Articles

In this article, we present a novel approach towards the detection and modeling of complex social phenomena in multi-party discourse, including leadership, influence, pursuit of power and group cohesion. We have developed a two-tier approach that relies on observable and computable linguistic features of conversational text to make predictions about …...

There is often more than one way to represent syntactic structures, even within a given formalism. Selecting one representation over another may affect parsing performance. Therefore, selecting between alternative syntactic representations (henceforth, syntactic selection) is an essential step in designing an annotation scheme. We present a methodology for syntactic selection …...

Psychological disorders are frequently under-diagnosed and consequently have an irreversible impact on individuals and society. The stigma associated with such disorders makes face-to-face discussions with family members and clinicians difficult for many individuals. In contrast, people openly relate experiences on Internet forums. This paper describes a novel system that analyses …...

Underspecified queries are common in vertical search engines, leading to large result sets that are difficult for users to navigate. In this paper, we show that we can automatically guide users to their target results by engaging them in a dialog consisting of well-formed binary questions mined from unstructured data. …...

We propose an approach to correcting spelling errors and assigning part-of-speech (POS) tags simultaneously for sentences written by learners of English as a second language (ESL). In ESL writing, there are several types of errors such as preposition, determiner, verb, noun, and spelling errors. Spelling errors often interfere with POS …...

We report a wide range of comparative experiments establishing for the first time contrastive foundations for a completely unsupervised approach to bilingual grammar induction that is cognitively oriented toward early category formation and phrasal chunking in the bootstrap- ping process up the expressiveness hierarchy from finite-state to linear to inversion …...

We present algorithms for identifying Hindi Noun Groups and Verb Groups in a given text by using morphotactical constraints and sequencing that apply to the constituents of these groups. We provide a detailed repertoire of the grammatical categories and their markers and an account of their arrangement. The main motivation …...

Bilingual lexicon construction (BLC) from comparable corpora is based on the idea that bilingual similar words tend to occur in similar contexts, usually of words. This, however, introduces noise and leads to low performance. This paper proposes a bilingual dependency mapping model for BLC which encodes a word’s context as …...

This paper describes the development of a web-service tool for the automatic extraction of Multi-word expressions lexicons, which has been integrated in a distributed platform for the automatic creation of linguistic resources. The main purpose of the work described is thus to provide a (computationally “light”) tool that produces a …...

Name ambiguity is a major problem in information retrieval: The name "Metropolis" may refer to a movie, a physicist, or Superman’s hometown. Recent work resolves ambiguity in natural language text by linking name mentions against the corresponding Wikipedia concept (Wikification). Standard methods comparing a single mention with the corresponding Wikipedia …...

In most summarization approaches, sentence ranking plays a vital role. Most previous work ex- plored different features and combined them into unified ranking methods. However, it would be imprecise to rank sentences from a single point of view because contributions from the fea- tures are onefold in these methods. In …...

We address the problem of unsupervised tagging of phrase structure trees with phrase categories (parse tree nonterminals). Motivated by the inability of a range of direct clustering approaches to improve over the current leading algorithm, we propose a mixture of experts approach. In particular, we tackle the difficult challenge of …...

This paper presents an identification framework for extracting Tibetan base noun phrase (NP). The framework includes two phases. In the first phase, Chinese base NPs are extracted from all Chinese sentences in the sentence aligned Chinese-Tibetan corpus using Stanford Chinese parser. In the second phase, the Tibetan translations of those …...

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This paper describes a categorial grammar which, like other categorial grammars, imposes a small, uniform, and easily learnable …...

We study the problem of classifying the temporal relationship between events and time expres- sions in text. In contrast to previous methods that require extensive feature engineering, our approach is simple, relying only on a measure of parse tree similarity. Our method generates such tree similarity values using dependency parses …...

We show that by making use of information common to document sets belonging to a common category, we can improve the quality of automatically extracted content in multi-document summaries. This simple property is widely applicable in multi-document summarization tasks, and can be encapsulated by the concept of category-specific importance (CSI). …...

Automatically extracting terminology and index terms from scientific literature is useful for a variety of digital library, indexing and search applications. This task is non-trivial, compli- cated by domain-specific terminology and a steady...

We describe two methods for syntactic source reordering developed for English-German SMT. Both methods learn from bilingual data accompanied by automatic word alignments to reorder the source such that it resembles that of the target. While the first method is an extension of a parse-based algorithm and accommodates contextual triggers …...

We present a novel algorithm for surface realisation with lexicalist grammars. In this algorithm, the structure of the input is used both top-down to constrain the selection of applicable rules and bottom-up to filter the initial search space associated with local input trees. In addition, parallelism is used to recursively …...

Many NLP tasks interact with syntax. The presence of a named entity span, for example, is often a clear indicator of a noun phrase in the parse tree, while a span in the syntax can help indicate the lack of a named entity in the spans that cross it. For …...