Articles

We propose a new hierarchical Bayesian n-gram model of natural languages. Our model makes use of a generalization of the commonly used Dirichlet distributions called Pitman-Yor processes which pro- duce power-law distributions more closely resembling those in natural languages. We show that an approximation to the hier- archical Pitman-Yor language …...

This paper describes a study of the pat- terns of translational equivalence exhib- ited by a variety of bitexts. The study found that the complexity of these pat- terns in every bitext was higher than sug- gested in the literature. These findings shed new light on why “syntactic” con- straints …...

Certain distinctions made in the lexicon of one language may be redundant when translating into another language. We quantify redundancy among source types by the similarity of their distributions over target types. We propose a language- independent framework for minimising lexical redundancy that can be optimised directly from parallel text. …...

Statistical MT has made great progress in the last few years, but current translation models are weak on re-ordering and target language fluency. Syn- tactic approaches seek to remedy these problems. In this paper, we take the framework for acquir- ing multi-level syntactic translation rules of (Gal- ley et al., …...

This paper focuses on the use of advanced techniques of text analysis as support for collocation extraction. A hybrid system is presented that combines statistical meth- ods and multilingual parsing for detecting accurate collocational information from English, French, Spanish and Italian cor- pora. The advantage of relying on full parsing …...

Thesauri and ontologies provide impor- tant value in facilitating access to digital archives by representing underlying prin- ciples of organization. Translation of such resources into multiple languages is an important component for providing multilingual access. However, the speci- ficity of vocabulary terms in most on- tologies precludes fully-automated ma- chine …...

This paper presents the particular use of “Jibiki” (Papillon’s web server develop- ment platform) for the LexALP1 project. LexALP’s goal is to harmonise the ter- minology on spatial planning and sustain- able development used within the Alpine Convention2, so that the member states are able to cooperate and communicate efficiently …...

Chatting is a popular communication media on the Internet via ICQ, chat rooms, etc. Chat language is different from natural language due to its anoma- lous and dynamic natures, which renders conventional NLP tools inapplicable. The dynamic problem is enormously trouble- some because it makes static chat lan- guage corpus …...

This article describes a robust seman- tic parser that uses a broad knowledge base created by interconnecting three ma- jor resources: FrameNet, VerbNet and PropBank. The FrameNet corpus con- tains the examples annotated with seman- tic roles whereas the VerbNet lexicon pro- vides the knowledge about the syntac- tic behavior …...

We investigate the unsupervised detection of semi-fixed cue phrases such as “This paper proposes a novel approach. . . 1” from unseen text, on the basis of only a handful of seed cue phrases with the de- sired semantics. The problem, in contrast to bootstrapping approaches for Question Answering and …...

We present a new approach for mapping natural language sentences to their for- mal meaning representations using string- kernel-based classifiers. Our system learns these classifiers for every production in the formal language grammar. Meaning repre- sentations for novel natural language sen- tences are obtained by finding the most probable semantic …...

Work on the semantics of questions has argued that the relation between a ques- tion and its answer(s) can be cast in terms of logical entailment. In this paper, we demonstrate how computational systems designed to recognize textual entailment can be used to enhance the accuracy of current open-domain automatic …...

This paper describes an algorithm for propagating verb arguments along lexi- cal chains consisting of WordNet rela- tions. The algorithm creates verb argu- ment structures using VerbNet syntactic patterns. In order to increase the cover- age, a larger set of verb senses were auto- matically associated with the existing pat- …...

In this paper, we explore correlation of dependency relation paths to rank candi- date answers in answer extraction. Using the correlation measure, we compare de- pendency relations of a candidate answer and mapped question phrases in sentence with the corresponding relations in ques- tion. Different from previous studies, we propose …...

We investigate prototype-driven learning for pri- marily unsupervised grammar induction. Prior knowledge is specified declaratively, by providing a few canonical examples of each target phrase type. This sparse prototype information is then propa- gated across a corpus using distributional similar- ity features, which augment an otherwise standard PCFG model. We …...

The present work advances the accu- racy and training speed of discrimina- tive parsing. Our discriminative parsing method has no generative component, yet surpasses a generative baseline on con- stituent parsing, and does so with mini- mal linguistic cleverness. Our model can incorporate arbitrary features of the in- put and …...

We investigate generalizations of the all- subtrees "DOP" approach to unsupervised parsing. Unsupervised DOP models assign all possible binary trees to a set of sentences and next use (a large random subset of) all subtrees from these binary trees to compute the most probable parse trees. We will test both …...

In this paper we present how the auto- matic extraction of events from text can be used to both classify narrative texts ac- cording to plot quality and produce advice in an interactive learning environment in- tended to help students with story writing. We focus on the story rewriting task, …...

In this paper we investigate a novel method to detect asymmetric entailment relations between verbs. Our starting point is the idea that some point-wise verb selec- tional preferences carry relevant seman- tic information. Experiments using Word- Net as a gold standard show promising re- sults. Where applicable, our method, used …...

This paper presents a hybrid approach to question answering in the clinical domain that combines techniques from summarization and information retrieval. We tackle a frequently-occurring class of questions that takes the form “What is the best drug treatment for X?” Starting from an initial set of MEDLINE citations, our system …...