Articles

AbstractMethods for text simplification using the framework of statistical machine translation have been extensively studied in recent years. However, building the monolingual parallel corpus necessary for training the model requires costly human annotation. Monolingual parallel corpora for text simplification have therefore been built only for a limited number of languages, …...

AbstractDespite the growing number of Computational Construction Grammar implementations, the field is still lacking evaluation methods to compare grammar fragments across different platforms. Moreover, the hand-crafted nature of most grammars requires profiling tools to understand the complex interactions between constructions of different types. This paper presents a number of evaluation …...

AbstractNatural language generation (NLG) is the task of generating natural language from a meaning representation. Current rule-based approaches require domain-specific and manually constructed linguistic resources, while most machine-learning based approaches rely on aligned training data and/or phrase templates. The latter are needed to restrict the search space for the structured …...

AbstractWe propose a phrase-based approach for generating product review summaries. The main idea of our method is to leverage phrase properties to choose a subset of optimal phrases for generating the final summary. Specifically, we exploit two phrase properties, popularity and specificity. Popularity describes how popular the phrase is in …...

AbstractSemantic text processing faces the challenge of defining the relation between lexical expressions and the world to which they make reference within a period of time. It is unclear whether the current test sets used to evaluate disambiguation tasks are representative for the full complexity considering this time-anchored relation, resulting …...

AbstractReaders usually rely on abstracts to identify relevant medical information from scientific articles. Abstracts are also essential to advanced information retrieval methods. More than 50 thousand scientific publications in PubMed lack author-generated abstracts, and the relevancy judgements for these papers have to be based on their titles alone. In this …...

AbstractWe examine the task of aggregation in the context of text-to-text generation. We introduce a new aggregation task which frames the process as grouping input sentence fragments into clusters that are to be expressed as a single output sentence. We extract datasets for this task from a corpus using an …...

AbstractUnexpected events such as accidents, natural disasters and terrorist attacks represent an information situation where it is crucial to give users access to important and non-redundant information as early as possible. Incremental update summarization (IUS) aims at summarizing events which develop over time. In this paper, we propose a combination …...

AbstractRecently Wen et al. (2015) have proposed a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) approach to the generation of utterances from dialog acts, and shown that although their model requires less effort to develop than a rule-based system, it is able to improve certain aspects of the utterances, in particular their naturalness. …...

AbstractChinese poetry generation is a very challenging task in natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage poetry generating method which first plans the sub-topics of the poem according to the user’s writing intent, and then generates each line of the poem sequentially, using a modified recurrent …...

AbstractCoherent extracts are a novel type of summary combining the advantages of manually created abstractive summaries, which are fluent but difficult to evaluate, and low-quality automatically created extractive summaries, which lack coherence and structure. We use a corpus of heterogeneous documents to address the issue that information seekers usually face …...

AbstractWe present a novel approach to automated question generation that improves upon prior work both from a technology perspective and from an assessment perspective. Our system is aimed at engaging language learners by generating multiple-choice questions which utilize specific inference steps over multiple sentences, namely coreference resolution and paraphrase detection. …...

AbstractIn this paper, we present phoneme level Siamese convolutional networks for the task of pair-wise cognate identification. We represent a word as a two-dimensional matrix and employ a siamese convolutional network for learning deep representations. We present siamese architectures that jointly learn phoneme level feature representations and language relatedness from …...

AbstractThis paper investigates the effectiveness of 65 cohesion-based variables that are commonly used in the literature as predictive features to assess text readability. We evaluate the efficiency of these variables across narrative and informative texts intended for an audience of L2 French learners. In our experiments, we use a French …...

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate the annotation projection of semantic units in a practical setting. Previous approaches have focused on using parallel corpora for semantic transfer. We evaluate an alternative approach using loosely parallel corpora that does not require the corpora to be exact translations of each other. We developed …...

AbstractThis paper describes our construction of named-entity recognition (NER) systems in two Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish and Tajik, as a part of a pilot study of “Linguistic Rapid Response” to potential emergency humanitarian relief situations. In the absence of large annotated corpora, parallel corpora, treebanks, bilingual lexica, etc., we …...

AbstractIn this paper we discuss three key points related to error detection (ED) in learners’ English. We focus on content word ED as one of the most challenging tasks in this area, illustrating our claims on adjective–noun (AN) combinations. In particular, we (1) investigate the role of context in accurately …...

AbstractThis paper presents a new memory-bounded left-corner parsing model for unsupervised raw-text syntax induction, using unsupervised hierarchical hidden Markov models (UHHMM). We deploy this algorithm to shed light on the extent to which human language learners can discover hierarchical syntax through distributional statistics alone, by modeling two widely-accepted features of …...

AbstractOn microblogging services, people usually use hashtags to mark microblogs, which have a specific theme or content, making them easier for users to find. Hence, how to automatically recommend hashtags for microblogs has received much attention in recent years. Previous deep neural network-based hashtag recommendation approaches converted the task into …...

AbstractHistorical texts are challenging for natural language processing because they differ linguistically from modern texts and because of their lack of orthographical and grammatical standardisation. We use a character-level neural network to build a part-of-speech (POS) tagger that can process historical data directly without requiring a separate spelling normalisation stage. …...