Articles

We study the effectiveness of search engines for common usage, a new category of search engines that exploit n-gram frequencies on the web to measure the commonness of a formulation, and that allow their users to submit wildcard queries about formulation uncertainties often encountered in the process of writing. These …...

Short Messaging Service (SMS) has become a popular form of communication. While it is predominantly used for monolingual communication, it can be extremely useful for facilitating cross-lingual communication through statistical machine translation. In this work we present an application of statistical machine translation to SMS messages. We decouple the SMS …...

Previous work by Lin et al. (2011) demonstrated the effectiveness of using discourse relations for evaluating text coherence. However, their work was based on discourse relations annotated in accordance with the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) (Prasad et al., 2008), which encodes only very shallow discourse structures; therefore, they cannot capture …...

Most of the world’s languages are under-resourced, and most under-resourced languages lack a writing system and literary tradition. As these languages fall out of use, we lose important sources of data that contribute to our understanding of human language. The first, urgent step is to collect and orally translate a …...

This paper proposes an architecture for an open-domain conversational system and evaluates an implemented system. The proposed architecture is fully composed of modules based on natu- ral language processing techniques. Experimental results using human subjects show that our architecture achieves significantly better naturalness than a retrieval-based baseline and that its …...

Document enrichment is the task of retrieving additional knowledge from external resource over what is available through source document. This task is essential because of the phenomenon that text is generally replete with gaps and ellipses since authors assume a certain amount of background knowledge. The recovery of these gaps …...

This paper investigates the problem of automated text aesthetics prediction. The avail- ability of user generated content and ratings, e.g. Flickr, has induced research in aesthet- ics prediction for non-text domains, particularly for photographic images. This problem, however, has yet not been explored for the text domain. Due to the …...

This paper presents an investigation of lexical chaining (Morris and Hirst, 1991) for measuring discourse coherence quality in test-taker essays. We hypothesize that attributes of lexical chains, as well as interactions between lexical chains and explicit discourse elements, can be harnessed for representing coherence. Our experiments reveal that performance achieved …...

Authorship detection is a challenging task due to many design choices the user has to decide on. The performance highly depends on the right set of features, the amount of data, in-sample vs. out-of-sample settings, and profile- vs. instance-based approaches. So far, the variety of combinations renders off-the-shelf methods for …...

With the rapid development of web-based services, concerns about user privacy have height- ened. The privacy policies of online websites, which serve as a legal agreement between service providers and users, are not easy for people to understand and therefore offer an opportunity for natural language processing. In this paper, …...

Story highlights form a succinct single-document summary consisting of 3-4 highlight sentences that reflect the gist of a news article. Automatically producing news highlights is very challeng- ing. We propose a novel method to improve news highlights extraction by using microblogs. The hypothesis is that microblog posts, although noisy, are …...

In online social media, social action prediction and social tie discovery are two fundamental tasks for social network analysis. Traditionally, they were considered as separate tasks and solved inde- pendently. In this paper, we investigate the high correlation and mutual influence between social actions (i.e. user-behavior interactions) and social ties …...

We address the problem of discovering topical phrases or “aspects” from microblogging sites like Twitter, that correspond to key talking points or buzz around a particular topic or entity of interest. Inferring such topical aspects enables various applications such as trend detection and opinion mining for business analytics. However, mining …...

Accessing the web has been an efficient and effective means to acquire self-help knowledge when suf- fering from depressive problems. Many mental health websites have developed community-based ser- vices such as web forums and blogs for Internet users to share their depressive problems with other us- ers and health professionals. …...

A large number of online health communities exist today, helping millions of people with social support during difficult phases of their lives when they suffer from serious diseases. Interactions between members in these communities contain discussions on practical problems faced by peo- ple during their illness such as depression, side-effects …...

In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically learning feature embeddings to address the feature sparseness problem for dependency parsing. Inspired by word embeddings, feature embeddings are distributed representations of features that are learned from large amounts of auto-parsed data. Our target is to learn feature embeddings that can …...

This paper presents predicate-argument structure analysis (PASA) for dialogue systems in Japanese. Conventional PASA and semantic role labeling have been applied to newspaper arti- cles. Because pronominalization and ellipses frequently appear in dialogues, we base our PASA on a strategy that simultaneously resolves zero-anaphora and adapt it to dialogues. By …...

In this paper we present an in-depth study on automatic feature selection for beam-search depen- dency parsers. The search strategy is inherited from the one implemented in MaltOptimizer, but searches in a much larger set of feature templates that could lead to a higher number of combina- tions. Our models …...

This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework of soft cross-lingual syntax projection to transfer syntactic structures from source language to target language using monolingual treebanks and large-scale bilingual parallel text. Here, soft means that we only project reliable dependencies to compose high-quality target structures. The projected instances are then …...

Modelling linguistic phenomena requires highly structured and complex data representations. Document representation frameworks (DRFs) provide an interface to store and retrieve multiple annotation layers over a document. Researchers face a difficult choice: using a heavy-weight DRF or implement a custom DRF. The cost is substantial, either learning a new complex …...