Articles

Words of foreign origin are referred to as borrowed words or loanwords. A loanword is usually imported to Chinese by phonetic transliteration if a translation is not easily available. Semantic transliteration is seen as a good tradition in introducing foreign words to Chinese. Not only does it preserve how a …...

Text is not unadulterated fact. A text can make you laugh or cry but can it also make you short sell your stocks in company A and buy up options in company B? Research in the domain of finance strongly suggests that it can. Studies have shown that both the …...

Previous studies in data-driven dependency parsing have shown that tree transformations can improve parsing accuracy for specific parsers and data sets. We investigate to what extent this can be generalized across languages/treebanks and parsers, focusing on pseudo-projective parsing, as a way of capturing non-projective dependencies, and transformations used to facilitate …...

This paper explores methods for generating subjectivity analysis resources in a new lan- guage by leveraging on the tools and re- sources available in English. Given a bridge between English and the selected target lan- guage (e.g., a bilingual dictionary or a par- allel corpus), the methods can be used …...

We investigate automatic classification of speculative language (‘hedging’), biomedical text using weakly supervisedin machine learning. Our contributions include a precise description of the task with anno- tation guidelines, analysis and discussion, a probabilistic weakly supervised learning model, and experimental evaluation of the methods presented. We show that hedge classification is …...

Speech recognition in many morphologi- cally rich languages suffers from a very high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) ratio. Earlier work has shown that vocabulary decomposition methods can practically solve this problem for a subset of these languages. This pa- per compares various vocabulary decompo- sition approaches to open vocabulary speech recognition, using …...

This paper presents pipeline iteration, an ap- proach that uses output from later stages of a pipeline to constrain earlier stages of the same pipeline. We demonstrate sig- nificant improvements in a state-of-the-art PCFG parsing pipeline using base-phrase constraints, derived either from later stages of the parsing pipeline or from …...

Transliteration is the task of converting a word from one alphabetic script to another. We present a novel, substring-based ap- proach to transliteration, inspired by phrase- based models of machine translation. We in- vestigate two implementations of substring- based transliteration: a dynamic program- ming algorithm, and a finite-state transducer. We …...

A number of Russian verbs lack 1sg non- past forms. These paradigmatic gaps are puzzling because they seemingly contradict the highly productive nature of inflectional systems. We model the persistence and spread of Russian gaps via a multi-agent model with Bayesian learning. We ran three simulations: no grammar learning, learning …...

Morphological segmentation has been shown to be beneficial to a range of NLP tasks such as machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis and infor- mation retrieval. Recently, a number of approaches to unsupervised morphological segmentation have been proposed. This paper describes an algorithm that draws from previous approaches and combines …...

Frequency distribution models tuned to words and other linguistic events can pre- dict the number of distinct types and their frequency distribution in samples of arbi- trary sizes. We conduct, for the first time, a rigorous evaluation of these models based on cross-validation and separation of train- ing and test …...

Situation entities (SEs) are the events, states, generic statements, and embedded facts and propositions introduced to a discourse by clauses of text. We report on the first data- driven models for labeling clauses according to the type of SE they introduce. SE classifi- cation is important for discourse mode iden- …...

This paper presents the first empirical results to our knowledge on learning synchronous grammars that generate logical forms. Using statistical machine translation techniques, a semantic parser based on a synchronous context-free grammar augmented with λ- operators is learned given a set of training sentences and their correct logical forms. The …...

This paper presents an approach for the au- tomatic acquisition of qualia structures for nouns from the Web and thus opens the pos- sibility to explore the impact of qualia struc- tures for natural language processing at a larger scale. The approach builds on ear- lier work based on the …...

This paper describes the first system for large-scale acquisition of subcategorization frames (SCFs) from English corpus data which can be used to acquire comprehen- sive lexicons for verbs, nouns and adjectives. The system incorporates an extensive rule- based classifier which identifies 168 verbal, 37 adjectival and 31 nominal frames from …...

This paper proposes a novel method for phrase-based statistical machine translation by using pivot language. To conduct trans- lation between languages Lf and Le with a small bilingual corpus, we bring in a third language Lp, which is named the pivot lan- guage. For Lf-Lp and Lp-Le, there exist large …...

This paper studies the problem of identify- ing erroneous/correct sentences. The prob- lem has important applications, e.g., pro- viding feedback for writers of English as a Second Language, controlling the quality of parallel bilingual sentences mined from the Web, and evaluating machine translation results. In this paper, we propose a …...

Recent studies suggest that machine learn- ing can be applied to develop good auto- matic evaluation metrics for machine trans- lated sentences. This paper further ana- lyzes aspects of learning that impact per- formance. We argue that previously pro- posed approaches of training a Human- Likeness classifier is not as …...

In this paper, we describe our experiences in extending a standard cross-language in- formation retrieval (CLIR) approach which uses parallel aligned corpora and Latent Semantic Indexing. Most, if not all, previous work which follows this ap- proach has focused on bilingual retrieval; two examples involve the use of French- English …...

We propose a bootstrapping approach to training a memoriless stochastic transducer for the task of extracting transliterations from an English-Arabic bitext. The trans- ducer learns its similarity metric from the data in the bitext, and thus can func- tion directly on strings written in different writing scripts without any additional …...