguments, which can cope with noisy conditions in terms of wording, beliefs and argument structure. this is achieved through the application of the minimum message length principle to evaluate candidate interpretations. our system receives as input a quasi-natural language argument, where propositions are presented in english, and generates an interpretation of the argument in the form of a bayesian network (bn). performance was evaluated by distorting the system's arguments (generated from a bn) and feeding them to the system for interpretation. in 75% of the cases, the interpretations produced by the system matched precisely or almost-precisely the representation of the original arguments.
comparing two trainable grammatical relations finders. grammatical relationships (grs) form an important level of natural language processing, but different sets of grs are useful for different purposes. therefore, one may often only have time to obtain a small training corpus with the desired gr annotations. on such a small training corpus, we compare two systems. they use different learning techniques, but we find that this difference by itself only has a minor effect. a larger factor is that in english, a different gr length measure appears better suited for finding simple argument grs than for finding modifier grs. we also find that partitioning the data may help memory-based learning.
lexical query paraphrasing for document retrieval. we describe a mechanism for the generation of lexical paraphrases of queries posed to an internet resource. these paraphrases are generated using wordnet and part-of-speech information to propose synonyms for the content words in the queries. statistical information, obtained from a corpus, is then used to rank the paraphrases. we evaluated our mechanism using 404 queries whose answers reside in the la times subset of the trec-9 corpus. there was a 14% improvement in performance when paraphrases were used for document retrieval.
an empirical study on the generation of zero anaphors in chinese. in this paper, we describe the creation of rules for generating chinese zero anaphors through a sequence of experiments in a stepwise enhanced manner. in the experiments, we basically examined the occurence of zero anaphors in a real text and the ones generated by the algorithms employing the rules, assuming the same semantic and discourse structures as the text. the factors of locality, syntactic constraints, discourse structure and salience of objects were considered in the rules. the results of the experiment show that 93% of the zero anaphors in the text can be correctly generated by an algorithm using a rule involving all the above factors.
conceptual lexicon using an object-oriented language. this paper describes the construction of a lexicon representing abstract concepts. this lexicon is written by an object-oriented language, ctalk, and forms a dynamic network system controlled by object-oriented mechanisms. the content of the lexicon is constructed using a japanese dictionary. first, entry words and their definition parts are derived from the dictionary. second, syntactic and semantic information is analyzed from these parts. finally, superconcepts are assigned in the superconcept part in an object, static parts to the slot values, and dynamic operations to the message parts, respectively. one word has one object in a world, but through the superconcept part and slot part this connects to the subconcept of other words and worlds. when relative concepts are accumulated, the result will be a model of human thoughts which have conscious and unconscious parts.
deep sentence understanding in a restricted domain. we present here the current prototype of the text understanding system h&eacute;l&eacute;ne. the objective of this system is to achieve a deep understanding of small reports dealing with a restricted domain. sentence understanding builds a model of the state of the world described, through the application of several knowledge modules: (i) lfg parsing, (ii) syntactic disambiguation based on lexical entry semantic components, (iii) assembly of semantic components and instantiation of domain entities, and (iv) construction of a world model through activation of common sense and domain knowledge.
database system based on intensional logic. model theoretic semantics of database systems is studied. as rechard montague has done in his work,5 we translate statements of ddl and dml into intensional logic and the latter is interpreted with reference to a suitable model. major advantages of its approach include (i) it leads itself to the design of database systems which can handle historical data, (ii) it provides with a formal description of database semantics.
object-oriented parallel parsing for context-free grammars. this paper describes a new parallel parsing scheme for context-free grammars and our experience of implementing this scheme, and it also reports the result of our simulation for running the parsing program on a massive parallel processor.in our basic parsing scheme, a set of context free grammar rules is represented by a network of processor-like computing agents each having its local memory. each computing agent in the network corresponds to an occurrence of a non-terminal or terminal symbol appearing in the grammar rules. computing agents in the network work concurrently and communicate with one another by passing messages which are partial parse trees.this scheme is shown to be fast (0(n*h) time for the first complete parse tree, where n is the length of an input sentence and h is the height of the parse tree) and useful in various modes of parsing such as on-line parsing, overlap parsing, on-line unparsing, pipe-lining to semantics processing, etc. performance evaluation for implementing this scheme on a massive parallel machine is conducted by distributed event simulation using the time warp mechanism/jefferson85/.our parsing scheme is implemented in a programming language called abcl/1 which is designed for object-oriented concurrent programming and used for various concurrent programming /yonezawa86/. the program is currently runing on standard single-cpu machines such as sun3s and symbolics lisp machines (by simulated parallelism).in our experiment and simulation, a set of about 250 context-free grammar rules specifying a subset of english is represented by the corresponding network of objects (i.e., computing agents) and about 1100 concurrently executable objects are involved.
