waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
a common framework for analysis and generation. it seems highly desirable to use a single representation of linguistic knowledge for both analysis and generation. we argue that the only part of the average nl system's knowledge that we can have any faith in is its vocabulary and, to a lesser extent, its syntactic rules, and we investigate the consequences of this for generation.
a flexible pragmatics-driven language generator for animated agents. this paper describes the neca mnlg; a fully implemented multimodal natural language generation module. the mnlg is deployed as part of the neca system which generates dialogues between animated agents. the generation module supports the seamless integration of full grammar rules, templates and canned text. the generator takes input which allows for the specification of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on the output.
a metaplan model for problem-solving discourse. the structure of problem-solving discourse in the expert advising setting can be modeled by adding a layer of metaplans to a plan-based model of the task domain. classes of metaplans are introduced to model both the agent's gradual refinement and instatiation of a domain plan for a task and the space of possible queries about preconditions or fillers for open variable slots that can be motivated by the exploration of particular classes of domain plans. this metaplan structure can be used to track an agent's problem-solving progress and to predict at each point likely follow-on queries based on related domain plans. the model is implemented in the pragma system where it is used to suggest corrections for ill-formed input.
exploring the sense distributions of homographs. this paper quantitatively investigates in how far local context is useful to disam-biguate the senses of an ambiguous word. this is done by comparing the co-occurrence frequencies of particular context words. first, one context word representing a certain sense is chosen, and then the co-occurrence frequencies with two other context words, one of the same and one of another sense, are compared. as expected, it turns out that context words belonging to the same sense have considerably higher co-occurrence frequencies than words belonging to different senses. in our study, the sense inventory is taken from the university of south florida homograph norms, and the co-occurrence counts are based on the british national corpus.
a logical treatment of semi-free word order and bounded discontinuous constituency. in this paper we present a logical treatment of semifree word order and bounded discontinuous constituency. we extend standard feature value logics to treat word order in a single formalism with a rigorous semantics without phrase structure rules. the elimination of phrase structure rules allows a natural generalisation of the approach to nonconfigurational word order and bounded discontinuous continuency via sequence union. sequence union formalises the notions of clause union and scrambling by providing a mechanism for describing word order domains larger than the local tree. the formalism incorporates the distinction between bounded and unbounded forms of discontinuous constituency. grammars are organised as algebraic theories. this means that linguistic generalisations are stated as axioms about the structure of signs. this permits a natural interpretation of implicational universals in terms of theories, subtheories and implicational axioms. the accompanying linguistic analysis is eclectic, borrowing insights from many current linguistic theories.
dealing with the notion "obligatory" in syntactic analysis. in the paper the use of the notion "obligatory complement" in syntactic analysis is discussed. in many theories which serve as bases for syntactic analysis procedures there are devices to express the difference between obligatory and optional complements on the rule level, i.e. via the lexicon the wordforms are connected with these rules where the fitting properties are expressed. i'll show that such an approach leads to some problems, ifwe want to handle real texts in syntactic analysis.in the first part i'll outline the theoretical framework we work with. then i'll discuss for which purpose the use of the notion obligatory has some advantages and in the last part i'll show shortly how we intend to use this notion- in lexical entries (with respect to morphological analysis) and- in the syntactic analysis process.
prosodic inheritance and morphological generalisations. prosodic inheritance (pi) morphology provides uniform treatment of both concatenative and non-concatenative morphological and phonological generalisations using default inheritance. models of an extensive range of german umlaut and arabic intercalation facts, implemented in datr, show that the pl approach also covers 'hard cases' more homogeneously and more extensively than previous computational treatments.
coping with derivation in a morphological component. in this paper a morphological component with a limited capability to automatically interpret (and generate) derived words is presented. the system combines an extended two-level morphology [trost, 1991a; trost, 1991b] with a feature-based word grammar building on a hierarchical lexicon. polymorphemic stems not explicitly stored in the lexicon are given a compositional interpretation. that way the system allows to minimize redundancy in the lexicon because derived words that are transparent need note to be stored explicitly. also, words formed ad-hoc can be recognized correctly. the system is implemented in commonlisp and has been tested on examples from german derivation.
