waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
parsing into discourse object descriptions. this paper reports work on the design of a natural language interface with a limited dialogue capability. it is argued that (i) the interpretation of the input is preferably represented as a structure of discourse object descriptions (dods); (ii) the dods must be determined on the basis of different types of knowledge such as grammatical knowledge, object type definitions and knowledge about existing discourse objects and their discourse status; (iii) the different types of knowledge are stored separately but integrated in the interpretation process which is based on constraints.
an experiment with heuristic parsing of swedish. heuristic parsing is the art of doing parsing in a haphazard and seemingly careless manner but in such a way that the outcome is still "good", at least from a statistical point of view, or, hopefully, even from a more absolute point of view. the idea is to find strategic shortcuts derived from guesses about the structure of a sentence based on scanty observations of linguistic units in the sentence. if the guess comes out right much parsing time can be saved, and if it does not, many subobservations may still be valid for revised guesses. in the (very preliminary) experiment reported here the main idea is to make use of (combinations of) surface phenomena as much as possible as the base for the prediction of the structure as a whole. in the parser to be developed along the lines sketched in this report main stress is put on arriving at independently working, parallel recognition procedures.the work reported here is both aimed at simulating certain aspects of human language perception and at arriving at effective algorithms for actual parsing of running text. there is, indeed, a great need for fast such algorithms, e.g. for the analysis of the literally millions of words of running text that already today comprise the data bases in various large information retrieval systems, and which can be expected to expand several orders of magnitude both in importance and in size in the foreseeable future.
interactive word alignment for language engineering. in this paper we report ongoing work on developing an interactive word alignment environment that will assist a user to quickly produce accurate full-coverage word alignment in bitexts for different language engineering tasks, such as mt lexicons and gold standards for evaluation. the system uses a graphical interface, static and dynamic resources as well as machine learning techniques. we also sketch how the system is being integrated with an automatic word aligner.
various representations of text proposed for eurotra. we introduce several general notions concerning the texts and the particularities of text processing on a computer support, in relation to some problems which are specific to m(a)t. and we present the solution we have proposed for the duration of the eurotra project.
talking through procedures: an intelligent space station procedure assistant. we present a prototype system aimed at providing spoken dialogue support for complex procedures aboard the international space station. the system allows navigation one line at a time or in larger steps. other user functions include issuing spoken corrections, requesting images and diagrams, recording voice notes and spoken alarms, and controlling audio volume.
carsim: an automatic 3d text-to-scene conversion system applied to road accident reports. carsim is an automatic text-to-scene conversion system. it analyzes written descriptions of car accidents and synthesizes 3d scenes of them. the conversion process consists of two stages. an information extraction module creates a tabular description of the accident and a visual simulator generates and animates the scene.we implemented a first version of carsim that considered a corpus of texts in french. we redesigned its linguistic modules and its interface and we applied it to texts in english from the national transportation safety board in the united states.
natural, language information retrieval system dialog. presented paper contains a description of an experimental version of the natural language information retrieval system dialog. the system is destined for the use in the field of medicine. its main purpose is to ensure access to information to phisicians in a conversational manner. the use of the system does not require ability of programming from its user.
reversing controlled document authoring to normalize documents. this paper introduces document normalization, and addresses the issue of whether controlled document authoring systems can be used in a reverse mode to normalize legacy documents. a paradigm for deep content analysis using such a system is proposed, and an architecture for a document normalization system is described.
generating and visualizing a soccer knowledge base. this demo abstract describes the smartweb ontology-based annotation system (soba). a key feature of soba is that all information is extracted and stored with respect to the smartweb integrated ontology (swinto). in this way, other components of the systems, which use the same ontology, can access this information in a straightforward way. we will show how information extracted by soba is visualized within its original context, thus enhancing the browsing experience of the end user.
an efficient method for determining bilingual word classes. in statistical natural language processing we always face the problem of sparse data. one way to reduce this problem is to group words into equivalence classes which is a standard method in statistical language modeling. in this paper we describe a method to determine bilingual word classes suitable for statistical machine translation. we develop an optimization criterion based on a maximum-likelihood approach and describe a clustering algorithm. we will show that the usage of the bilingual word classes we get can improve statistical machine translation.
