Articles

This paper describes a method to construct a case frame dic- tionary automatically from a raw corpus. The main prob- lem is how to handle the diversity of verb usages. We col- lect predicate-argument examples, which are distinguished by the verb and its closest case component in order to deal …...

In this paper we show how two standard outputs from information extraction (IE) systems – named entity annotations and scenario templates – can be used to enhance access to text collections via a standard text browser. We describe how this information is used in a prototype system designed to support …...

As part of MITRE’s work under the DARPA TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization) program, we are preparing a series of demonstrations to showcase the TIDES Integrated Feasibility Experiment on Bio-Security (IFE-Bio). The current demonstration illustrates some of the resources that can be made available to analysts tasked with …...

In this paper we describe a technique for improving the performance of an information extraction system for speech data by explicitly modeling the errors in the recognizer output. The approach combines a statistical model of named entity states with a lattice representation of hypothesized words and errors annotated with recognition …...

The limited coverageof availabletranslation lexiconscan posea se- rious challenge in some cross-language information retrieval appli- cations. We present two techniques for combining evidence from dictionary-based and corpus-based translation lexicons, and show that backoff translation outperforms a technique based on merging lexicons. 1....

In this paper, we describe a process used for guiding the evaluation and transformation process for language processing research and development. The Integrated Feasibility Experiment process is explained by describing the key six steps, and then providing a specific example to help understand how to implement the steps. 1....

This paper introduces a set of guidelines for annotating time expressions with a canonicalized representation of the times they refer to. Applications that can benefit from such an annotated corpus include information extraction (e.g., normalizing temporal references for database entry), question answering (answering “when” questions), summarization (temporally ordering information), machine …...

In this paper, we explore the effects of data fusion on First Story Detection [1] in a broadcast news domain. The data fusion element of this experiment involves the combination of evidence derived from two distinct representations of document content in a single cluster run. Our composite document representation consists …...

We present the design and development of a Hidden Markov Model for the division of news broadcasts into story segments. Model topology, and the textual features used, are discussed, together with the non-parametric estimation techniques that were employed for obtaining estimates for both transition and observation probabilities. Visualization methods developed …...

We describe a novel method for detecting errors in task-based human-computer (HC) dialogues by automatically deriving them from semantic tags. We examined 27 HC dialogues from the DARPA Communicator air travel domain, comparing user inputs to system responses to look for slot value discrepancies, both automatically and manually. For the …...

This demonstration will motivate some of the significant properties of the Galaxy Communicator Software Infrastructure and show how they support the goals of the DARPA Communicator program. Keywords Spoken dialogue, speech interfaces 1....

We describe and present evaluation results for Talk’n’Travel, a spoken dialogue language system for making air travel plans over the telephone. Talk’n’Travel is a fully conversational, mixed- initiative system that allows the user to specify the constraints on his travel plan in arbitrary order, ask questions, etc., in general spoken …...

This pap er describ es a searc h tec hnology whic h enables im- pro v ed searc h across div erse genres of digital ob jects { do c- umen ts, paten ts, cross-language retriev al, n umeric data and images. The tec hnology lev erages h uman indexing …...

A GUI is presented with our PIRCS retrieval system for supporting English-Chinese cross language information retrieval. The query translation approach is employed using the LDC bilingual wordlist. Given an English query, different translation methods and their retrieval results can be demonstrated. 1....

To support engaging human users in robust, mixed-initiative speech dialogue interactions which reach beyond current capabilities in dialogue systems, the DARPA Communicator program [1] is funding the development of a distributed message-passing infrastructure for dialogue systems which all Communicator participants are using. In this presentation, we describe the features of …...

In this paper we report on our work on a prototype route navigation dialogue system for use in a vehicle. The system delivers spoken turn-by-turn directions, and has been developed to accept naturally phrased navigation queries, as part of our overall effort to create an in-vehicle information system which delivers …...

This paper describes a dialogue act tagging scheme developed for the purpose of providing finer-grained quantitative dialogue met- rics for comparing and evaluating DARPA COMMUNICATOR spo- ken dialogue systems. We show that these dialogue act metrics can be used to quantify the amount of effort spent in a dialogue main- …...

An important first step in developing a cross-lingual question answering system is to understand whether techniques developed with English text will also work with other languages, such as Chinese. The Marsha Chinese question answering system described in this paper uses techniques similar to those used in the English systems developed …...

Websites of businesses should accommodate both customer needs and business requirements. Traditional menu-driven navigation and key word search do not allow users to describe their intentions precisely. We have developed a conversational interface to online shopping that provides convenient, personalized access to information using natural language dialog. User studies show …...

We present a deployed, conversational dialog system that assists users in finding computers based on their usage patterns and constraints on specifications. We discuss findings from a market survey and two user studies. We compared our system to a directed dialog system and a menu driven navigation system. We found …...