robust and flexible mixed-initiative dialogue for telephone services. in this work, we present an experimental analysis of a dialogue system for the automatization of simple telephone services. starting from the evaluation of a preliminar version of the system we conclude the necessity to desing a robust and flexible system suitable to have to have different dialogue control strategies depending on the characteristics of the user and the performance of the speech recognition module. experimental results following the paradise framework show an important improvement both in terms of task success and dialogue cost for the proposed system.
dialogue processing in a call-system. in a call-environment (computer-assisted language learning) programs should ideally allow the learner to train his/her communicative competence, which is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching nowadays. this can be reached by allowing learners to use and train their knowledge of a foreign language in realistic dialogue-style exercises. all levels of linguistic and communicational analysis have to be considered to realize such a system. in this paper i will concentrate on the dialogue component of the concept, which relies on two main knowledge sources. the discourse grammar structures the dialogue elements (or dialogue acts) as possible parts of a dialogue and the dialogue knowledge base provides the possible contents of dialogues. additionally, a framing discourse stucture has to be built to provide the specific dialogue-exercise. a fsa (finite state automaton) based on the discourse grammar determines the possible moves which the dialogue might take. on the one hand this concept is restricted enough to allow for (relatively) easy maintenance as well as expansion and on the other hand it is advanced enough to allow for simulated complex dialogues.
on reasoning with ambiguities. the paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. truth conditions are provided for these representations and different consequence relations are judged on the basis of intuitive correctness. finally inference patterns are presented that operate directly on these underspecified structures, i.e. do not rely on any translation into the set of their disambiguations.
on learning more appropriate selectional restrictions. we present some variations affecting the association measure and thresholding on a technique for learning selectional restrictions from on-line corpora. it uses a wide-coverage noun taxonomy and a statistical measure to generalize the appropriate semantic classes. evaluation measures for the selectional restrictions learning task are discussed. finally, an experimental evaluation of these variations is reported.
developing an approach for why-question answering. in the current project, we aim at developing an approach for automatically answering why-questions. we created a data collection for research, development and evaluation of a method for automatically answering why-questions (why-qa) the resulting collection comprises 395 why-questions. for each question, the source document and one or two user-formulated answers are available in the data set. the resulting data set is of importance for our research and it will contribute to and stimulate other research in the field of why-qa. we developed a question analysis method for why-questions, based on syntactic categorization and answer type determination. the quality of the output of this module is promising for future development of our method for why-qa.
on the generative power of two-level morphological rules. koskenniemi's model of two-level morphology has been very influential in recent years, but definitions of the formalism have generally been phrased in terms of a compilation (sometimes left unspecified) into a form of finite-state transducers, or else have consisted of an informal outline of the intended interpretation of the rule-formalism itself. analyses of the properties of the formalism have generally focussed on the transducer mechanism. it is, however, possible to give a fully formal definition of the original rule notation directly, in a way which reflects koskenniemi's original informal characterisation and which does not depend directly on the notion of a transducer (although it must retain the essential nature of parts of the notation as being regular expressions). this re-formulation allows a proof that the ability of this formalism to characterise mappings between strings is more limited than that of arbitrary transducers.
lexical transfer based on bilingual signs: towards interaction during transfer. the lexical transfer phase is the most crucial step in mt because most of difficult problems are caused by lexical differences between two languages. in order to treat lexical issues systematically in transfer-based mt systems, we introduce the concept of bilingual-sings which are defined by pairs of equivalent monolingual signs. the bilingual signs not only relate the local linguistic structures of two languages but also play a central role in connecting the linguistic processes of translation with knowledge based inferences. we also show that they can be effectively used to formulate appropriate questions for disambiguating "transfer ambiguities", which is crucial in interactive mt systems.
an assessment of semantic information automatically extracted from machine readable dictionaries. in this paper we provide a quantitative evaluation of information automatically extracted from machine readable dictionaries. our results show that for any one dictionary, 55--70% of the extracted information is garbled in some way. however, we show that these results can be dramatically reduced to about 6% by combining the information extracted from five dictionaries. it therefore appears that even if individual dictionaries are an unreliable source of semantic information, multiple dictionaries can play an important role in building large lexical-semantic databases.
categorial grammar, modalities and algebraic semantics. this paper contributes to the theory of substructural logics that are of interest to categorial grammarians. combining semantic ideas of hepple [1990] and morrill [1990], proof-theoretic ideas of venema [1993b; 1993a] and the theory of equational specifications, a class of resource-preserving logics is defined, for which decidability and completeness theorems are established.
