Articles

The acquisition of the semantics of natural language spatial terms is considered within the cognitive framework introduced by (Lan- gncker, 1987), and the computational frame- work of the Berkeley L0 project (Feldman et. al., 1990). We describe a computational model which incorporates selective attention mech- anisms to facilitate the identification …...

This paper describes our preliminary research on "attention-sharing" in infants' language ac- quisition. Attention-sharing is the activity of paying one's attention to someone else's atten- tional target. This enables one to observe oth- ers' sensory-input (what they are perceiving from the target) and motor-output (what they are doing in response …...

In this paper, we propose a method for con- structing bigram LR tables by way of incor- porating bigram constraints into an LR table. Using a bigram LR table, it is possible for a GLR parser to make use of both big'ram and CFG constraints in natural language process- ing. …...

We are concerned that the quality of results produced by an NLP parser bears little, if any, relation to the percentage-results claimed by the various NLP parser-systems presently available for use. To illustrate this problem, we examine one readily available NLP tagging and parsing system, the ENGCG parser; and one …...

Can we do text analysis without phrase struc- ture? We think the answer could be positive. In this paper we outline the basics of an under- lying theory which yields hierarchical structure as the result of more abstract principles relat- ing to the combinatorial properties of linguistic units. We discuss …...

In leading morpho-phonological theories and state-of-the-art text-to-speech systems it is assumed that word pronunciation cannot be learned or performed without in-between anal- yses at several abstraction levels (e.g., mor- phological, graphemic, phonemic, syllabic, and stress levels). We challenge this assump- tion for the case of English word pronunci- ation. Using …...

We present a procedure that determines a set of phonemes possibly intended by a speaker from a recognized or uttered phone. This in- formation will be used to allow a speech rec- ognizer to take pronunciation into account or to consider input from a noisy source during lexical access. We …...

This paper mainly presents a Turkish sentence generator for producing the actual text from its semantic description. To concentrate on the text generation rather than text planning, we assume that the lexicalized semantic de- scription of the text is produced in some way, currently given by hand. In the generation, …...

Applied discourse analysis is a hot topic in In- formation Retrieval (IR) and the related field of Information Extraction (IE). Although in- teresting observations about discourse can be made "by hand," applications require large quantities of data about language -- data which is rather uninteresting. This paper in- vestigates using …...

Recently I have been intrigued by the reappearance of an old friend, George Kingsley Zipf, in a number of not entirely expected places. The law named for him is ubiquitous, but Zipf did not actually discover the law so much as provide a plausible explanation. Others have proposed modifications to …...

The idea of '~familial relationships" among lan- guages is well-established and accepted, al- though some controversies persist in a few specific instances. By painstakingly record- ing and identifying regularities and similarities and comparing these to the historical record, linguists have been able to produce a general "family tree" incorporating most …...

This paper explores the use of weighted cusums, a technique found in authorship attribution studies, for the purpose of identifying sublanguages. The tech- nique, and its relation to standard cusums (cumulative sum charts) is first described, and the formulae for calculations given in detail. The technique compares texts by testing …...

This paper analyzes the functionality of dif- ferent distance metrics that can be used in a bottom-up unsupervised algorithm for au- tomatic word categorization. The proposed method uses a modified greedy-type algorithm. The formulations of fuzzy theory are also used to calculate the degree of membership for the elements in …...

We discuss an automatic method for the construction of hypertext links within and between newspaper articles. The method comprises three steps: determining the lexical chains in a text, building links between the paragraphs of articles, and building links between articles. Lexical chains capture the semantic relations between words that occur …...

Our argumentation system NAG uses Bayesian networks in a user model and in a normative model to assemble and assess nice arguments, that is arguments which balance persuasive- ness with normative correctness. Attentional focus is simulated in both models to select relevant subnetworks for Bayesian propaga- tion. Bayesian propagation in …...

This article attempts to determine what ele- ments of linguistic theory are used in statisti- cal language learning, and why the extracted language models look like they do. The study indicates that some linguistic elements, such as the notion of a word, are simply too useful to be ignored. The …...

A statistical language model may be used to segment a data sequence by thresholding its instantaneous entropy. In this paper we de- scribe how this process works, and we apply it to the problem of discovering separator sym- bols in a text. Our results show that language models which bootstrap …...

Memory-based learning, keeping full memory ofleaxning material, appeaxs a viable approach to learning N-~ tasks, and is often superior in genera~sation accuracy to eager learning approaches that abstract from learning mate- riaL Here we investigate three pa~'tial memory- based learning approaches which remove from memory specific task instance types estimated …...

In this document, we outline some elements related to sense variation and to sense delim- itation within the perspective of the Gener- ative Lexicon. We then show that, in some cases, the Qualia structure can be combined with or replaced by a small number of rules, which seem to capture …...

We describe two systems: GATE (General Ar- chitecture for Text Engineering), an architec- ture to aid in the production and delivery of language engineering systems which signifi- cantly reduces development time and ease of reuse in such systems. We also describe a sense tagger which we implemented within the GATE …...