Articles

Information Extraction (IE) systems are com- monly based on pattern matching. Adapting an IE system to a new scenario entails the construction of a new pattern base---a time- consuming and expensive process. We have implemented a system for finding patterns au- tomatically from un-annotated text. Starting with a small initial …...

A large-scale controlled vocabulary indexing system is described. The system currently covers almost 70,000 named entity topics, and applies to documents from thousands of news publications. Topic definitions are built through substantially automated knowledge engineering. 1...

This paper describes the results of some experiments using a new approach to information access that combines techniques from natural language process- ing and knowledge representation with a penalty- based technique for relevance estimation and passage retrieval. Unlike many attempts to combine natural language processing with information retrieval, these results …...

This paper reports on work carried out to de- velop a spelling and grammar corrector for Dan- ish, addressing in particular the issue of how a form of shallow parsing is combined with er- ror detection and correction for the treatment of context-dependent spelling errors. The syn- tactic grammar for …...

This paper presents a hybrid approach for named entity (NE) tagging which combines Maximum Entropy Model (MaxEnt), Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and handcrafted grammatical rules. Each has innate strengths and weaknesses; the combination results in a very high precision tagger. MaxEnt includes external gazetteers in the system. Sub-category generation is …...

We present a divide-and-conquer strategy based on finite state technology for shallow parsing of real- world German texts. In a first phase only the topo- logical structure of a sentence (i.e., verb groups, subclauses) are determined. In a second phase the phrasal grammars are applied to the contents of the …...

This paper proposes a framework of language inde- pendent morphological analysis and mainly concen- trate on tokenization, the first process of morpholog- ical analysis. Although tokenization is usually not regarded as a difficult task in most segmented lan- guages such as English, there are a number of prob- lems in …...

Sophisticated grammar formalisms, such as LFG, al- low concisely capturing complex linguistic phenom- ena. The powerful operators provided by such for- malisms can however introduce spurious ambigu- ity, making parsing inefficient. A simple form of corpus-based grammar pruning is evaluated experi- mentally on two wide-coverage grammars, one En- giish and …...

Compound noun analysis is one of the crucial prob- lems in Korean language processing because a series of nouns in Korean may appear without white space in real texts, which makes it difficult to identify the morphological constituents. This paper presents an effective method of Korean compound noun segmen- tation …...

This paper introduces a system for categorizing un- known words. The system is based on a multi- component architecture where each component is re- sponsible for identifying one class of unknown words. The focus of this paper is the components that iden- tify names and spelling errors. Each component uses …...

ARBITER is a Prolog program that extracts assertions about macromolecular binding relationships from biomedical text. We de- scribe the domain knowledge and the under- specified linguistic analyses that support the identification of these predications. After discussing a formal evaluation of ARBITER, we report on its application to 491,000 MEDLINE ~ …...

We describe and evaluate an implemented system for general-knowledge question answering. The sys- tem combines techniques for standard ad-hoc infor- mation retrieval (IR), query-dependent text summa- rization, and shallow syntactic and semantic sen- tence analysis. In a series of experiments we examine the role of each statistical and linguistic knowledge …...

Trigrams'n'Tags (TnT) is an efficient statistical part-of-speech tagger. Contrary to claims found elsewhere in the literature, we argue that a tagger based on Markov models performs at least as well as other current approaches, including the Maximum Entropy framework. A recent comparison has even shown that TnT performs significantly better …...

This paper discusses an information extraction (IE) system, Textract, in natural language (NL) question answering (QA) and examines the role of IE in QA application. It shows: (i) Named Entity tagging is an important component for QA, (ii) an NL shallow parser provides a structural basis for questions, and (iii) …...

We present an algorithm and a tool for automatically revising grammars for natural language processing (NLP) systems to disallow specifically identified sentences or sets of sentences. We also outline an approach for automatically revising attribute value grammars using counter-examples. Developing grammars for NLP systems that are both general enough to …...

Customer care in technical domains is increasingly based on e-mail communication, allowing for the re- production of approved solutions. Identifying the customer's problem is often time-consuming, as the problem space changes if new products are launched. This paper describes a new approach to the classifi- cation of e-mail requests based …...

In this paper we present a new, multi- lingual data-driven method for coreference resolution as implemented in the SWIZZLE system. The results obtained after training this system on a bilingual corpus of English and Romanian tagged texts, outperformed coreference resolution in each of the indi- vidual languages. 1...

In this paper, we describe a system to rank sus- pected answers to natural language questions. We process both corpus and query using a new technique, predictive annotation, which aug- ments phrases in texts with labels anticipating their being targets of certain kinds of questions. Given a natural language question, …...

Over the past decade or so, a lot of work in computational linguistics has been directed at finding ways to exploit the ever increasing volume of electronic bilingual corpora. These efforts have allowed for substantial expansion of the computational toolbox. We describe a system, TransCheck, which makes intensive use of …...

This work is in the context of TRANSTYPE, a sys- tem that observes its user as he or she types a trans- lation and repeatedly suggests completions for the text already entered. The user may either accept, modify, or ignore these suggestions. We describe the design, implementation, and performance of …...