Articles

A good decoding algorithm is critical to the success of any statistical machine translation system. The decoder’s job is to find the translation that is most likely according to set of previously learned parameters (and a formula for combin- ing them). Since the space of possi- ble translations is extremely …...

This paper proposes a description of German word order including phe- nomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic de- pendency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without re- sorting to movement or similar mechanisms. 1 1...

Typically, the lexicon models used in statistical machine translation systems do not include any kind of linguistic or contextual information, which often leads to problems in performing a cor- rect word sense disambiguation. One way to deal with this problem within the statistical framework is to use max- imum entropy …...

While the generative view of language processing builds bigger units out of smaller ones by means of rewriting steps, the axiomatic view eliminates in- valid linguistic structures out of a set of possible structures by means of well- formedness principles. We present a generator based on the axiomatic view and …...

We propose a method to generate large-scale encyclopedic knowledge, which is valuable for much NLP research, based on the Web. We first search the Web for pages contain- ing a term in question. Then we use lin- guistic patterns and HTML structures to ex- tract text fragments describing the term. …...

This paper presents methods for a qual- itative, unbiased comparison of lexical association measures and the results we have obtained for adjective-noun pairs and preposition-noun-verb triples ex- tracted from German corpora. In our approach, we compare the entire list of candidates, sorted according to the particular measures, to a reference …...

We describe a new framework for de- pendency grammar, with a modular de- composition of immediate dependency and linear precedence. Our approach distinguishes two orthogonal yet mutu- ally constraining structures: a syntactic dependency tree and a topological de- pendency tree. The syntax tree is non- projective and even non-ordered, while …...

Current alternatives for language mod- eling are statistical techniques based on large amounts of training data, and hand-crafted context-free or finite-state grammars that are difficult to build and maintain. One way to address the problems of the grammar-based ap- proach is to compile recognition gram- mars from grammars written in …...

Polarized dependency (PD-) grammars are proposed as a means of efficient treatment of discontinuous construc- tions. PD-grammars describe two kinds of dependencies : local, explicitly de- rived by the rules, and long, implicitly specified by negative and positive va- lencies of words. If in a PD-grammar the number of non-saturated …...

We present a machine learning approach to evaluating the well- formedness of output of a machine translation system, using classifiers that learn to distinguish human reference translations from machine translations. This approach can be used to evaluate an MT system, tracking improvements over time; to aid in the kind of …...

We develop a framework for formaliz- ing semantic construction within gram- mars expressed in typed feature struc- ture logics, including HPSG. The ap- proach provides an alternative to the lambda calculus; it maintains much of the desirable flexibility of unification- based approaches to composition, while constraining the allowable operations in …...

We consider the question “How much strong generative power can be squeezed out of a formal system without increasing its weak generative power?” and propose some theoret- ical and practical constraints on this problem. We then introduce a formal- ism which, under these constraints, maximally squeezes strong generative power out …...

We present two language models based upon an “immediate-head” parser — our name for a parser that conditions all events below a constituent c upon the head of c. While all of the most accurate statistical parsers are of the immediate-head variety, no previous grammatical language model uses this technology. …...

This paper addresses the issue of designing embodied conversational agents that exhibit appropriate posture shifts during dialogues with human users. Previous research has noted the importance of hand gestures, eye gaze and head nods in conversations between embodied agents and humans. We present an analysis of human monologues and dialogues …...

The RAGS proposals for generic speci- fication of NLG systems includes a de- tailed account of data representation, but only an outline view of processing aspects. In this paper we introduce a modular processing architecture with a concrete implementation which aims to meet the RAGS goals of transparency and reusability. …...

Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance, if the thesis statement of a student’s essay could be automatically identified, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to …...

We address the issue of on-line detec- tion of communication problems in spoken dialogue systems. The useful- ness is investigated of the sequence of system question types and the word graphs corresponding to the respective user utterances. By applying both rule- induction and memory-based learning techniques to data obtained with …...

In a language generation system, a content planner embodies one or more “plans” that are usually hand–crafted, sometimes through manual analysis of target text. In this paper, we present a system that we developed to automati- cally learn elements of a plan and the ordering constraints among them. As training …...

We aim at finding the minimal set of fragments which achieves maximal parse accuracy in Data Oriented Parsing. Expe- riments with the Penn Wall Street Journal treebank show that counts of almost arbitrary fragments within parse trees are important, leading to improved parse accuracy over previous models tested on this …...

For ambiguous sentences, traditional semantics construction produces large numbers of higher-order formulas, which must then be � -reduced individ- ually. Underspecified versions can pro- duce compact descriptions of all read- ings, but it is not known how to perform � -reduction on these descriptions. We show how to do this …...