Articles

This paper describes an empirical study of the “In- formation Synthesis” task, defined as the process of (given a complex information need) extracting, or- ganizing and inter-relating the pieces of information contained in a set of relevant documents, in order to obtain a comprehensive, non redundant report that satisfies the …...

We present an approach using syntacto- semantic rules for the extraction of rela- tional information from biomedical ab- stracts. The results show that by over- coming the hurdle of technical termi- nology, high precision results can be achieved. From abstracts related to baker’s yeast, we manage to extract a regulatory …...

Multilingual applications frequently involve dealing with proper names, but names are often missing in bilingual lexicons. This problem is exacerbated for applications involving translation between Latin-scripted languages and Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) where simple string copying is not a solution. We present a novel approach …...

The parameters of statistical translation models are typically estimated from sentence-aligned parallel corpora. We show that significant improvements in the alignment and translation quality of such mod- els can be achieved by additionally including word- aligned data during training. Incorporating word- level alignments into the parameter estimation of the IBM …...

Collocation translation is important for machine translation and many other NLP tasks. Unlike previous methods using bilingual parallel corpora, this paper presents a new method for acquiring collocation translations by making use of monolingual corpora and linguistic knowledge. First, dependency triples are extracted from Chinese and English corpora with dependency …...

Most foreign names are transliterated into Chinese, Japanese or Korean with approximate phonetic equivalents. The transliteration is usually achieved through intermediate phonemic mapping. This paper presents a new framework that allows direct orthographical mapping (DOM) between two different languages, through a joint source-channel model, also called n-gram transliteration model (TM). …...

Knowledge of the anaphoricity of a noun phrase might be profitably exploited by a coreference sys- tem to bypass the resolution of non-anaphoric noun phrases. Perhaps surprisingly, recent attempts to incorporate automatically acquired anaphoricity in- formation into coreference systems, however, have led to the degradation in resolution performance. This paper …...

We use machine learning techniques to find the best combination of local focus and lexical distance features for identifying the anchor of mereological bridging references. We find that using first men- tion, utterance distance, and lexical distance com- puted using either Google or WordNet results in an accuracy significantly higher …...

Coreferential information of a candidate, such as the properties of its antecedents, is important for pronoun resolution because it reflects the salience of the candidate in the local discourse. Such information, however, is usually ignored in previous learning-based systems. In this paper we present a trainable model which incorporates coreferential …...

Convolution kernels, such as sequence and tree ker- nels, are advantageous for both the concept and ac- curacy of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Experiments have, however, shown that the over-fitting problem often arises when these ker- nels are used in NLP tasks. This paper discusses this issue of …...

This paper describes an incremental parsing approach where parameters are estimated using a variant of the perceptron algorithm. A beam-search algorithm is used during both training and decoding phases of the method. The perceptron approach was implemented with the same feature set as that of an existing generative model (Roark, …...

This paper describes and evaluates log-linear parsing models for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). A parallel implementation of the L-BFGS optimisation algorithm is described, which runs on a Beowulf cluster allowing the complete Penn Treebank to be used for estima- tion. We also develop a new efficient parsing algorithm for CCG …...

A new technique is introduced, linguistic profiling, in which large numbers of counts of linguistic features are used as a text profile, which can then be compared to average profiles for groups of texts. The technique proves to be quite effective for authorship verification and recogni- tion. The best parameter …...

Discriminative methods have shown significant improvements over traditional generative meth- ods in many machine learning applications, but there has been difficulty in extending them to natural language parsing. One problem is that much of the work on discriminative methods conflates changes to the learning method with changes to the parameterization …...

This paper describes the user expertise model in AthosMail, a mobile, speech-based e-mail system. The model encodes the system’s assumptions about the user expertise, and gives recommendations on how the system should respond depending on the assumed competence levels of the user. The recommendations are realized as three types of …...

A challenging problem for spoken dialog sys- tems is the design of utterance generation mod- ules that are fast, flexible and general, yet pro- duce high quality output in particular domains. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge automatically adapted to the application do- main. This …...

In this paper, we describe a new methodology to develop mixed-initiative spoken dialog systems, which is based on the extensive use of simulations to accelerate the development process. With the help of simulations, a system providing informa- tion about a database of nearly 1000 restaurants in the Boston area has …...

We present a prototype natural-language problem-solving application for a financial services call center, developed as part of the Amitiés multilingual human-computer dialogue project. Our automated dialogue system, based on empirical evidence from real call-center conversations, features a data- driven approach that allows for mixed system/customer initiative and spontaneous conversation. Preliminary …...

This paper proposes a new approach for coreference resolution which uses the Bell tree to represent the search space and casts the coreference resolution problem as finding the best path from the root of the Bell tree to the leaf nodes. A Maximum Entropy model is used to rank these …...

This paper describes and evaluates MOP, an IE system for automatic extraction of metalinguistic information from technical and scientific documents. We claim that such a system can create special databases to boot- strap compilation and facilitate update of the huge and dynamically changing glossaries, knowledge bases and ontologies that are …...