Articles

A new framework for a system that aids online volunteer translators is proposed. As regards this proposal, first, the current status and conditions of online volunteer translators and their translation environments are examined, and general requirements for a system that would aid these translators are given. Our proposed approach for …...

For speech synthesis systems that transform text materials into voice data, correctness and naturalness are the crucial measures of performance, the latter gaining more emphasis recently. In order to make synthesized voices natural, we must take into account pronunciation-related linguistic phenomena such as homograph, among others. The syntax certainly provides …...

On-line databases of presidential speeches now allow for a diachronic exploration of language use at the highest political levels. This allows for a contrast between legislative and legal advances for minorities and the integration of those advances into the presidential lexicon. In this paper, I explore language use pertaining to …...

The present work aims at a formal description of the interface between prosody and pragmatics in the framework of Constraint-based Unified Grammar CUG. It focuses on two main aspects of this interface: (1) intonation patterns vs. speech acts and (2) stress vs. topic- focus articulation. First, four terminal contours are …...

Annotated linguistic databases are widely used in linguistic research and in language technology development. These annotations are typically hierarchical, and represent the nested structure of syntactic and prosodic constituents. Recently, the LPath language has been proposed as a convenient path-based language for querying linguistic trees. We establish the formal expressiveness …...

This paper describes how to perform syntactic parsing and semantic analysis using the contextual information as a language understanding component in a dialog system. Although syntactic parsing and semantic analysis are often conducted independently of each other, correct parsing of a sentence often requires the semantic information on the input …...

This paper describes an application of re- inforcement learning to determine a dia- log policy for a complex collaborative task where policies for both the system and a proxy for a user of the system are learned simultaneously. With this approach a use- ful dialog policy is learned without the …...

This paper addresses a dialogue strategy to clarify and constrain the queries for speech-driven document retrieval systems. In spoken dialogue interfaces, users often make utterances before the query is com- pletely generated in their mind; thus input queries are often vague or fragmental. As a result, usually many items are …...

We present a novel voice-based human- computer interface designed to enable in- dividuals with motor impairments to use vocal parameters for continuous control tasks. Since discrete spoken commands are ill-suited to such tasks, our interface exploits a large set of continuous acoustic- phonetic parameters like pitch, loudness, vowel quality, etc. …...

This work addresses the task of identify- ing thematic correspondences across sub- corpora focused on different topics. We introduce an unsupervised algorithmic framework based on distributional data clustering, which generalizes previous ini- tial works on this task. The empirical re- sults reveal interesting commonalities of different religions. We evaluate the …...

This paper explores the segmentation of tutorial dialogue into cohesive topics. A latent semantic space was created using conversations from human to human tu- toring transcripts, allowing cohesion be- tween utterances to be measured using vector similarity. Previous cohesion- based segmentation methods that focus on expository monologue are reapplied to …...

Many language processing tasks can be re- duced to breaking the text into segments with prescribed properties. Such tasks include sentence splitting, tokenization, named-entity extraction, and chunking. We present a new model of text segmenta- tion based on ideas from multilabel clas- sification. Using this model, we can natu- rally …...

Query expansion techniques generally se- lect new query terms from a set of top ranked documents. Although a user’s manual judgment of those documents would much help to select good expansion terms, it is difficult to get enough feedback from users in practical situations. In this paper we propose a …...

Applying the noisy channel model to search query spelling correction requires an error model and a language model. Typically, the error model relies on a weighted string edit distance measure. The weights can be learned from pairs of misspelled words and their corrections. This paper investigates using the Expec- tation …...

MIT’s Audio Notebook added great value to the note-taking process by retaining audio record- ings, e.g. during lectures or interviews. The key was to provide users ways to quickly and easily access portions of interest in a recording. Sev- eral non-speech-recognition based techniques were employed. In this paper we present …...

In this paper we investigate the use of lin- guistic knowledge in passage retrieval as part of an open-domain question answer- ing system. We use annotation produced by a deep syntactic dependency parser for Dutch, Alpino, to extract various kinds of linguistic features and syntactic units to be included in …...

Following recent developments in the au- tomatic evaluation of machine translation and document summarization, we present a similar approach, implemented in a mea- sure called POURPRE, for automatically evaluating answers to definition questions. Until now, the only way to assess the cor- rectness of answers to such questions in- volves …...

We investigate techniques to support the answering of opinion-based questions. We first present the OpQA corpus of opin- ion questions and answers. Using the cor- pus, we compare and contrast the proper- ties of fact and opinion questions and an- swers. Based on the disparate characteris- tics of opinion vs. …...

We consider the problem of question- focused sentence retrieval from complex news articles describing multi-event sto- ries published over time. Annotators gen- erated a list of questions central to under- standing each story in our corpus. Be- cause of the dynamic nature of the stories, many questions are time-sensitive (e.g. …...

In this paper we investigate an applica- tion of feature clustering for word sense disambiguation, and propose a semi- supervised feature clustering algorithm. Compared with other feature clustering methods (ex. supervised feature cluster- ing), it can infer the distribution of class labels over (unseen) features unavailable in training data (labeled …...