Articles

In synchronous rewriting, the productions of two rewriting systems are paired and applied synchronously in the derivation of a pair of strings. We present a new syn- chronous rewriting system and argue that it can handle certain phenomena that are not covered by existing synchronous sys- tems. We also prove …...

We study the computational complexity of the parsing problem of a variant of Lambek Categorial Grammar that we call semidirectional. In semidirectional Lambek calculus SD[ there is an additional non- directional abstraction rule allowing the formula abstracted over to appear any- where in the premise sequent's left-hand side, thus permitting …...

Under categorial grammars that have pow- erful rules like composition, a simple n-word sentence can have exponentially many parses. Generating all parses is ineffi- cient and obscures whatever true semantic ambiguities are in the input. This paper addresses the problem for a fairly general form of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, by …...

In this paper 1 we present a new pars- ing algorithm for linear indexed grammars (LIGs) in the same spirit as the one de- scribed in (Vijay-Shanker and Weir, 1993) for tree adjoining grammars. For a LIG L and an input string x of length n, we build a non …...

This paper addresses the problem of cor- recting spelling errors that result in valid, though unintended words (such as peace and piece, or quiet and quite) and also the problem of correcting particular word usage errors (such as amount and num- ber, or among and between). Such cor- rections require …...

This paper describes a system that leads us to believe in the feasibility of constructing natural spoken dialogue systems in task-oriented domains. It specifically addresses the issue of robust interpre- tation of speech in the presence of recognition errors. Robustness is achieved by a combination of statistical error post-correction, syntactically- …...

We present an overview of recent work in which eye movements are monitored as people follow spoken instructions to move objects or pictures in a visual workspace. Subjects naturally make saccadic eye-movements to objects that are closely time-locked to relevant information in the instruction. Thus the eye-movements provide a window …...

We present a natural language interface system which is based entirely on trained statistical models. The system consists of three stages of processing: parsing, semantic interpretation, and discourse. Each of these stages is modeled as a statistical process. The models are fully integrated, resulting in an end-to-end system that maps …...

This paper deals with the discovery, rep- resentation, and use of lexical rules (LRs) during large-scale semi-automatic compu- tational lexicon acquisition. The analy- sis is based on a set of LRs implemented and tested on the basis of Spanish and English business- and finance-related cor- pora. We show that, though …...

Most natural language processing tasks re- quire lexical semantic information. Au- tomated acquisition of this information would thus increase the robustness and portability of NLP systems. This pa- per describes an acquisition method which makes use of fixed correspondences be- tween derivational affixes and lexical se- mantic information. One advantage …...

Information retrieval is an important ap- plication area of natural-language pro- cessing where one encounters the gen- uine challenge of processing large quanti- ties of unrestricted natural-language text. This paper reports on the application of a few simple, yet robust and efficient noun- phrase analysis techniques to create bet- ter …...

A natural next step in the evolution of constraint-based grammar formalisms from rewriting formalisms is to abstract fully away from the details of the grammar mechanism--to express syntactic theories purely in terms of the properties of the class of structures they license. By fo- cusing on the structural properties of …...

In this paper, we show that Higher-Order Coloured Unification - a form of unification developed for automated theorem proving - provides a general theory for modeling the interface between the interpretation process and other sources of linguistic, non semantic information. In particular, it pro- vides the general theory for the …...

In this paper, we present a new approach for word sense disambiguation (WSD) us- ing an exemplar-based learning algorithm. This approach integrates a diverse set of knowledge sources to disambiguate word sense, including part of speech of neigh- boring words, morphological form, the un- ordered set of surrounding words, local …...

Lexical attributes, like syntactic (part-of-speech) and semantic (semantic category) attributes, are in most cases, ambiguous in every languages. Automatic resolution of ambiguity of these attributes can be achieved using different techniques; rule-based, statistical, NN-based and their hybrids. Moreover, one linguistic feature also has influence over the resolution of ambiguity of …...

Despite the importance of segmentation to a variety of software applications, almost noth- ing is known about the characteristics or distribution of ambiguous partitions (eg. to Pend vs. top_end) in Thai text. By using special-purpose code to investigate a large (-400K word) text corpus, we were able to extract 36,267 …...

This paper focusses on mental state ad- jectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Puste- jovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, in- stead of enumerating the various syntac- tic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is pos- sible to give …...

In the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1992) it is assumed that there are different types of projections (lexical and functional) and therefore different types of heads. This paper explains why functional heads are not treated as head-corners by the mini- realist head-corner parser described here. 1...

A system, WOLFIE, that acquires a map- ping of words to their semantic representa- tion is presented and a preliminary evalua- tion is performed. Tree least general gener- alizations (TLGGs) of the representations of input sentences are performed to assist in determining the representations of indi- vidual words in the …...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that quantifiers in natural languages do not have a fixed truth functional meaning as has long been held in logical semantics. Instead we suggest that quantifiers can best be modeled as complex inference procedures that are highly dynamic and sensitive to the …...