Articles

An approach is described for supplying se- lectional restrictions to parsers in natural language interfaces (NLIs) to databases by extracting the selectional restrictions from semantic descriptions of those NLIs. Au- tomating the process of finding selectional restrictions reduces NLI development time and may avoid errors introduced by hand- coding selectional …...

We present work-in-progress on the ma- chine acquisition of a lexicon from sen- tences that are each an unsegmented phone sequence paired with a primitive represen- tation of meaning. A simple exploratory algorithm is described, along with the di- rection of current work and a discussion of the relevance of …...

As the first step in an automated text sum- marization algorithm, this work presents a new method for automatically identi- fying the central ideas in a text based on a knowledge-based concept counting paradigm. To represent and generalize concepts, we use the hierarchical concept taxonomy WordNet. By setting appropri- ate …...

We extract from sentences a superstruc- ture made of argumentative operators and connectives applying to the remaining set of terminal sub-sentences. We found the argumentative interpretation of utterances on a semantics defined at the linguistic le- vel. We describe the computation of this particular semantics, based on the cons- traints …...

We describe a computational framework for a grammar architecture in which dif- ferent linguistic domains such as morphol- ogy, syntax, and semantics are treated not as separate components but compositional domains. The framework is based on Combinatory Categorial Grammars and it uses the morpheme as the basic building block of …...

This paper deals with the automatic trans- lation of route descriptions into graphic sketches. We discuss some general prob- lems implied by such inter-mode transcrip- tion. We propose a model for an automatic text-to-image translator with a two-stage intermediate representation in which the linguistic representation of a route descrip- tion …...

Common algorithms for sentence and word-alignment allow the automatic iden- tification of word translations from paxalhl texts. This study suggests that the identi- fication of word translations should also be possible with non-paxMlel and even unre- lated texts. The method proposed is based on the assumption that there is a …...

Event recognition We present a program for segmenting texts ac- cording to the separate events they describe. A modular architecture is described that al- lows us to examine the contributions made by particular aspects of natural language to event structuring. This is applied in the context of terrorist news articles, …...

This paper describes a heuristic-based approach to word-sense disambiguation. The heuristics that are applied to disambiguate a word depend on its part of speech, and on its relationship to neighboring salient words in the text. Parts of speech are found through a tagger, and related neighboring words are identified by …...

By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions served by pitch accents, as markers of both propo- sitional (semantic/pragmatic) and atten- tional salience. This …...

Syntactic natural language parsers have shown themselves to be inadequate for pro- cessing highly-ambiguous large-vocabulary text, as is evidenced by their poor per- formance on domains like the Wall Street Journal, and by the movement away from parsing-based approaches to text- processing in general. In this paper, I de- scribe …...

In this paper we present some novel ap- plications of Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) technique to parsing Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining grammars. The novel as- pects are (a) immediate generalization of parses in the training set, (b) generaliza- tion over recursive structures and (c) rep- resentation of generalized parses as Finite State Transducers. …...

Large-scale natural language generation re- quires the integration of vast mounts of knowledge: lexical, grammatical, and concep- tual. A robust generator must be able to operate well even when pieces of knowledge axe missing. It must also be robust against incomplete or inaccurate inputs. To attack these problems, we have …...

Semantic clusters of a domain form an important feature that can be useful for performing syntactic and semantic disam- biguation. Several attempts have been made to extract the semantic clusters of a domain by probabilistic or taxonomic tech- niques. However, not much progress has been made in evaluating the obtained …...

The lexicalist approach to Machine Trans- lation offers significant advantages in the development of linguistic descriptions. However, the Shake-and-Bake generation algorithm of (Whitelock, 1992) is NP- complete. We present a polynomial time algorithm for lexicalist MT generation pro- vided that sufficient information can be transferred to ensure more determinism. 1...

We describe a grammarless method for simul- taneously bracketing both halves of a paral- lel text and giving word alignments, assum- ing only a translation lexicon for the language pair. We introduce inversion-invariant trans- duction grammars which serve as generative models for parallel bilingual sentences with weak order constraints. Focusing …...

We describe a corpus-based induction algo- rithm for probabilistic context-free gram- mars. The algorithm employs a greedy heuristic search within a Bayesian frame- work, and a post-pass using the Inside- Outside algorithm. We compare the per- formance of our algorithm to n-gram mo- dels and the Inside-Outside algorithm in three …...

We introduce three new techniques for sta- tistical language models: extension mod- eling, nonmonotonic contexts, and the di- vergence heuristic. Together these tech- niques result in language models that have few states, even fewer parameters, and low message entropies. 1...

Many theories of semantic interpretation use A-term manipulation to composition- ally compute the meaning of a sentence. These theories are usually implemented in a language such as Prolog that can simulate A-term operations with first-order unifica- tion. However, for some interesting cases, such as a Combinatory Categorial Gram- mar account …...

Traditional approaches to quantifier scope typically need stipulation to exclude rea- dings that are unavailable to human under- standers. This paper shows that quantifier scope phenomena can be precisely charac- terized by a semantic representation cons- trained by surhce constituency, if the di- stinction between referential and quantifi- cational NPs …...