identifying temporal expression and its syntactic role using fst and lexical data from corpus. accurate analysis of the temporal expression is crucial for korean text processing applications such as information extraction and chunking for efficient syntactic analysis. it is a complicated problem since temporal expressions often have the ambiguity of syntactic roles. this paper discusses two problems: (1) representing and identifying the temporal expression (2) distinguishing the syntactic function of the temporal expression in case it has a dual syntactic role. in this paper, temporal expressions and the context for disambiguation which is called local context are represented using lexical data extracted from corpus and the finite state transducer. by experiments, it turns out that the method is effective for temporal expression analysis. in particular, our approach shows the corpus-based work could make a promising result for the problem in a restricted domain in that we can effectievely deal with a large size of lexical data.
a consideration on the concepts structure and language- in relation to selections of translation equivalents of verbs in machine translation system. to give appropriate translation equivalents for target words is one of the most fundamental problems in machine translation systems.especially, when the mt systems handle languages that have completely different structures like japanese and european languages as source and target languages. in this report, we discuss about the data structure that enables appropriate selections of translation equivalents for verbs in the target language. this structure is based on the concepts structure with associated information relating source and target languages.discussion have been made from the standpoint of realizability of the structure (e.g. from the standpoint of easiness of data collection and arrangement, easiness of realization and compactness of the size of storage space).
man-assisted machine construction of a semantic dictionary for natural language processing. this is a report on the semantic dictionary for natural language processing we are constructing now. this paper explains how to obtain the semantic information for the dictionary from an ordinary japanese language dictionary with about 60,000 items (which had already been put into machine readable form) and also explains what should be the frame for the representation of meaning of each item (word). then a man-assisted machine procedure that embeds the semantic graph with respect to the head word of the ordinary dictionary into the frame of a head word is discussed.
identifying zero pronouns in japanese dialogue. japanese dialogue containing zero pronouns is analyzed for the purpose of automatic japanese-english conversation translation. topic-driven discourse structure is formalized which identifies mainly non-human zero pronouns as a by-product. other zero pronouns are handled using cognitive and sociolinguistic information in honorific, deictic, speech-act and mental predicates. these are integrated into the model.
an analysis of indonesian language for interlingual machine-translation system. this paper presents bias (bahasa indonesia analyzer system), an analysis system for indonesian language suitable for multilingual machine translation system. bias is developed with a motivation to contribute to on-going cooperative research project in machine translation between indonesia and other asian countries. in addition, it may serve to foster nlp research in indonesia. it start with an overview of various methodologies for representation of linguistic knowledge and plausible strategies of automatic reasoning for indonesian language. we examine these methodologies from the perspective of their relative advantage and their suitability for an interlingual machine-translation environment. bias is a multi-level analyzer which is developed not only to extract the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences but also to provide a unifying method for knowledge reasoning. each phase of the analyzer is discussed with emphasis on indonesian morphology and case-grammatical constructions.
abl: alignment-based learning. this paper introduces a new type of grammar learning algorithm, inspired by string edit distance (wagner and fischer, 1974). the algorithm takes a corpus of flat sentences as input and returns a corpus of labelled, bracketed sentences. the method works on pairs of unstructured sentences that have one or more words in common. when two sentences are divided into parts that are the same in both sentences and parts that are different, this information is used to find parts that are interchangeable. these parts are taken as possible constituents of the same type. after this alignment learning step, the selection learning step selects the most probable constituents from all possible constituents.this method was used to bootstrap structure on the atis corpus (marcus et. al., 1993) and on the ovis! corpus (bonnema et al., 1997). while the results are encouraging (we obtained up to 89.25% non-crossing brackets precision), this paper will point out some of the shortcomings of our approach and will suggest possible solutions.
generation of accent in nominally premodified noun phrases. the primary purpose of this paper is to present a set of conditions that constrain accent placement in focused nominally premodified nps. selkirk (1984) argues that if the premodifier is an argument of the head, then the head can be deaccented. i agree with selkirk's proposal and argue that what is essential is not whether the premodifier is a grammatical argument of the head noun, but rather, whether it is a &theta;-complement in lexical conceptual structure. this proposal is evaluated by testing it against a corpus of naturally occurring data.
