Articles

In this article, we show how a bilingual text- translation alignment method can be adapted to deal with more than two versions of a text. Experiments on a trilingual corpus demonstrate that this method yields better bilingual align- ments than can be obtained with bilingual text- alignment methods. Moreover, for …...

In this paper we show how machine learning techniques for constructing and combining sev- eral classifiers can be applied to improve the accuracy of an existing English POS tagger (MSxquez and Rodrfguez, 1997). Additionally, the problem of data sparseness is also addressed by applying a technique of generating convez pseudo-data …...

Corpus-based grammar induction generally re- lies on hand-parsed training data to learn the structure of the language. Unfortunately, the cost of building large annotated corpora is pro- hibitively expensive. This work aims to improve the induction strategy when there are few labels in the training data. We show that the …...

We present a method for extracting parts of objects from wholes (e.g. "speedometer" from "car"). Given a very large corpus our method finds part words with 55% accuracy for the top 50 words as ranked by the system. The part list could be scanned by an end-user and added to …...

I show that the equational treatment of ellipsis proposed in (Dalrymple et al., 1991) can further be viewed as modeling the effect of parallelism on semantic interpretation. I illustrate this claim by showing that the account straightfor- wardly extends to a general treatment of sloppy identity on the one hand, …...

We show that discourse structure need not bear the full burden of conveying discourse relations by showing that many of them can be explained non- structurally in terms of the grounding of anaphoric presuppositions (Van der Sandt, 1992). This simpli- fies discourse structure, while still allowing the real- isation of …...

Distributional similarity is a useful notion in es- timating the probabilities of rare joint events. It has been employed both to cluster events ac- cording to their distributions, and to directly compute averages of estimates for distributional neighbors of a target event. Here, we examine the tradeoffs between model size …...

We study distributional similarity measures for the purpose of improving probability estima- tion for unseen cooccurrences. Our contribu- tions are three-fold: an empirical comparison of a broad range of measures; a classification of similarity functions based on the information that they incorporate; and the...

A great deal of work has been done demonstrat- ing the ability of machine learning algorithms to automatically extract linguistic knowledge from annotated corpora. Very little work has gone into quantifying the difference in ability at this task between a person and a machine. This pa- per is a first …...

The possibilities for data mining from large text collections are virtually untapped. Text ex- presses a vast, rich range of information, but en- codes this information in a form that is difficult to decipher automatically. Perhaps for this rea- son, there has been little work in text data min- ing …...

We describe a distributed, modular architecture for platform independent natural language sys- tems. It features automatic interface genera- tion and self-organization. Adaptive (and non- adaptive) voting mechanisms are used for inte- grating discrete modules. The architecture is suitable for rapid prototyping and product de- livery. 1...

ing Horacio Saggion Ddpartement d'Informatique et Recherche Opdrationnelle Universitd de Montrdal CP 6128, Succ Centre-Ville Montrdal, Qudbec, Canada, H3C 3J7 Fax: +1-514-343-5834 saggion@iro, umontreal, ca Abstract We present work on the automatic generation of short indicative-informative abstracts of scien- tific and technical articles. The indicative part of the abstract identifies …...

This paper presents a pronoun resolution algo- rithm that adheres to the constraints and rules of Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995) and is an alternative to Brennan et al.'s 1987 algo- rithm. The advantages of this new model, the Left-Right Centering Algorithm (LRC), lie in its incremental processing of …...

This paper examines the use of an unsuper- vised statistical model for determining the at- tachment of ambiguous coordinate phrases (CP) of the form nl p n2 cc n3. The model pre- sented here is based on JAR98], an unsupervised model for determining prepositional phrase at- tachment. After training on …...

This paper discusses a decision-tree approach to the problem of assigning probabilities to words following a given text. In contrast with previ- ous decision-tree language model attempts, an algorithm for selecting nearly optimal questions is considered. The model is to be tested on a standard task, The Wall Street Journal, …...

Filled pauses are characteristic of spontaneous speech and can present considerable problems for speech recognition by being often recognized as short words. An um can be recognized as thumb or arm if the recognizer's language model does not adequately represent FP's. Recognition of quasi-spontaneous speech (medical dictation) is subject to …...

Since Kimball (73) parsing preference principles such as "Right association" (RA) and "Minimal attachment" (MA) are often formulated with respect to constituent trees. We present 3 preference principles based on "derivation trees" within the framework of LTAGs. We argue they remedy some shortcomings of the former approaches and account for …...

This paper proposes a method for packing fea- ture structures, which automatically collapses equivalent parts of lexical/phrasal feature struc- tures of HPSG into a single packed feature struc- ture. This method avoids redundant repetition of unification of those parts. Preliminary exper- iments show that this method can significantly improve a …...

Human understanding of spoken language ap- pears to integrate the use of contextual ex- pectations with acoustic level perception in a tightly-coupled, sequential fashion. Yet com- puter speech understanding systems typically pass the transcript produced by a speech rec- ognizer into a natural language parser with no integration of acoustic …...

In this paper, I discuss issues pertinent to the design of a task-based evaluation methodology for a spoken machine translation (MT) sys- tem processing human to human communica- tion rather than human to machine communi- cation. I claim that system mediated human to human communication requires new evaluation criteria and …...