Articles

A log.ical recasting of B.inding Theory is performed as an enhancing step tor the purpose ot its gull and lean declarative implementation. A new insight on sentential anaptioric processes is presented which may suggestively be c%ptured by the slogan binding conclitions are me effect of phase quantification on the universe …...

This paper proposes decoupling the dependency tree from word order, such that surface ordering is not determined by traversing the dependency tree. We develop the notion of a word order do- main structure, which is linked but structurally dissimilar to the syntactic dependency tree. The proposal results in a lexicalized, …...

This paper presents a technique to deal with multiword nominal terminology in a compu- tational Lexical Functional Grammar. This method treats multiword terms as single to- kens by modifying the preprocessing stage of the grammar (tokenization and morphological anal- ysis), which consists of a cascade of two-level finite-state automata (transducers). …...

In relatively free word order languages, grammat- ical functions are intricately related to case mark- ing. Assuming an ordered representation of the predicate-argument structure, this work proposes a Combinatory Categorial Grammar formulation of relating surface case cues to categories and types for correctly placing the arguments in the predicate- argument …...

A large spoken dialogue translation system imposes both engineering and linguistic constraints on the way in which linguistic information is communi- cated between modules. We describe the design and use of interface terms, whose formal, functional and communicative role has been tested in a sequence of integrated systems and which …...

The paper presents a language model that devel- ops syntactic structure and uses it to extract mean- ingful information from the word history, thus en- abling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint sequence of words-binary-parse-structure with headword an- notation and operates in a …...

In this paper we present an algorithm to an- chor floating quantifiers in Japanese, a language in which quantificational nouns and numeral- classifier combinations can appear separated from the noun phrase they quantify. The algo- rithm differentiates degree and event modifiers from nouns that quantify noun phrases. It then finds …...

We develop a Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) model based on the syntactic representations of Lexical- Functional Grammar (LFG). We start by sum- marizing the original DOP model for tree represen- tations and then show how it can be extended with corresponding functional structures. The resulting LFG-DOP model triggers a new, corpus-based …...

We show how the DOP model can be used for fast and robust processing of spoken input in a practical spoken dialogue system called OVIS. OVIS, Openbaar Vervoer Informatie Systeem ("Public Transport Infor- mation System"), is a Dutch spoken language infor- mation system which operates over ordinary telephone lines. The …...

In this article, we apply to natural language parsing and tagging the device of trigger- pair predictors, previously employed exclu- sively within the field of language mod- elling for speech recognition. Given the task of predicting the correct rule to as- sociate with a parse-tree node, or the cor- rect …...

This paper examines the phenomenon of conso- nant spreading in Arabic stems. Each spread- ing involves a local surface copying of an un- derlying consonant, and, in certain phonologi- cal contexts, spreading alternates productively with consonant lengthening (or gemination). The morphophonemic triggers of spreading lie in the patterns or even …...

Redundancy is a good thing, at least in a learn- ing process. To be a good teacher you must say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you have just said. Well, three times is better than one. To acquire and learn knowl- edge from text …...

Semantic relationships among words and phrases are often marked by explicit syntactic or lexical clues that help recognize such rela- tionships in texts. Within complex nominals, however, few overt clues are available. Sys- tems that analyze such nominals must com- pensate for the lack of surface clues with other information. …...

The lexical acquisition system presented in this pa- per incrementally updates linguistic properties of un- known words inferred from their surrounding con- text by parsing sentences with an HPSG grammar for German. We employ a gradual, information- based concept of "unknownness" providing a uni- form treatment for the range of …...

FrameNet is a three-year NSF-supported project in corpus-based computational lexicog- raphy, now in its second year (NSF IRI-9618838, "Tools for Lexicon Building"). The project's key features are (a) a commitment to corpus evidence for semantic and syntactic generaliza- tions, and (b) the representation of the valences of its target words …...

Cross-document coreference occurs when the same person, place, event, or concept is discussed in more than one text source. Computer recognition of this phenomenon is important because it helps break "the document boundary" by allowing a user to ex- amine information about a particular entity from multiple text sources at …...

Recognizing shallow linguistic patterns, such as ba- sic syntactic relationships between words, is a com- mon task in applied natural language and text pro- cessing. The common practice for approaching this task is by tedious manual definition of possible pat- tern structures, often in the form of regular expres- sions …...

Word graphs are able to represent a large num- ber of different utterance hypotheses in a very compact manner. However, usually they con- tain a huge amount of redundancy in terms of word hypotheses that cover almost identi- cal intervals in time. We address this problem by introducing hypergraphs for …...

Starting from descriptions of French connectives (in particular "donc"---therefore), on the one hand, and aspectual properties of French tenses pass4 simple and imparfait on the other hand, we study in this paper how the two interact with respect to the expression of causality. It turns out that their interaction is …...

We describe a method for the fully automatic learning of hierarchical finite state translation models. The input to the method is transcribed speech utterances and their corresponding hu- man translations, and the output is a set of head transducers, i.e. statistical lexical head- outward transducers. A word-alignment func- tion and …...