helpful answers to modal and hypothetical questions. this paper describes a computational pragmatic model which is geared towards providing helpful answers to modal and hypothetical questions. the work brings together elements from formal semantic theories on modality and question answering, defines a wider, pragmatically flavoured, notion of answerhood based on non-monotonic inference and develops a notion of context, within which aspects of more cognitively oriented theories, such as relevance theory, can be accommodated. the model has been implemented. the research was funded by esrc grant number r000231279.
an algorithm for generating non-redundant quantifier scopings. this paper describes an algorithm for generating quantifier scopings. the algorithm is designed to generate only logically non-redundant scopings and to partially order the scopings with a given default scoping first. removing logical redundancy is not only interesting per se, but also drastically reduces the processing time. the input and output formats are described through a few access and construction functions. thus, the algorithm is interesting for a modular linguistic theory, which is flexible with respect to syntactic and semantic framework.
representing a system of lexical types using default unification. default inheritance is a useful tool for encoding linguistic generalisations that have exceptions. in this paper we show how the use of an order independent typed default unification operation can provide non-redundant highly structured and concise representation to specify a network of lexical types, that encodes linguistic information about verbal subcategorisation. the system of lexical types is based on the one proposed by pollard and sag (1987), but uses the more expressive typed default feature structures, is more succinct, and able to express linguistic sub-regularities more elegantly.
a two-way approach to structural transfer in mt. the metal machine translation project incorporates two methods of structural transfer - direct transfer and transfer by grammar. in this paper i discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches in general and with respect to the metal project, and argue that, for many applications, a combination of the two is preferable to either alone.
computational aspects of m-grammars. in this paper m-grammars that are used in the rosetta translation system will be looked at as the specification of attribute grammars. we will show that the attribute evaluation order is such that instead of the special-purpose parsing and generation algorithms introduced for m-grammars in appelo et al.(1987), also earley-like context-free parsing and ordinary generation strategies can be used. furthermore, it is illustrated that the attribute grammar approach gives an insight into the weak generative capacity of m-grammars and into the computational complexity of the parsing and generation process. finally, the attribute grammar approach will be used to reformulate the concept of isomorphic grammars.
a syntax-based part-of-speech analyser. there are two main methodologies for constructing the knowledge base of a natural language analyser: the linguistic and the data-driven. recent state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers are based on the data-driven approach. because of the known feasibility of the linguistic rule-based approach at related levels of description, the success of the data-driven approach in part-of-speech analysis may appear surprising. in this paper, a case is made for the syntactic nature of part-of-speech tagging. a new tagger of english that uses only linguistic distributional rules is outlined and empirically evaluated. tested against a benchmark corpus of 38,000 words of previously unseen text, this syntax-based system reaches an accuracy of above 99%. compared to the 95--97% accuracy of its best competitors, this result suggests the feasibility of the linguistic approach also in part-of-speech analysis.
using noisy bilingual data for statistical machine translation. smt systems rely on sufficient amount of parallel corpora to train the translation model. this paper investigates possibilities to use word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations extracted not only from clean parallel corpora but also from noisy comparable corpora. translation results for a chinese to english translation task are given.
a language for the statement of binary relations over feature structures. unification is often the appropriate method for expressing relations between representations in the form of feature structures; however, there are circumstances in which a different approach is desirable. a declarative formalism is presented which permits direct mappings of one feature structure into another, and illustrative examples are given of its application to areas of current interest.
an experiment on the upper bound of interjudge agreement: the case of tagging. we investigate the controversial issue about the upper bound of interjudge agreement in the use of a low-level grammatical representation. pessimistic views suggest that several percent of words in running text are undecidable in terms of part-of-speech categories. our experiments with 55kw data give reason for optimism: linguists with only 30 hours' training apply the engcg-2 morphological tags with almost 100% interjudge agreement.
a generative grammar approach for the morphologic and morphosyntactic analysis of italian. a morphologic and morphosyntactic analyzer for the italian language has been implemented in vm/prolog |3| at the ibm rome scientific center as part of a project on text understanding.aim of this project is the development of a prototype which analyzes short narrative texts (press agency news) and gives a formal representation of their "meaning" as a set of first order logic expressions. question answering features are also provided.the morphologic analyzer processes every word by means of a context free grammar, in order to obtain its morphologic and syntactic characteristics.it also performs a morphosyntactic analysis to recognize fixed and variable sequences of words such as idioms, date expressions, compound tenses of verbs and comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.the lexicon is stored in a relational data base under the control of sql/ds [2], while the endings of the grammar are stored in the workspace as prolog facts.a friendly interface written in gddm [1] allows the user to introduce on line the missing lemmata, in order to directly update the dictionary.