a robust and efficient three-layered dialogue component for a speech-to-speech translation system. we present the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system verbmobil. in contrast to conventional dialogue systems it mediates the dialogue while processing maximally 50% of the dialogue in depth. special requirements (robustness and efficiency) lead to a 3-layered hybrid architecture for the dialogue module, using statistics, an automaton and a planner. a dialogue memory is constructed incrementally.
danish field grammar in typed prolog. this paper describes a field grammar for danish and its implementations in a prolog version with predeclared types. in comparison to the ususal s -> np vp schema, this kind of grammar, where the first rule is s -> cnf ff nf cf enhances analysis effeciency because the fields specify constituents and syntactic function at the same time. the field grammar tradition is outlinedand an overview of the major rules of the prolog program, which implements the grammar, is given.
discontinuous constituents in trees, rules, and parsing. this paper discusses the consequences of allowing discontinuous constituents in syntactic representions and phrase-structure rules, and the resulting complications for a standard parser of phrase-structure grammar.it is argued, first, that discontinuous constituents seem inevitable in a phrase-structure grammar which is acceptable from a semantic point of view. it is shown that tree-like constituent structures with discontinuities can be given a precise definition which makes them just as acceptable for syntactic representation as ordinary trees. however, the formulation of phrase-structure rules that generate such structures entails quite intricate problems. the notions of linear precedence and adjacency are reexamined, and the concept of "n-place adjacency sequence" is introduced. finally, the resulting form of phrase-structure grammar, called "discontinuous phrase-structure grammar", is shown to be parsable by an algorithm for context-free parsing with relatively minor adaptations. the paper describes the adaptations in the chart parser which was implemented as part of the tendumdialogue system.
the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the human sentence processing mechanism. the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the human sentence processing mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. at issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. minimal attachment-frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. crain & steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution process is governed not by minimal attachment but instead by whether or not a referring expression provides sufficient information with which to identify a unique referent. such an approach relies on the provision of adequate contextual information, something which has been lacking in experiments which have been claimed to support minimal attachment. in this paper i shall consider a number of such experiments, and the different patterns of results which emerge once contextual information is provided. although the importance of contextual information will be stressed, i shall briefly consider reasons why parsing preferences arise in the absence of any explicit prior context. the conclusion is that computational models of syntactic ambiguity resolution which are based on evidence which has ignored contextual considerations are models of something other than <u>natural</u> language processing.
automatic semantic classification of verbs from their syntactic contexts: an implemented classifier for stativity. this paper discusses an implemented program that automatically classifies verbs into those that describe only states of the world, such as to know, and those that describe events, such as to look. it works by exploiting the constraint between the syntactic environments in which a verb can occur and its meaning. the only input is on-line text. this demonstrates an important new technique for the automatic generation of lexical databases.
a two-stage approach to retrieving answers for how-to questions. this paper addresses the problem of automatically retrieving answers for how-to questions, focusing on those that inquire about the procedure for achieving a specific goal. for such questions, typical information retrieval methods, based on key word matching, are better suited to detecting the content of the goal (e.g., 'installing a windows xp server') than the general nature of the desired information (i.e., procedural, a series of steps for achieving this goal). we suggest dividing the process of retrieving answers for such questions into two stages, with each stage focusing on modeling one aspect of a how-to question. we compare the two-stage approach with two alternative approaches: a baseline approach that only uses the content of the goal to retrieve relevant documents and another approach that explores the potential of automatic query expansion. the result of the experiment shows that the two-stage approach significantly outperforms the baseline but achieves similar result with the systems using automatic query expansion techniques. we analyze the reason and also present some future work.
limits of a sentence based procedural approach for aspect choice in german-russian mt. in this paper we discuss some problems arising in german-russian machine translation with regard to tense and aspect. since the formal category of aspect is missing in german the information required for generating russian aspect forms has to be extracted from different representation levels. a sentence based procedure for aspect choice in the mt system virtex is presented which takes lexical, morphological and semantic criteria into account. the limits of this approach are shown. to overcome these difficulties a human interaction component is proposed.
