Articles

AbstractIn this paper we describe a set of processes for the acquisition of re­sources for quick ramp­up machine translation (MT) from any language lacking significant machine tracta­ble resources into English, using the Paraguayan indigenous lan­guage Guarani as well as Amharic and Chechen, as examples. Our task is to develop a …...

AbstractThe research context of this paper is developing hybrid machine translation (MT) systems that exploit the advantages of linguistic rule-based and statistical MT systems. Arabic, as a morphologically rich language, is especially challenging even without addressing the hybridization question. In this paper, we describe the challenges in building an Arabic-English …...

AbstractThis paper presents a reordering framework for statistical machine translation (SMT) where source-side reorderings are integrated into SMT decoding, allowing for a highly constrained reordered search graph. The monotone search is extended by means of a set of reordering patterns (linguistically motivated rewrite patterns). Patterns are automatically learnt in training …...

AbstractWhen response metrics for evaluating the utility of machine translation (MT) output on a given task do not yield a single ranking of MT engines, how are MT users to decide which engine best supports their task? When the cost of different types of response errors vary, how are MT …...

AbstractDiscriminative training methods have recently led to significant advances in the state of the art of machine translation (MT). Another promising trend is the incorporation of syntactic information into MT systems. Combining these trends is difficult for reasons of system complexity and computational complexity. The present study makes progress towards …...

XML information retrieval (XML-IR) sys- tems respond to user queries with results more specific than documents. XML-IR queries contain both content and struc- tural requirements traditionally expressed in a formal language. However, an intu- itive alternative is natural language queries (NLQs). Here, we discuss three ap- proaches for handling NLQs …...

Search engine interfaces come in a range of variations from the familiar text-based approach to the more experimental graphical systems. It is rare however that psychological or human factors research is undertaken to properly evaluate or optimize the systems, and to the extent this has been done the results have …...

Many natural language processes have some degree of preprocessing of data: tokenisation, stemming and so on. In the domain of Statisti- cal Machine Translation it has been shown that word reordering as a preprocessing step can help the translation process. Recently, hand-written rules for reordering in German–English translation have shown …...

This paper describes a mechanism for identifying errors made by a student dur- ing a computer-aided language learning dialogue. The mechanism generates a set of ‘perturbations’ of the student’s origi- nal typed utterance, each of which em- bodies a hypothesis about an error made by the student. Perturbations are then …...

This paper investigates whether multi- semantic-role (MSR) based selectional preferences can be used to improve the performance of supervised verb sense dis- ambiguation. Unlike conventional se- lectional preferences which are extracted from parse trees based on hand-crafted rules, and only include the direct subject or the direct object of the …...

As research in text-to-text paraphrase gen- eration progresses, it has the potential to improve the quality of generated text. However, the use of paraphrase genera- tion methods creates a secondary problem. We must ensure that generated novel sen- tences are not inconsistent with the text from which it was generated. …...

The Natural Language Generation com- munity is currently engaged in discussion as to whether and how to introduce one or several shared evaluation tasks, as are found in other fields of Natural Language Processing. As one of the most well- defined subtasks in NLG, the generation of referring expressions looks …...

Direct questions such as “Who saw Mary?” intuitively request for a certain type of answer, for instance a noun phrase “John” or a quantified noun phrase such as “A man”. Following the structured meaning approach to questions, we pro- pose an analysis of wh-questions in type- logical grammar that incorporates …...

Instant messaging dialogue is real-time, text-based computer-mediated communi- cation conducted over the Internet. Mes- sages sent over instant messaging can be encoded We propose a method of using dialogue acts to predict utterances in task- oriented dialogue. Dialogue acts provide a semantic representation of utterances in a dialogue. An evaluation …...

Proficiency in a second language is of vi- tal importance for many people. Today’s access to corpora of text, including the Web, allows new techniques for improv- ing language skill. Our project’s aim is the development of techniques for presenting the user with suitable web text, to allow optimal language …...

The necessity of a gradient approach to salience ranking of referents introduced in a discourse is evaluated by looking at (unbound) pronoun resolution preferences when there are competing non-salient referents. The study uses a sentence- completion technique in which partici- pants had to resolve pronouns (“John sprayed the paint on …...

Relevance feedback has already proven its usefulness in probabilistic information re- trieval (IR). In this research we explore whether a pseudo relevance feedback tech- nique on IR can improve the Question An- swering task (QA). The basis of our explo- ration is the use of relevant named entities from the …...

We examine standard deep lexical acqui- sition features in automatically predict- ing the gender of noun types and to- kens by bootstrapping from a small an- notated corpus. Using a knowledge-poor approach to simulate prediction in unseen languages, we observe results comparable to morphological analysers trained specif- ically on our …...

Automatic mapping of key concepts from clinical notes to a terminology is an im- portant task to achieve for extraction of the clinical information locked in clinical notes and patient reports. The present pa- per describes a system that automatically maps free text into a medical reference terminology. The algorithm …...

We present a system for named entity recognition (ner) in astronomy jour- nal articles. We have developed this system on a ne corpus comprising ap- proximately 200,000 words of text from astronomy articles. These have been manually annotated with ∼40 entity types of interest to astronomers. We report on the …...