Articles

This paper describes an incremental chart parser that generates look-ahead catego- ries on the fly for a controlled natural lan- guage. These predictive hints tell the au- thor what kind of syntactic (or semantic) structure can follow the current input string and thereby aim at helping the au- thor to …...

Conventional approaches to the generation of referring expressions place the task within a pipelined ar- chitecture, typically somewhere be- tween text planning and linguis- tic realisation. In this paper, we look at the issues that arise in generating one-anaphoric referring expressions; examination of this task causes us to reflect on …...

In Korean, in order to generate a coherent text, a redundantly prominent noun should be replaced by a non-zero pronoun or zero pronoun. Otherwise, the text becomes un- natural. Specifically, a redundant noun in Korean is frequently omitted while a re- dundant noun in English is replaced by a pronoun. …...

A formally defined subset of English known as EasyEnglish is described. Primarily designed for a culturally di- verse audience of second-language English speakers, EasyEnglish seeks to clarify meaning through restrictions on vocabulary and grammar, whilst pre- serving intellectual content. EasyEng- lish has been developed by Wycliffe Associates (UK), an organisation …...

We describe a basic Geo-coding service en- compassing a geo-parsing tool and integrated digital gazetteer service. The development of a geo-parser comes from the need to explicitly georeference large resource collections such as the Statistical Accounts of Scotland which cur- rently only contain implicit georeferences in the form of placennames …...

We define a data model for storing geographic information from multiple sources that en- ables the efficient production of customizable gazetteers. The GazDB separates names from features while storing the relationships be- tween them. Geographic names are stored in a variety of resolutions to allow for i18n and for multiplicity …...

We describe a purely confidence-based geo- graphic term disambiguation system that cru- cially relies on the notion of “positive” and “negative” context and methods for combining confidence-based disambiguation with mea- sures of relevance to a user’s query. 1...

The task of named entity annotation of unseen text has recently been successfully automated with near-human performance. But the full task involves more than annotation, i.e. identifying the scope of each (continuous) text span and its class (such as place name). It also involves grounding the named entity (i.e. establishing …...

To be unambiguous about a Chinese geographic name represented in English text as Pinyin, one needs to recover the name in Chinese characters. We present our approach to this back-transliteration problem based on processes such as bilingual geographic name lookup, name suggestion using place name character and pair frequencies, and …...

In this paper we present an approach to the ac- quisition of geographical gazetteers. Instead of creating these resources manually, we propose to extract gazetteers from the World Wide Web, using Data Mining techniques. The bootstrapping approach, investigated in our study, allows us to create new gazetteers using only a …...

Issues in the description of places are discussed in the context of a logical geospatial theory. This theory lies at the core of the system Ge- oLogica, which deduces answers to geographi- cal questions based on knowledge provided by multiple agents. 1...

Here we present work on using spatial knowl- edge in conjunction with information extrac- tion (IE). Considerable volume of location data was imported in a knowledge base (KB) with entities of general importance used for seman- tic annotation, indexing, and retrieval of text. The Semantic Web knowledge representation standards are …...

Ambiguity is very high for location names. For example, there are 23 cities named ‘Buffalo’ in the U.S. Based on our previous work, this paper presents a refined hybrid approach to geographic references using our information extraction engine InfoXtract. The InfoXtract location normalization module consists of local pattern matching and …...

In this paper we report on the set of con- trolled language specifications defined for Modern Greek and the development of the respective style checker. We will focus on the effectiveness and suitability of these specifications by assessing the perform- ance of a commercial machine translation system over controlled texts …...

In spoken dialog systems, a well- crafted prompt is important in order to get the user to respond with an expected type of utterance. We identify a new, important area for research in speech- to-speech translation, which focuses on the fact that the output of the MT sys- tem serves …...

_________________________________________________________________ In 1998, Airbus started a project dedicated to the creation of a controlled language for industrial use; in this case enhancing warning texts quality in the cockpit of Airbus aircraft. Another objective was to provide designers a means of facilitating their job while respecting the stringent safety criteria. This …...

The present study attempts to measure and compare the morphological productivity of five Mandarin Chinese suffixes: the verbal suffix -hua, the plural suffix -men, and the nominal suffixes -r, -zi, and -tou. These suffixes are predicted to differ in their degree of productivity: -hua and -men appear to be productive, …...

It is shown that for a large corpus, Zipf 's law for both words in English and characters in Chinese does not hold for all ranks. The frequency falls below the frequency predicted by Zipf's law for English words for rank greater than about 5,000 and for Chinese characters for …...

The output of Chinese word segmentation can vary according to different linguistic definitions of words and different engineering requirements, and no single standard can satisfy all linguists and all computer applications. Most of the disagreements in language processing come from the segmentation of morphologically derived words (MDWs). This paper presents …...

In this paper we report results of a supervised machine-learning approach to Chinese word segmentation. A maximum entropy tagger is trained on manually annotated data to automatically assign to Chinese characters, or hanzi, tags that indicate the position of a hanzi within a word. The tagged output is then converted …...