Articles

This paper focuses on the task of insert- ing punctuation symbols into transcribed con- versational speech texts, without relying on prosodic cues. We investigate limitations as- sociated with previous methods, and propose a novel approach based on dynamic conditional random fields. Different from previous work, our proposed approach is designed …...

We describe a new scalable algorithm for semi-supervised training of conditional ran- dom fields (CRF) and its application to part- of-speech (POS) tagging. The algorithm uses a similarity graph to encourage similar n- grams to have similar POS tags. We demon- strate the efficacy of our approach on a do- …...

As a prerequisite to translation of poetry, we implement the ability to produce translations with meter and rhyme for phrase-based MT, examine whether the hypothesis space of such a system is flexible enough to accomodate such constraints, and investigate the impact of such constraints on translation quality. 1...

This paper studies the effects of training data on binary text classification and postulates that negative training data is not needed and may even be harmful for the task. Traditional binary classification involves building a clas- sifier using labeled positive and negative training examples. The classifier is then ap- plied …...

We propose a language-independent approach for improving statistical machine translation for morphologically rich languages using a hybrid morpheme-word representation where the basic unit of translation is the morpheme, but word boundaries are respected at all stages of the translation process. Our model extends the classic phrase-based model by means of …...

Targeted paraphrasing is a new approach to the problem of obtaining cost-effective, reasonable quality translation that makes use of simple and inexpensive human computations by monolin- gual speakers in combination with machine translation. The key insight behind the process is that it is possible to spot likely translation errors with …...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to Web search result clustering based on the au- tomatic discovery of word senses from raw text, a task referred to as Word Sense Induc- tion (WSI). We first acquire the senses (i.e., meanings) of a query by means of a graph- …...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to enhance hierarchical phrase-based machine translation systems with linguistically moti- vated syntactic features. Rather than directly using treebank categories as in previous stud- ies, we learn a set of linguistically-guided la- tent syntactic categories automatically from a source-side parsed, word-aligned parallel cor- …...

We present a machine learning approach for the task of ranking previously answered ques- tions in a question repository with respect to their relevance to a new, unanswered refer- ence question. The ranking model is trained on a collection of question groups manually annotated with a partial order relation reflect- …...

Recent times have seen a tremendous growth in mobile based data services that allow peo- ple to use Short Message Service (SMS) to access these data services. In a multilin- gual society it is essential that data services that were developed for a specific language be made accessible through other …...

In the 1980s, plot units were proposed as a conceptual knowledge structure for represent- ing and summarizing narrative stories. Our research explores whether current NLP tech- nology can be used to automatically produce plot unit representations for narrative text. We create a system called AESOP that exploits a variety of …...

This paper presents a two-stage approach to summarizing multiple contrastive viewpoints in opinionated text. In the first stage, we use an unsupervised probabilistic approach to model and extract multiple viewpoints in text. We experiment with a variety of lexical and syntactic features, yielding significant perfor- mance gains over bag-of-words feature …...

Discovering and summarizing opinions from online reviews is an important and challeng- ing task. A commonly-adopted framework generates structured review summaries with aspects and opinions. Recently topic mod- els have been used to identify meaningful re- view aspects, but existing topic models do not identify aspect-specific opinion words. In this …...

The PECO framework is a knowledge repre- sentation for formulating clinical questions. Queries are decomposed into four aspects, which are Patient-Problem (P), Exposure (E), Comparison (C) and Outcome (O). However, no test collection is available to evaluate such framework in information retrieval. In this work, we first present the construction …...

We present a unified view of two state-of-the- art non-projective dependency parsers, both approximate: the loopy belief propagation parser of Smith and Eisner (2008) and the re- laxed linear program of Martins et al. (2009). By representing the model assumptions with a factor graph, we shed light on the optimiza- …...

Syntactic consistency is the preference to reuse a syntactic construction shortly after its appearance in a discourse. We present an anal- ysis of the WSJ portion of the Penn Tree- bank, and show that syntactic consistency is pervasive across productions with various left- hand side nonterminals. Then, we implement a …...

This paper introduces dual decomposition as a framework for deriving inference algorithms for NLP problems. The approach relies on standard dynamic-programming algorithms as oracle solvers for sub-problems, together with a simple method for forcing agreement be- tween the different oracles. The approach provably solves a linear programming (LP) re- laxation …...

We study self-training with products of latent variable grammars in this paper. We show that increasing the quality of the automatically parsed data used for self-training gives higher accuracy self-trained grammars. Our genera- tive self-trained grammars reach F scores of 91.6 on the WSJ test set and surpass even discriminative …...

AbstractIn this paper we describe GikiCLEF, the first evaluation contest that, to our knowledge, was specifically designed to expose and investigate cultural and linguistic issues involved in structured multimedia collections and searching, and which was organized under the scope of CLEF 2009. GikiCLEF evaluated systems that answered hard questions for …...

AbstractThis article describes the preparation, recording and orthographic transcription of a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish (NCCSp). The corpus contains around 30 hours of recordings of 52 Madrid Spanish speakers engaged in conversations with friends. Casual speech was elicited during three different parts, which together provided …...