test-score semantics for natural languages. test-score semantics is based on the premise that almost everything that relates to natural languages is a matter of degree. viewed from this perspective, any semantic entity in a natural language, e.g., a predicate, predicate-modifier, proposition, quantifier, command, question, etc. may be represented as a system of elastic constraints on a collection of objects or derived objects in a universe of discourse. in this sense, test-score semantics may be viewed as a generalization of truth-conditional, possible-world and model-theoretic semantics, but its expressive power is substantially greater.
a computational theory of dispositions. informally, a disposition is a proposition which is preponderantly, but no necessarily always, true. for example, birds can fly is a disposition, as are the propositions swedes are blond and spaniards are dark.an idea which underlies the theory described in this paper is that a disposition may be viewed as a proposition with implicit fuzzy quantifiers which are approximations to all and always, e.g., almost all, almost always, most, frequently, etc. for example, birds can fly may be interpreted as the result of supressing the fuzzy quantifier most in the proposition most birds can fly. similarly, young men like young women may be read as most young men like mostly young women. the process of transforming a disposition into a proposition is referred to as explicitation or restoration.explicitation sets the stage for representing the meaning of a proposition through the use of test-score semantics (zadeh, 1978, 1982). in this approach to semantics, the meaning of a proposition, p, is represented as a procedure which tests, scores and aggregates the elastic constraints which are induced by p.the paper closes with a description of an approach to reasoning with dispositions which is based on the concept of a fuzzy syllogism. syllogistic reasoning with dispositions has an important bearing on commonsense reasoning as well as on the management of uncertainty in expert systems. as a simple application of the techniques described in this paper, we formulate a definition of typicality -- a concept which plays an important role in human cognition and is of relevance to default reasoning.
on compositional semantics. we prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. we then show that when one requires compositional semantics to be "systematic" (that is the meaning function cannot be arbitrary, but must belong to some class), one can easily distinguish between compositional and non-compositional semantics. we also present an example of a simple grammar for which there is no "systematic" compositional semantics. this implies that it is possible to distinguish "good" and "bad" grammars on the basis of whether they can have compositional semantics. as a result, we believe that the paper clarifies the concept of compositionality and opens a possibility of making systematic comparisons of different systems of grammars and nlu programs.
language acquisition: coping with lexical gaps. computer programs so far have not fared well in modeling language acquisition. for one thing, learning methodology applicable in general domains does not readily lend itself in the linguistic domain. for another, linguistic representation used by language processing systems is not geared to learning. we introduced a new linguistic representation, the dynamic hierarchical phrasal lexicon (dhpl) [zernik 88], to facilitate language acquisition. from this, a language learning model was implemented in the program rina, which enhances its own lexical hierarchy by processing examples in context. we identified two tasks: first, how linguistic concepts are acquired from training examples and organized in a hierarchy; this task was discussed in previous papers [zernik87]. second, we show in this paper how a lexical hierarchy is used in predicting new linguistic concepts. thus, a program does not stall even in the presence of a lexical unknown, and a hypothesis can be produced for covering that lexical gap.
nl understanding with a grammar of constructions. we present an approach to natural language understanding based on a computable grammar of constructions. a construction consists of a set of features of form and a description of meaning in a context. a grammar is a set of constructions. this kind of grammar is the key element of mincal, an implemented natural language speech-enabled interface to an on-line calendar system. the architecture has two key aspects: (a) the use of constructions, integrating descriptions of form, meaning and context into one whole; and (b) the separation of domain knowledge (about calendars) from application knowledge (about the particular on-line calendar).
scsl: a linguistic specification language for mt. nowadays, mt systems grow to such a size that a first specification step is necessary if we want to be able to master their developement and maintenance, for the software part as well for the linguistic part ("lingwares").advocating for a clean separation between linguistic tasks and programming tasks, we first introduce a specification/implementation/ validation framework for nlp then scsl, a language for the specification of analysis and generation modules.
interactive translation: a new approach. a new approach for interactive machine translation where the author interacts during the creation or the modification of the document is proposed. the explanation of an ambiguity or an error for the purpose of correction does not use any concepts of the underlying linguistic theory: it is a reformulation of the erroneous or ambiguous sentence. the interaction is limited to the analysis step of the translation process.this paper presents a new interactive disambiguation scheme based on the paraphrasing of a parser's multiple output. some examples of paraphrasing ambiguous sentences are presented.
nkrl, a knowledge representation language for narrative natural language processing. nkrl is a conceptual language which intends to provide a normalised, pragmatic description of the semantic contents (in short, the "meaning") of nl narrative documents. we introduce firstly the general architecture of nkrl, and we give some examples of its characteristics features. we supply, afterward, some sketchy information about the inference techniques and the nlp procedures associated with this language.