subgrammars, rule classes and control in the rosetta translation system. the paper discusses a recent extension of the linguistic framework of the rosetta system. the original framework is elegant and has proved its value in practice, but it also has a number of deficiencies, of which the most salient is the impossibility to assign an explicit structure to the grammars. this may cause problems, especially in a situation where large grammars have to be written by a group of people. the newly developed framework enables us to divide a grammar into subgrammars in a linguistically motivated way and to control explicitly the application of rules in a subgrammar. on the other hand it enables us to divide the set of grammar rules into rule classes in such a way that we get hold of the more difficult translation relations. the use of both these divisions naturally leads to a highly modular structure of the system, which helps in controlling its complexity. we will show that these divisions also give insight into a class of difficult translation problems in which there is a mismatch of categories.
structure-driven generation from separate semantic representations. a new approach to structure-driven generation is presented that is based on a separate semantics as input structure. for the first time, a gpsg-based formalism is complemented with a system of pattern-action rules that relate the parts of a semantics to appropriate syntactic rules. this way a front end generator can be adapted to some application system (such as a machine translation system) more easily than would be possible with many previous generators based on modern grammar formalisms.
unsupervised discovery of persian morphemes. this paper reports the present results of a research on unsupervised persian morpheme discovery. in this paper we present a method for discovering the morphemes of persian language through automatic analysis of corpora. we utilized a minimum description length (mdl) based algorithm with some improvements and applied it to persian corpus. our improvements include enhancing the cost function using some heuristics, preventing the split of high frequency chunks, exploiting penalty for first and last letters and distinguishing pre-parts and post-parts. our improved approach has raised the precision, recall and f-measure of discovery by respectively %32, %17 and %23.
a flexible architecture for reference resolution. this paper describes an architecture for performing anaphora resolution in a flexible way. systems which conform to these guidelines are well-encapsulated and portable, and can be used to compare anaphora resolution techniques for new language understanding applications. our implementation of the architecture in a pronoun resolution testing platform demonstrates the flexibility of the approach.
the treegram index-an efficient technique for retrieval in linguistic treebanks. multiway trees (mt, henceforth) are a common and well-understood data structure for describing hierarchical linguistic information. with the availability of large treebanks, retrieval techniques for highly structured data now become essential. in this contribution, we investigate the efficient retrieval of mt structures at the cost of a complex index---the treegram index.we illustrate our approach with the venona retrieval system, which handles the bht (biblia hebraica transcripta) treebank comprising 508,650 phrase structure trees with maximum degree eight and maximum height 17, containing altogether 3.3 million old-hebrew words.
meaningful conversation with a mobile robot. we describe an implementation integrating a spoken dialogue system with a mobile robot, which the user can direct to specific locations, ask for information about its status, and supply information about its environment. the robot uses an internal map for navigation, and communicates its current orientation and accessible locations to the dialogue system using a topological map as interface.
focusing on focus: a formalization. we present an operable definition of focus which is argued to be of a cognito-pragmatic nature and explore how it is determined in discourse in a formalized manner. for this purpose, a file card model of discourse model and knowledge store is introduced enabling the decomposition and formal representation of its determination process as a programmable algorithm (fda). interdisciplinary evidence from social and cognitive psychology is cited and the prospect of the integration of focus via fda as a discourse-level construct into speech synthesis systems, in particular, concept-to-speech systems, is also briefly discussed.
experiments in reusability of grammatical resources. substantial formal grammatical and lexical resources exist in various nlp systems and in the form of textbook specifications. in the present paper we report on experimental results obtained in manual, semi-automatic and automatic migration of entire computational or textbook descriptions (as opposed to a more informal reuse of ideas or the design of a single "polytheoretic" representation) from a variety of formalisms into the alep formalism. the choice of alep (a comparatively lean, typed feature structure formalism based on rewrite rules) was motivated by the assumption that the study would be most interesting if the target formalism is relatively mainstream without overt ideological commitments to particular grammatical theories. as regards the source formalisms we have attempted migrations of descriptions in hpsg (which uses fullytyped feature structures and has a strong 'non-derivational' flavour), ets (an untyped stratificational formalism which essentially uses rewrite rules for feature structures and has run-time non-monotonic devices) and lfg (which is an un-typed constraint and cf-psg based formalism with extensions such as existential, negative and global well-formedness constraints).
