Articles

This paper reports on the SYN-RA (SYNtax-based Reference Annotation) project, an on-going project of annotating German newspaper texts with referential relations. The project has developed an in- ventory of anaphoric and coreference rela- tions for German in the context of a uni- fied, XML-based annotation scheme for combining morphological, syntactic, …...

We describe a method for annotating spoken dia- log corpora using both automatic and manual an- notation. Our semi-automated method for corpus development results in a corpus combining rich se- mantics, discourse information and reference anno- tation, and allows us to explore issues relating these. 1...

In this paper, we introduce LiveTree, a core component of LIDAS, the Lin- guistic Discourse Analysis System for automatic discourse parsing with the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) (X et al, 2004). LiveTree is an integrated workbench for super- vised and unsupervised creation, stor- age and manipulation of the discourse …...

The Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) is a new re- source built on top of the Penn Wall Street Journal corpus, in which discourse connectives are anno- tated along with their arguments. Its use of stand- off annotation allows integration with a stand-off version of the Penn TreeBank (syntactic structure) and …...

A corpus of German newspaper commentaries has been assembled and annotated with differ- ent information (and currently, to different de- grees): part-of-speech, syntax, rhetorical struc- ture, connectives, co-reference, and information structure. The paper explains the design deci- sions taken in the annotations, and describes a number of applications using this …...

1 In this paper, we describe how the LIDAS System (Linguistic Discourse Analysis Sys- tem), a discourse parser built as an implemen- tation of the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) uses information from sen- tential syntax and semantics along with lexical semantic information to build the Open Right Discourse Parse …...

The GNOME corpus was created to study the dis- course and semantic properties of discourse entities that affect their realization and interpretation, and particularly salience. We discuss what information was annotated and the methods we followed. 1...

This paper presents the discourse annotation fol- lowed in Cast3LB, a Spanish corpus annotated with several information sources (morphological, syntac- tic, semantic and coreferential) at syntactic, seman- tic and discourse level. 3LB annotation scheme has been developed for three languages (Spanish, Cata- lan and Basque). Human annotators have used a …...

We report on two recent medium-scale initiatives annotating present day English corpora for animacy distinctions. We discuss the relevance of animacy for computational linguistics, specifically generation, the annotation categories used in the two studies and the interannotator reliability for one of the studies. 1...

Getting a machine to understand human narratives has been a classic challenge for NLP and AI. This paper proposes a new representation for the temporal structure of narratives. The representation is parsimonious, using temporal relations as surrogates for discourse relations. The narrative models, called Temporal Discourse Models, are tree- structured, …...

Most research on automated categorization of doc- uments has concentrated on the assignment of one or many categories to a whole text. However, new applications, e.g. in the area of the Semantic Web, require a richer and more fine-grained annotation of documents, such as detailed thematic informa- tion about the …...

We present discourse-level annotation of newspa- per texts in German and English, as part of an ongoing project aimed at investigating information structure from a cross-linguistic perspective. Rather than annotating some specific notion of information structure, we propose a theory-neutral annotation of basic features at the levels of syntax, prosody …...

In this paper we describe the (annotation) tools underly- ing two automatic techniques to analyse the meaning and use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of these techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were stud- …...

Like speakers of any natural language, speakers of English potentially have many different word orders in which to encode a single meaning. One key fac- tor in speakers’ use of certain non-canonical word orders in English is their ability to contribute infor- mation about syntactic and semantic discourse rela- tions. …...

In statistical machine translation, the currently best performing systems are based in some way on phrases or word groups. We describe the baseline phrase-based translation system and various refinements. We describe a highly ef- ficient monotone search algorithm with a com- plexity linear in the input sentence length. We present …...

State-of-the-art story link detection systems, that is, systems that determine whether two sto- ries are about the same event or linked, are usu- ally based on the cosine-similarity measured between two stories. This paper presents a method for improving the performanceof a link detection system by using a variety of …...

In this paper we address the question of assigning semantic roles to sentences in Chinese. We show that good semantic parsing results for Chinese can be achieved with a small 1100-sentence training set. In order to extract features from Chinese, we describe porting the Collins parser to Chinese, resulting in …...

We propose a theory that gives formal seman- tics to word-level alignments defined over par- allel corpora. We use our theory to introduce a linear algorithm that can be used to derive from word-aligned, parallel corpora the minimal set of syntactically motivated transformation rules that explain human translation data. 1...

There are a lot of differences between expres- sions used in written language and spoken lan- guage. It is one of the reasons why speech syn- thesis applications are prone to produce unnat- ural speech. This paper represents a method of paraphrasing unsuitable expressions for spo- ken language into suitable …...

In this paper, we propose a machine learning al- gorithm for shallow semantic parsing, extend- ing the work of Gildea and Jurafsky (2002), Surdeanu et al. (2003) and others. Our al- gorithm is based on Support Vector Machines which we show give an improvement in perfor- mance over earlier classifiers. …...