Articles

"Prose rhythm" is a widely observed but scarcely quantified phenomenon. We de- scribe an information-theoretic model for measuring the regularity of lexical stress in English texts, and use it in combination with trigram language models to demon- strate a relationship between the probabil- ity of word sequences in English and …...

This paper presents an architecture for the generation of spoken monologues with con- textually appropriate intonation. A two- tiered information structure representation is used in the high-level content planning and sentence planning stages of generation to produce efficient, coherent speech that makes certain discourse relationships, such as explicit contrasts, appropriately …...

Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guid- ing the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the center- ing model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by indicators of the functional information …...

This paper reports on corpus-based research into the relationship between intonational vari- ation and discourse structure. We examine the effects of speaking style (read versus sponta- neous) and of discourse segmentation method (text-alone versus text-and-speech) on the na- ture of this relationship. We also compare the acoustic-prosodic features of initial, …...

We propose an Mgorithm to resolve anaphors, tackling mainly the problem of intrasentential antecedents. We base our methodology on the fact that such an- tecedents are likely to occur in embedded sentences. Sidner's focusing mechanism is used as the basic algorithm in a more com- plete approach. The proposed algorithm …...

In transformation-based parsing, a finite sequence of tree rewriting rules are checked for application to an input structure. Since in practice only a small percentage of rules are applied to any particular structure, the naive parsing algorithm is rather ineffi- cient. We exploit this sparseness in rule applications to derive …...

Off-line compilation of logic grammars us- ing Magic allows an incorporation of fil- tering into the logic underlying the gram- mar. The explicit definite clause charac- terization of filtering resulting from Magic compilation allows processor independent and logically clean optimizations of dy- namic bottom-up processing with respect to goal-directedness. Two …...

We give a new treatment of tabular LR parsing, which is an alternative to Tomita's generalized LR algorithm. The advantage is twofold. Firstly, our treatment is con- ceptually more attractive because it uses simpler concepts, such as grammar trans- formations and standard tabulation tech- niques also know as chart parsing. …...

We show how a general grammar may be automatically adapted for fast parsing of utterances from a specific domain by means of constituent pruning and grammar specialization based on explanation-based learning. These methods together give an order of magnitude increase in speed, and the coverage loss entailed by grammar spe- …...

We report on a method for compiling decision trees into weighted finite-state transducers. The key assumptions are that the tree predictions specify how to rewrite symbols from an input string, and the decision at each tree node is stateable in terms of regular expressions on the input string. Each leaf …...

This paper presents a quantitative evalu- ation of the portability to the stock mar- ket domain of the revision rule hierarchy used by the system STREAK to incremen- tally generate newswire sports summaries. The evaluation consists of searching a test corpus of stock market reports for sentence pairs whose (semantic …...

This paper describes a new statistical parser which is based on probabilities of dependencies between head-words in the parse tree. Standard bigram probability es- timation techniques are extended to calcu- late probabilities of dependencies between pairs of words. Tests using Wall Street Journal data show that the method per- forms …...

Many different metrics exist for evaluating parsing results, including Viterbi, Cross- ing Brackets Rate, Zero Crossing Brackets Rate, and several others. However, most parsing algorithms, including the Viterbi algorithm, attempt to optimize the same metric, namely the probability of getting the correct labelled tree. By choosing a parsing algorithm appropriate …...

We present a language model consisting of a collection of costed bidirectional finite state automata associated with the head words of phrases. The model is suitable for incremental application of lexical asso- ciations in a dynamic programming search for optimal dependency tree derivations. We also present a model and algorithm …...

This paper presents a generalised two- level implementation which can handle lin- ear and non-linear morphological opera- tions. An algorithm for the interpretation of multi-tape two-level rules is described. In addition, a number of issues which arise when developing non-linear grammars are discussed with examples from Syriac. 1...

This paper proposes the use of "pattern- based" context-free grammars as a basis for building machine translation (MT) sys- tems, which are now being adopted as per- sonal tools by a broad range of users in the cyberspace society. We discuss ma- jor requirements for such tools, including easy customization …...

° • We present an iterative procedure to build a Chinese language model (LM). We seg- ment Chinese text into words based on a word-based Chinese language model. How- ever, the construction of a Chinese LM it- self requires word boundaries. To get out of the chicken-and-egg problem, we propose …...

This paper describes an accurate and robust text alignment system for struc- turally different languages. Among structurally different languages such as Japanese and English, there is a limitation on the amount of word correspondences that can be statistically acquired. The proposed method makes use of two kinds of word correspondences …...

We propose a treatment of coordination based on the concepts of functor, argument and subcategorization. Its formalization comprises two parts which are conceptually independent. On one hand, we have ex- tended the feature structure unification to disjunctive and set values in order to check the compatibility and the satisfiability of …...

This paper introduces to the finite-state calculus a family of directed replace op- erators. In contrast to the simple re- place expression, UPPER -> LOWER, defined in Karttunen (1995), the new directed ver- sion, UPPER ©-> LOWER, yields an unam- biguous transducer if the lower language consists of a single …...