Articles

We describe refinements to hierarchical translation search procedures intended to reduce both search errors and memory us- age through modifications to hypothesis expansion in cube pruning and reductions in the size of the rule sets used in transla- tion. Rules are put into syntactic classes based on the number of …...

We extend the factored translation model (Koehn and Hoang, 2007) to allow trans- lations of longer phrases composed of fac- tors such as POS and morphological tags to act as templates for the selection and re- ordering of surface phrase translation. We also reintroduce the use of alignment in- formation …...

Named entity recognition for morpholog- ically rich, case-insensitive languages, in- cluding the majority of semitic languages, Iranian languages, and Indian languages, is inherently more difficult than its English counterpart. Worse still, progress on ma- chine learning approaches to named entity recognition for many of these languages is currently hampered by …...

This paper examines unsupervised ap- proaches to part-of-speech (POS) tagging for morphologically-rich, resource-scarce languages, with an emphasis on Goldwa- ter and Griffiths’s (2007) fully-Bayesian approach originally developed for En- glish POS tagging. We argue that ex- isting unsupervised POS taggers unreal- istically assume as input a perfect POS lexicon, and …...

This paper presents the end-to-end evalu- ation of an automatic simultaneous trans- lation system, built with state-of-the-art components. It shows whether, and for which situations, such a system might be advantageous when compared to a human interpreter. Using speeches in English translated into Spanish, we present the evaluation procedure and …...

As empirically demonstrated by the last SensEval exercises, assigning the appro- priate meaning to words in context has re- sisted all attempts to be successfully ad- dressed. One possible reason could be the use of inappropriate set of meanings. In fact, WordNet has been used as a de-facto standard repository …...

In this paper, we describe experiments con- ducted on identifying a person using a novel unique correlated corpus of text and audio samples of the person’s communication in six genres. The text samples include essays, emails, blogs, and chat. Audio samples were collected from individual interviews and group discussions and …...

We present a framework for interfacing a PCFG parser with lexical information from an external resource following a dif- ferent tagging scheme than the treebank. This is achieved by defining a stochas- tic mapping layer between the two re- sources. Lexical probabilities for rare events are estimated in a semi-supervised …...

We introduce cube summing, a technique that permits dynamic programming algo- rithms for summing over structures (like the forward and inside algorithms) to be extended with non-local features that vio- late the classical structural independence assumptions. It is inspired by cube prun- ing (Chiang, 2007; Huang and Chiang, 2007) in …...

This paper presents an application of finite state transducers weighted with feature structure descriptions, following Amtrup (2003), to the morphology of the Semitic language Tigrinya. It is shown that feature-structure weights provide an effi- cient way of handling the templatic mor- phology that characterizes Semitic verb stems as well as …...

We present parsing algorithms for vari- ous mildly non-projective dependency for- malisms. In particular, algorithms are pre- sented for: all well-nested structures of gap degree at most 1, with the same com- plexity as the best existing parsers for con- stituency formalisms of equivalent genera- tive power; all well-nested structures …...

This paper presents six novel approaches to biographic fact extraction that model structural, transitive and latent proper- ties of biographical data. The ensem- ble of these proposed models substantially outperforms standard pattern-based bio- graphic fact extraction methods and per- formance is further improved by modeling inter-attribute correlations and distribu- tions …...

Many different types of features have been shown to improve accuracy in parse reranking. A class of features that thus far has not been considered is based on a pro- jection of the syntactic structure of a trans- lation of the text to be parsed. The intu- ition for using …...

Although a lot of progress has been made recently in word segmentation and POS tagging for Chinese, the output of cur- rent state-of-the-art systems is too inaccu- rate to allow for syntactic analysis based on it. We present an experiment in im- proving the output of an off-the-shelf mod- ule …...

We explore the problem of resolving the second person English pronoun you in multi-party dialogue, using a combination of linguistic and visual features. First, we distinguish generic and referential uses, then we classify the referential uses as ei- ther plural or singular, and finally, for the latter cases, we identify …...

The paper presents a multi-document sum- marization system which builds company- specific summaries from a collection of fi- nancial news such that the extracted sen- tences contain novel and relevant infor- mation about the corresponding organiza- tion. The user’s familiarity with the com- pany’s profile is assumed. The goal of …...

This paper presents a conditional ran- dom field-based approach for identifying speaker-produced disfluencies (i.e. if and where they occur) in spontaneous speech transcripts. We emphasize false start re- gions, which are often missed in cur- rent disfluency identification approaches as they lack lexical or structural similar- ity to the speech …...

Mobile voice-enabled search is emerging as one of the most popular applications abetted by the exponential growth in the number of mobile devices. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) output of the voice query is parsed into several fields. Search is then performed on a text corpus or a database. In …...

We investigate linguistic features that correlate with the readability of texts for adults with in- tellectual disabilities (ID). Based on a corpus of texts (including some experimentally meas- ured for comprehension by adults with ID), we analyze the significance of novel discourse- level features related to the cognitive factors underlying …...

Large scale annotated corpora are pre- requisite to developing high-performance semantic role labeling systems. Unfor- tunately, such corpora are expensive to produce, limited in size, and may not be representative. Our work aims to reduce the annotation effort involved in creat- ing resources for semantic role labeling via semi-supervised learning. …...