Articles

Computer Assisted Translation tools re- main the preferred solution of human translators when publication quality is of concern. In this paper, we present our ongoing efforts conducted within TS3, a project which aims at improv- ing the commercial bilingual concordancer TransSearch. The core technology of this Web-based service mainly relies …...

Human sentence processing involves integrat- ing probabilistic knowledge from a variety of sources in order to incrementally determine the hierarchical structure for the serial input stream. While a large number of sentence pro- cessing effects have been explained in terms of comprehenders’ rational use of probabilistic information, effects of local …...

This paper introduces three new syntactic models for representing speech with repairs. These models are developed to test the intu- ition that the erroneous parts of speech repairs (reparanda) are not generated or recognized as such while occurring, but only after they have been corrected. Thus, they are designed to …...

This paper introduces the Finite-State Turn- Taking Machine (FSTTM), a new model to control the turn-taking behavior of conversa- tional agents. Based on a non-deterministic finite-state machine, the FSTTM uses a cost matrix and decision theoretic principles to se- lect a turn-taking action at any time. We show how the …...

This paper explores several unsupervised ap- proaches to automatic keyword extraction using meeting transcripts. In the TFIDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency) weighting framework, we incorporated part- of-speech (POS) information, word clustering, and sentence salience score. We also evalu- ated a graph-based approach that measures the importance of a word …...

The (batch) EM algorithm plays an important role in unsupervised induction, but it some- times suffers from slow convergence. In this paper, we show that online variants (1) provide significant speedups and (2) can even find bet- ter solutions than those found by batch EM. We support these findings on …...

We describe a statistical model over linguis- tic areas and phylogeny. Our model recov- ers known areas and identifies a plausible hi- erarchy of areal features. The use of areas improves genetic reconstruction of languages both qualitatively and quantitatively according to a variety of metrics. We model linguistic areas by …...

The number of research publications in var- ious disciplines is growing exponentially. Researchers and scientists are increasingly finding themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of tech- nical material. In this paper we present the first steps in producing an automatically gen- erated, readily consumable, technical …...

Recent work has shown that explicitly iden- tifying and filtering non-anaphoric mentions prior to coreference resolution can improve the performance of a coreference system. We present a novel approach to this task of anaphoricity determination based on graph cuts, and demonstrate its superiority to com- peting approaches by comparing their …...

Both coarse-to-fine and A∗ parsing use simple grammars to guide search in complex ones. We compare the two approaches in a com- mon, agenda-based framework, demonstrat- ing the tradeoffs and relative strengths of each method. Overall, coarse-to-fine is much faster for moderate levels of search errors, but be- low a …...

This paper presents a first-order logic learn- ing approach to determine rhetorical relations between discourse segments. Beyond lin- guistic cues and lexical information, our ap- proach exploits compositional semantics and segment discourse structure data. We report a statistically significant improvement in clas- sifying relations over attribute-value learn- ing paradigms such …...

Linear Context-free Rewriting Systems (LCFRS) is an expressive grammar formalism with applications in syntax-based machine translation. The parsing complexity of an LCFRS is exponential in both the rank of a production, defined as the number of nonterminals on its right-hand side, and a measure for the discontinuity of a phrase, …...

Tree substitution grammars (TSGs) are a com- pelling alternative to context-free grammars for modelling syntax. However, many popu- lar techniques for estimating weighted TSGs (under the moniker of Data Oriented Parsing) suffer from the problems of inconsistency and over-fitting. We present a theoretically princi- pled model which solves these problems …...

Multi-task learning is the problem of maxi- mizing the performance of a system across a number of related tasks. When applied to mul- tiple domains for the same task, it is similar to domain adaptation, but symmetric, rather than limited to improving performance on a target domain. We present a …...

The idea that some words carry more semantic content than others, has led to the notion of term specificity, or informativeness. Computa- tional estimation of this quantity is important for various applications such as information re- trieval. We propose a new method of comput- ing term specificity, based on modeling …...

This paper reports the effect of corpus size on case frame acquisition for discourse analysis in Japanese. For this study, we collected a Japanese corpus consisting of up to 100 bil- lion words, and constructed case frames from corpora of six different sizes. Then, we ap- plied these case frames …...

In this paper, we explore a streaming al- gorithm paradigm to handle large amounts of data for NLP problems. We present an efficient low-memory method for construct- ing high-order approximate n-gram frequency counts. The method is based on a determinis- tic streaming algorithm which efficiently com- putes approximate frequency counts …...

Work on sentiment analysis often focuses on the words and phrases that people use in overtly opinionated text. In this paper, we in- troduce a new approach to the problem that focuses not on lexical indicators, but on the syntactic “packaging” of ideas, which is well suited to investigating the …...

In this paper we model discussions in online political blogs. To do this, we extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al., 2003), in var- ious ways to capture different characteristics of the data. Our models jointly describe the generation of the primary documents (posts) as well as the authorship and, …...

With the in-depth study of sentiment analysis research, finer-grained opinion mining, which aims to detect opinions on different review fea- tures as opposed to the whole review level, has been receiving more and more attention in the sentiment analysis research community re- cently. Most of existing approaches rely mainly on …...