Articles

Coreference resolution involves finding antecedents for anaphoric discourse entities, such as definite noun phrases. But many definite noun phrases are not anaphoric because their meaning can be un- derstood from general world knowledge (e.g., "the White House" or "the news media"). We have developed a corpus-based algorithm for automat- ically …...

We present a shift-reduce rhetorical parsing algo- rithm that learns to construct rhetorical structures of texts from a corpus of discourse-parse action se- quences. The algorithm exploits robust lexical, syn- tactic, and semantic knowledge sources. I...

Most documents are about more than one subject, but many NLP and IR techniques implicitly assume documents have just one topic. We describe new clues that mark shifts to new topics, novel algorithms for identifying topic boundaries and the uses of such boundaries once identified. We report topic segmentation performance …...

We perform a linguistic analysis of documents during indexing for information retrieval. By eliminating index terms that occur only in subordinate clauses, index size is reduced by approximately 30% without adversely affecting precision or recall. These results hold for two corpora: a sample of the world wide web and an …...

A two-tier model for the description of morphologi- cal, syntactic and semantic variations of multi-word terms is presented. It is applied to term normal- ization of French and English corpora in the medi- cal and agricultural domains. Five different sources of morphological and semantic knowledge are ex- ploited (MULTEXT, CELEX, …...

We propose a mixed language query disam- biguation approach by using co-occurrence in- formation from monolingual data only. A mixed language query consists of words in a primary language and a secondary language. Our method translates the query into mono- lingual queries in either language. Two novel features for disambiguation, …...

This paper describes initial work on Deep Read, an automated reading comprehension system that accepts arbitrary text input (a story) and answers questions about it. We have acquired a corpus of 60 development and 60 test stories of 3 rd to 6 th grade material; each story is followed by …...

Non-compositional expressions present a special challenge to NLP applications. We present a method for automatic identification of non-compositional ex- pressions using their statistical properties in a text corpus. Our method is based on the hypothesis that when a phrase is non-composition, its mutual infor- mation differs significantly from the mutual …...

The dialogue strategies used by a spoken dialogue system strongly influence performance and user sat- isfaction. An ideal system would not use a single fixed strategy, but would adapt to the circumstances at hand. To do so, a system must be able to identify dialogue properties that suggest adaptation. This …...

The paper shows that movement or equivalent computational structure-changing operations of any kind at the level of logical form can be dispensed with entirely in capturing quantifer scope ambi- guity. It offers a new semantics whereby the ef- fects of quantifier scope alternation can be obtained by an entirely monotonic …...

We propose a formal system for representing the available readings of sentences displaying quan- tifier scope ambiguity, in which partial scopes may be expressed. We show that using a theory of scope availability based upon the function- argument structure of a sentence allows a deter- ministic, polynomial time test for …...

We present a statistical model of Japanese unknown words consisting of a set of length and spelling models classified by the character types that con- stitute a word. The point is quite simple: differ- ent character sets should be treated differently and the changes between character types are very im- …...

The paper describes an extensive experiment in inside-outside estimation of a lexicalized proba- bilistic context free grammar for German verb- final clauses. Grammar and formalism features which make the experiment feasible are de- scribed. Successive models are evaluated on pre- cision and recall of phrase markup. 1...

This paper introduces a new approach to morpho-syntactic analysis through Humor 99 (High-speed Unification Mo.rphology), a re- versible and unification-based morphological analyzer which has already been integrated with a variety of industrial applications. Hu- mor 99 successfully copes with problems of agglutinative (e.g. Hungarian, Turkish, Esto- nian) and other (highly) …...

This paper presents a dependency parsing scheme using an extended finite state approach. The parser augments input representation with "channels" so that links representing syntactic dependency rela- tions among words can be accommodated, and it- erates on the input a number of times to arrive at a fixed point. Intermediate …...

This paper presents a case study of analyzing and improving intercoder reliability in discourse tagging using statistical techniques. Bias- corrected tags are formulated and successfully used to guide a revision of the coding manual and develop an automatic classifier. 1...

In an effort to develop measures of discourse level management strategies, this study examines a measure of the degree to which decision- making interactions consist of sequences of utterance functions that are linked in a decision- making routine. The measure is applied to 100 dyadic interactions elicited in both face-to-face …...

We present a general architecture for efficient and deterministic morphological analysis based on memory-based learning, and apply it to morphological analysis of Dutch. The system makes direct mappings from letters in context to rich categories that encode morphological boundaries, syntactic class labels, and spelling changes. Both precision and recall of …...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information …...

An easy way of translating queries in one language to the other for cross-language information retrieval (IR) is to use a simple bilingual dictionary. Because of the general- purpose nature of such dictionaries, however, this simple method yields a severe translation ambiguity problem. This paper describes the degree to which …...