morphonology in the lexicon. in this paper we present a means of defining morphonological phenomena in an inheritance based lexicon. we make use of the theory behind the formal language molusc, in which morphological alternations were defined as mappings between sequences of tree-structured syllables. we discuss how the alternations can be defined in the inheritance-based lexical representation language datr, and how the phonological aspects can be built upon to bring it closer to an integrated lexicon with representations which can be used by both the morphology and phonology of a language.
how to detect grammatical errors in a text without parsing it. the constituent likelihood automatic word-tagging system (claws) was originally designed for the low-level grammatical analysis of the million-word lob corpus of english text samples. claws does not attempt a full parse, but uses a first-order markov model of language to assign word-class labels to words. claws can be modified to detect grammatical errors, essentially by flagging unlikely word-class transitions in the input text. this may seem to be an intuitively implausible and theoretically inadequate model of natural language syntax, but nevertheless it can successfully pinpoint most grammatical errors in a text. several modifications to claws have been explored. the resulting system cannot detect all errors in typed documents; but then neither do far more complex systems, which attempt a full parse, requiring much greater computation.
paradigmatic morphology. we present a notation for the declarative statement of morphological relationships and lexical rules, based on the traditional notion of word and paradigm (cf hockett 1954). the phenomenon of blocking arises from a generalized version of kiparsky's (1973) elsewhere condition, state in terms of ordering by subsumption over paradigms. orthographic constraints on morphemic alternation are described by means of string equations (siekmann 1975). we indicate some criticisms to be made of our approach from both linguistic and computational perspectives and relate our approach to others such as finite-state morphology (koskenniemi 1983), datr (gazdar and evans 1989) and object-oriented morphophonemics (de smedt 1984, daelemans 1988). finally, we discuss the questions of whether a system involving string equations allows a reduction to finite-state techniques.
pattern recognition applied to the acquisition of a grammatical classification system from unrestricted english text. within computational linguistics, the use of statistical pattern matching is generally restricted to speech processing. we have attempted to apply statistical techniques to discover a grammatical classification system from a corpus of 'raw' english text. a discovery procedure is simpler for a simpler language model; we assume a first-order markov model, which (surprisingly) is shown elsewhere to be sufficient for practical applications. the extraction of the parameters of a standard markov model is theoretically straightforward; however, the huge size of the standard model for a natural language renders it incomputable in reasonable time. we have explored various constrained models to reduce computation, which have yielded results of varying success.
an algorithm for generation in unification categorial grammar. we present an algorithm for the generation of sentences from the semantic representations of unification categorial grammar. we discuss a variant of shieber's semantic monotonicity requirement and its utility in our algorithm. we indicate how the algorithm may be extended to other grammars obeying the same requirement. appendices contain a full listing of the program and a trace of execution of the algorithm.
an algorithm to co-ordinate anaphora resolution and pps disambiguation process. both anaphora resolution and prepositional phrase (pp) attachment are the most frequent ambiguities in natural language processing. several methods have been proposed to deal with each phenomenon separately, however none of proposed systems has considered the way of dealing both phenomena we tackle this issue here, proposing an algorithm to co-ordinate the treatment of these two problems efficiently, i.e., the aim is also to exploit at each step all the results that each component can provide.
focus and accent in a dutch text-to-speech system. in this paper we discuss an algorithm for the assignment of pitch accent positions in text-to-speech conversion. the algorithm is closely modeled on current linguistic accounts of accent placement, and assumes a surface syntactic analysis of the input. it comprises a small number of heuristic rules for determining which phrases of a sentence are to be focussed upon; the exact location of a pitch accent within a focussed phrase is determined mainly on the basis of the syntactic relations holding between the elements of the phrase. a perceptual evaluation experiment showed that the algorithm proposed here leads to improved subjective speech quality as compared to a naive algorithm which accents all and only content words.
aggregation in the nl-generator of the visual and natural language specification tool. in this paper we show how to use the socalled aggregation technique to remove redundancies in the fact base of the visual and natural language specification tool (vinst). the current aggregation modules of the natural language generator of vinst is described and an improvement is proposed with one new aggregation rule and a bidirectional grammar.