Articles

In this paper we report ongoing work on developing an interactive word alignment environment that will assist a user to quickly produce accurate full-coverage word alignment in bitexts for different language engineering tasks, such as MT lexicons and gold standards for evalua- tion. The system uses a graphical inter- face, …...

This paper presents PEAS, the first comparative evaluation framework for parsers of French whose annotation formalism allows the annotation of both constituents and functional relations. A test corpus containing an assortment of different text types has been built and part of it has been manually annotated. Precision/Recall and crossing brackets …...

The paper addresses the problem of automatic enrichment of a thesaurus by classifying new words into its classes. The proposed classification method makes use of both the distributional data about a new word and the strength of the semantic relatedness of its target class to other likely candidate classes. 1...

This paper presents a multilingual system designed to recognize named entities in a wide variety of languages (currently more than 12 languages are concerned). The system includes original strategies to deal with a wide variety of encoding character sets, analysis strategies and algorithms to process these languages. 1...

The paper describes ongoing work on the evaluation of methods for extract- ing collocation candidates from large text corpora. Our research is based on a German treebank corpus used as gold standard. Results are available for adjective+noun pairs, which proved to be a comparatively easy extraction task. We plan to …...

The paper presents two approaches to partial parsing of German: a tagger trained on dependency tuples, and a cas- caded finite-state parser (Abney, 1997). For the tagging approach, the effects of choosing different representations of de- pendency tuples are investigated. Per- formance of the finite-state parser is boosted by delaying …...

This paper describes a system of termino- logical extraction capable of handling multi-word expressions, using a powerful syntactic parser. The system includes a concordancing tool enabling the user to display the context of the collocation, i.e. the sentence or the whole document where the collocation occurs. Since the corpora are …...

We describe a domain-independent se- mantic interpretation architecture suit- able for spoken dialogue systems, which uses a decision-list method to effect a transparent combination of rule-based and data-driven approaches. The ar- chitecture has been implemented and evaluated in the context of a medium- vocabulary command and control task. 1...

In this paper we describe the X-TRACT workbench, which enables efficient term- based querying against a domain-specific literature corpus. Its main aim is to aid domain specialists in locating and extracting new knowledge from scientific literature corpora. Before querying, a corpus is automatically terminologically analysed by the ATRACT system, which …...

This paper discusses the theoretical and practical concerns in part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Chinese. Unlike other languages such as English, Chinese lacks morphological marking in association with categorial alternations. We consider such categorial fluidity a continuum, and any categorial shift a transition, with spe- cial focus on the verb-noun shift. …...

We present experimental evidence that providing naive users of a spoken dia- logue system with immediate help mes- sages related to their out-of-coverage ut- terances improves their success in using the system. A grammar-based recog- nizer and a Statistical Language Model (SLM) recognizer are run simultane- ously. If the grammar-based …...

Research on the discovery of terms from corpora has focused on word sequences whose recurrent occurrence in a corpus is indicative of their terminological sta- tus, and has not addressed the issue of discovering terms when data is sparse. This becomes apparent in the case of noun compounding, which is …...

Compounded words are a challenge for NLP applications such as machine trans- lation (MT). We introduce methods to learn splitting rules from monolingual and parallel corpora. We evaluate them against a gold standard and measure their impact on performance of statisti- cal MT systems. Results show accuracy of 99.1% and …...

Finite structure query (fsq for short) is a tool for querying syntactically anno- tated corpora. fsq employs a query lan- guage of high expressive power, namely full first order logic. It can be used to query arbitrary finite structures, not just trees. 1...

This work is the first systematic inves- tigation of initiative in human-human tutorial dialogue. We studied initia- tive management in two dialogue strate- gies: didactic tutoring and Socratic tu- toring. We hypothesized that didactic tutoring would be mostly tutor-initiative while Socratic tutoring would be mixed- initiative, and that more student …...

This paper investigates two elements of Maximum Entropy tagging: the use of a correction feature in the Gener- alised Iterative Scaling (Gis) estimation algorithm, and techniques for model smoothing. We show analytically and empirically that the correction feature, assumed to be required for the correct- ness of GIS, is unnecessary. …...

One of the major challenges in TREC- style question-answering (QA) is to over- come the mismatch in the lexical repre- sentations in the query space and document space. This is particularly se- vere in QA as exact answers, rather than documents, are required in response to questions. Most current approaches …...

Spoken dialogue systems would be more acceptable if they were able to produce backchannel continuers such as mm-hmm in naturalistic locations during the user's utter- ances. Using the HCRC Map Task Cor- pus as our data source, we describe mod- els for predicting these locations using only limited processing and …...

We propose a new method for detect- ing errors in "gold-standard" part-of- speech annotation. The approach lo- cates errors with high precision based on n-grams occurring in the corpus with multiple taggings. Two further tech- niques, closed-class analysis and finite- state tagging guide patterns, are dis- cussed. The success of …...

We illustrate how the use of metaphorical views for reasoning with metaphor re- quires the mapping of information such as event shape, event rate and men- tal/emotional states from the source do- main to the target domain. Such mappings are domain-independent and can be implemented by means of rules we …...