jpsg parser on constraint logic programming. this paper presents a constraint logic programming language cu-prolog and introduces a simple japanese parser based on japanese phrase structure grammar (jpsg) as a suitable application of cu-prolog.cu-prolog adopts constraint unification instead of the normal prolog unification. in cu-prolog, constraints in terms of user defined predicates can be directly added to the program clauses. such a clause is called constraint added horn clause (cahc). unlike conventional clp systems, cu-prolog deals with constraints about symbolic or combinatorial objects. for natural language processing, such constraints are more important than those on numerical or boolean objects. in comparison with normal prolog, cu-prolog has more descriptive power, and is more declarative. it enables a natural implementation of jpsg and other unification based grammar formalisms.
the semantics of motion. in this paper we present a semantic study of motion complexes (ie. of a motion verb followed by a spatial preposition). we focus on the spatial and the temporal intrinsic semantic properties of the motion verbs, on the one hand, and of the spatial prepositions, on the other hand. then we address the problem of combining these basic semantics in order to formally and automatically derive the spatiotemporal semantics of a motion complex from the spatiotemporal properties of its components.
ambiguity resolution in a reductionistic parser. we are concerned with dependency-oriented morphosyntactic parsing of running text. while a parsing grammar should avoid introducing structurally unresolvable distinctions in order to optimise on the accuracy of the parser, it also is beneficial for the grammarian to have as expressive a structural representation available as possible. in a reductionistic parsing system this policy may result in considerable ambiguity in the input; however, even massive ambiguity can be tackled efficiently with an accurate parsing description and effective parsing technology.
a cross language document retrieval system based on semantic annotation. the paper describes a cross-lingual document retrieval system in the medical domain that employs a controlled vocabulary (umls1) in constructing an xml-based intermediary representation into which queries as well as documents are mapped. the system assists in the retrieval of english and german medical scientific abstracts relevant to a german query document (electronic patient record). the modularity of the system allows for deployment in other domains, given appropriate linguistic and semantic resources.
specifying a shallow grammatical representation for parsing purposes. is it possible to specify a grammatical representation (descriptors and their application guidelines) to such a degree that it can be consistently applied by different grammarians e.g. for producing a benchmark corpus for parser evaluation? arguments for and against have been given, but very little empirical evidence. in this article we report on a double-blind experiment with a surface-oriented morphosyntactic grammatical representation used in a large-scale english parser. we argue that a consistently applicable representation for morphology and also shallow syntax can be specified. a grammatical representation with a near-100% coverage of running text can be specified with a reasonable effort, especially if the representation is based on structural distinctions (i.e. it is structurally resolvable).
structural non-correspondence in translation. kaplan et al (1989) present an approach to machine translation based on co-description. in this paper we show that the notation is not as natural and expressive as it appears. we first show that the most natural analysis proposed in kaplan et al (1989) cannot in fact cover the range of data for the important translational phenomenon in question. this contribution extends the work reported on in sadler et al (1989) and sadler et al (1990). we then go on to discuss alternatives which depart from or extend the formalism proposed in kaplan et al (1989) in various respects, pointing out some directions for further research. the strategies discussed have been implemented.
experiments on the choice of features for learning verb classes. the choice of verb features is crucial for the learning of verb classes. this paper presents clustering experiments on 168 german verbs, which explore the relevance of features on three levels of verb description, purely syntactic frame types, prepositional phrase information and selectional preferences. in contrast to previous approaches concentrating on the sparse data problem, we present evidence for a linguistically defined limit on the usefulness of features which is driven by the idiosyncratic properties of the verbs and the specific attributes of the desired verb classification.
robust generic and query-based summarization. we present a robust summarisation system developed within the gate architecture that makes use of robust components for semantic tagging and coreference resolution provided by gate. our system combines gate components with well established statistical techniques developed for the purpose of text summarisation research. the system supports "generic" and query-based summarisation addressing the need for user adaptation.