Articles

Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promis- ing direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major draw- back: they only use the 1-best parse to direct the …...

This paper proposes a method to correct En- glish verb form errors made by non-native speakers. A basic approach is template match- ing on parse trees. The proposed method im- proves on this approach in two ways. To improve recall, irregularities in parse trees caused by verb form errors are …...

In lexicalized grammatical formalisms, it is possible to separate lexical category assign- ment from the combinatory processes that make use of such categories, such as pars- ing and realization. We adapt techniques from supertagging — a relatively recent tech- nique that performs complex lexical tagging before full parsing (Bangalore and …...

Previous work on statistical language gen- eration has primarily focused on grammat- icality and naturalness, scoring generation possibilities according to a language model or user feedback. More recent work has investigated data-driven techniques for con- trolling linguistic style without overgenera- tion, by reproducing variation dimensions ex- tracted from corpora. Another …...

This paper demonstrates a new method for leveraging free-text annotations to infer se- mantic properties of documents. Free-text an- notations are becoming increasingly abundant, due to the recent dramatic growth in semi- structured, user-generated online content. An example of such content is product reviews, which are often annotated by their …...

This paper is concerned with the problem of question search. In question search, given a question as query, we are to return questions semantically equivalent or close to the queried question. In this paper, we propose to conduct question search by identifying question topic and question focus. More specifically, we …...

Query expansion by word alterations (alterna- tive forms of a word) is often used in Web search to replace word stemming. This allows users to specify particular word forms in a query. However, if many alterations are added, query traffic will be greatly increased. In this paper, we propose methods …...

This paper presents a new unsupervised algo- rithm (WordEnds) for inferring word bound- aries from transcribed adult conversations. Phone ngrams before and after observed pauses are used to bootstrap a simple dis- criminative model of boundary marking. This fast algorithm delivers high performance even on morphologically complex words in English …...

Grounded language models represent the rela- tionship between words and the non-linguistic context in which they are said. This paper de- scribes how they are learned from large cor- pora of unlabeled video, and are applied to the task of automatic speech recognition of sports video. Results show that grounded …...

Written documents created through dictation differ significantly from a true verbatim tran- script of the recorded speech. This poses an obstacle in automatic dictation systems as speech recognition output needs to undergo a fair amount of editing in order to turn it into a document that complies with the cus- …...

We propose a language model based on a precise, linguistically motivated grammar (a hand-crafted Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and a statistical model estimating the probability of a parse tree. The language model is applied by means of an N-best rescor- ing step, which allows to directly measure the performance gains …...

Measure words in Chinese are used to indi- cate the count of nouns. Conventional sta- tistical machine translation (SMT) systems do not perform well on measure word generation due to data sparseness and the potential long distance dependency between measure words and their corresponding head words. In this paper, we …...

Query expansion is an effective technique to improve the performance of information re- trieval systems. Although hand-crafted lexi- cal resources, such as WordNet, could provide more reliable related terms, previous stud- ies showed that query expansion using only WordNet leads to very limited performance improvement. One of the main challenges …...

In this work, the problem of extracting phrase translation is formulated as an information re- trieval process implemented with a log-linear model aiming for a balanced precision and re- call. We present a generic phrase training al- gorithm which is parameterized with feature functions and can be optimized jointly with …...

Phrase-based decoding produces state-of-the- art translations with no regard for syntax. We add syntax to this process with a cohesion constraint based on a dependency tree for the source sentence. The constraint allows the decoder to employ arbitrary, non-syntactic phrases, but ensures that those phrases are translated in an order …...

The third PASCAL Recognizing Textual En- tailment Challenge (RTE-3) contained an op- tional task that extended the main entailment task by requiring a system to make three-way entailment decisions (entails, contradicts, nei- ther) and to justify its response. Contradic- tion was rare in the RTE-3 test set, occurring in only …...

We propose an automatic machine translation (MT) evaluation metric that calculates a sim- ilarity score (based on precision and recall) of a pair of sentences. Unlike most metrics, we compute a similarity score between items across the two sentences. We then find a maxi- mum weight matching between the items …...

This paper presents a comparative evalua- tion of several state-of-the-art English parsers based on different frameworks. Our approach is to measure the impact of each parser when it is used as a component of an information ex- traction system that performs protein-protein interaction (PPI) identification in biomedical papers. We evaluate …...

We combine the strengths of Bayesian mod- eling and synchronous grammar in unsu- pervised learning of basic translation phrase pairs. The structured space of a synchronous grammar is a natural fit for phrase pair proba- bility estimation, though the search space can be prohibitively large. Therefore we explore efficient algorithms …...

Linguistically annotated treebanks play an essential part in the modern computational linguistics. The more complex the tree- banks become, the more sophisticated tools are required for using them, namely for searching in the data. We study linguistic phenomena annotated in the Prague Depen- dency Treebank 2.0 and create a list …...