Articles

There have been considerable attempts to incorporate semantic knowledge into coreference resolution systems: different knowledge sources such as WordNet and Wikipedia have been used to boost the per- formance. In this paper, we propose new ways to extract WordNet feature. This feature, along with other features such as named entity …...

This paper explores Chinese semantic role la- beling (SRL) for nominal predicates. Besides those widely used features in verbal SRL, various nominal SRL-specific features are first included. Then, we improve the perform- ance of nominal SRL by integrating useful features derived from a state-of-the-art verbal SRL system. Finally, we address …...

Jointly parsing two languages has been shown to improve accuracies on either or both sides. However, its search space is much bigger than the monolingual case, forcing existing approaches to employ complicated modeling and crude approxi- mations. Here we propose a much simpler alternative, bilingually-constrained mono- lingual parsing, where a …...

We present a system that finds short def- initions of terms on Web pages. It em- ploys a Maximum Entropy classifier, but it is trained on automatically generated ex- amples; hence, it is in effect unsupervised. We use ROUGE-W to generate training ex- amples from encyclopedias and Web snip- pets, …...

We examine the problem of overcoming noisy word-level alignments when learn- ing tree-to-string translation rules. Our approach introduces new rules, and re- estimates rule probabilities using EM. The major obstacles to this approach are the very reasons that word-alignments are used for rule extraction: the huge space of possible rules, …...

System combination has emerged as a powerful method for machine translation (MT). This paper pursues a joint optimization strategy for combining outputs from multiple MT systems, where word alignment, ordering, and lexical selection decisions are made jointly according to a set of feature functions combined in a single log-linear model. …...

In this paper, we provide descriptive and empirical approaches to effectively ex- tracting underlying dependencies among parsing errors. In the descriptive ap- proach, we define some combinations of error patterns and extract them from given errors. In the empirical approach, on the other hand, we re-parse a sentence with a …...

Recent syntactic extensions of statisti- cal translation models work with a syn- chronous context-free or tree-substitution grammar extracted from an automatically parsed parallel corpus. The decoders ac- companying these extensions typically ex- ceed quadratic time complexity. This paper extends the Direct Transla- tion Model 2 (DTM2) with syntax while maintaining …...

Textual entailment recognition plays a fundamental role in tasks that require in- depth natural language understanding. In order to use entailment recognition tech- nologies for real-world applications, a large-scale entailment knowledge base is indispensable. This paper proposes a con- ditional probability based directional sim- ilarity measure to acquire verb entailment …...

Coreference systems are driven by syntactic, se- mantic, and discourse constraints. We present a simple approach which completely modularizes these three aspects. In contrast to much current work, which focuses on learning and on the dis- course component, our system is deterministic and is driven entirely by syntactic and semantic …...

We use the technique of SVM anchoring to demonstrate that lexical features extracted from a training corpus are not necessary to obtain state of the art results on tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Chunk- ing. While standard models require as many as 100K distinct features, we derive models …...

We introduce an extension to CCG that al- lows form and function to be represented simultaneously, reducing the proliferation of modifier categories seen in standard CCG analyses. We can then remove the non-combinatory rules CCGbank uses to address this prob- lem, producing a grammar that is fully lex- icalised and …...

We describe a process for automatically detecting decision-making sub-dialogues in multi-party, human-human meetings in real-time. Our basic approach to decision detection involves distinguishing between different utterance types based on the roles that they play in the formulation of a de- cision. In this paper, we describe how this approach can …...

This paper investigates the effect of di- rection in phrase-based statistial machine translation decoding. We compare a typ- ical phrase-based machine translation de- coder using a left-to-right decoding strat- egy to a right-to-left decoder. We also investigate the effectiveness of a bidirec- tional decoding strategy that integrates both mono-directional approaches, …...

We present a scalable joint language model designed to utilize fine-grain syn- tactic tags. We discuss challenges such a design faces and describe our solutions that scale well to large tagsets and cor- pora. We advocate the use of relatively simple tags that do not require deep lin- guistic knowledge …...

Current system combination methods usu- ally use confusion networks to find consensus translations among different systems. Requir- ing one-to-one mappings between the words in candidate translations, confusion networks have difficulty in handling more general situa- tions in which several words are connected to another several words. Instead, we propose a …...

Recently system combination has been shown to be an effective way to improve translation quality over single machine translation sys- tems. In this paper, we present a simple and ef- fective method to systematically derive an en- semble of SMT systems from one baseline li- near SMT model for use …...

There have been increasing needs for task specific rankings in web search such as rankings for specific query segments like long queries, time-sensitive queries, navi- gational queries, etc; or rankings for spe- cific domains/contents like answers, blogs, news, etc. In the spirit of ”divide-and- conquer”, task specific ranking may have …...

The design of practical language applica- tions by means of statistical approaches requires annotated data, which is one of the most critical constraint. This is par- ticularly true for Spoken Dialog Systems since considerably domain-specific con- ceptual annotation is needed to obtain ac- curate Language Understanding models. Since data annotation …...

In this paper we investigate temporal pat- terns of web search queries. We carry out several evaluations to analyze the proper- ties of temporal profiles of queries, reveal- ing promising semantic and pragmatic re- lationships between words. We focus on two applications: query suggestion and query categorization. The former shows …...