Articles

We provide a constraint based compu- tational model of linear precedence as employed in the HPSG grammar formal- ism. An extended feature logic which adds a wide range of constraints involv- ing precedence is described. A sound, complete and terminating deterministic constraint solving procedure is given. Deterministic computational model is …...

We present the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL. In contrast to conventional dialogue systems it mediates the dia- logue while processing maximally 50% of the dialogue in depth. Special require- ments (robustness and efficiency) lead to a 3-layered hybrid architecture for the dialogue module, using statistics, an …...

A novel approach to HPSG based natural language processing is described that uses an off-line compiler to automatically prime a declarative grammar for generation or parsing, and inputs the primed grammar to an advanced Earley-style processor. This way we provide an elegant solution to the problems with empty heads and …...

There are two main methodologies for constructing the knowledge base of a natural language analyser: the linguis- tic and the data-driven. Recent state-of- the-art part-of-speech taggers are based on the data-driven approach. Because of the known feasibility of the linguis- tic rule-based approach at related levels of description, the success …...

This paper presents an algorithm for tag- ging words whose part-of-speech proper- ties are unknown. Unlike previous work, the algorithm categorizes word tokens in con$ezt instead of word ~ypes. The algo- rithm is evaluated on the Brown Corpus. 1...

Recent work within the field of Categorial Grammar has seen the development of ap- proaches that allow different modes of lo- gical behaviour to be displayed within a single system, something corresponding to making available differing modes of lin- guistic description. Earlier attempts to achieve this goal have employed modal …...

The paper describes a parser for Catego- rial Grammar which provides fully word by word incremental interpretation. The parser does not require fragments of sen- tences to form constituents, and thereby avoids problems of spurious ambiguity. The paper includes a brief discussion of the relationship between basic Catego- rial Grammar …...

We present some variations affecting the association measure and thresholding on a technique for learning Selectional Re- strictions from on-line corpora. It uses a wide-coverage noun taxonomy and a statistical measure to generalize the ap- propriate semantic classes. Evaluation measures for the Selectional Restrictions learning task are discussed. Finally, an …...

Nominalization is a highly pro- ductive phenomena in most lan- guages. The process of nominaliza- tion ejects a verb from its syntactic role into a nominal position. The original verb is often replaced by a semantically emptied support verb (e.g., make a proposal). The choice of a support verb for …...

In this paper we provide a probabilis- tic interpretation for typed feature struc- tures very similar to those used by Pol- lard and Sag. We begin with a ver- sion of the interpretation which lacks a treatment of re-entrant feature struc- tures, then provide an extended interpre- tation which allows …...

Literal movement grammars (LMGs) pro- vide a general account of extraposition phe- nomena through an attribute mechanism al- lowing top-down displacement of syntacti- cal information. LMGs provide a simple and efficient treatment of complex linguistic phenomena such as cross-serial dependen- cies in German and Dutch--separating the treatment of natural language …...

Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1993) show that Linear Indexed Grammars (I_IG) can be processed in polynomial time by ex- ploiting constraints which make possible the extensive use of structure-sharing. This paper describes a formalism that is more powerful than I_IG, but which can also be processed in polynomial time using similar …...

Alignment methods based on byte-length comparisons of alignment blocks have been remarkably successful for aligning good translations from legislative transcriptions. For noisy translations in which the parallel text of a document has significant structural differences, byte-alignment methods often do not perform well. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) corpus is …...

Dialect groupings can be discovered ob- jectively and automatically by cluster analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas. The first step in the analysis, the computa- tion of linguistic distance.between each pair of sites, can be computed as Leven- shtein distance between phonetic strings. This …...

In this paper, we prove the decidability of the generation problem for those unifica- tion grammars which are based on context- free phrase structure rule skeletons, like e.g. LFG and PATR-II. The result shows a perhaps unexpected asymmetry, since it is valid also for those unification grammars whose parsing problem …...

Statistical language models are useful because they can provide probabilis- tic information upon uncertain decision making. The most common statistic is n-grams measuring word cooccurrences in texts. The method suffers from data shortage problem, however. In this pa- per, we suggest Bayesian networks be used in approximating the statistics of …...

We argue that the resource shar- ing that is commonly manifest in semantic accounts of coordination is instead appropriately handled in terms of structure-sharing in LFG f-structures. We provide an extension to the previous account of LFG seman- tics (Dalrymple et al., 1993a) accord- ing to which dependencies between f-structures …...

This paper defines a language Z~ for spe- cifying LFG grammars. This enables constraints on LFG's composite onto- logy (c-structures synchronised with f- structures) to be stated directly; no ap- peal to the LFG construction algorithm is needed. We use f to specify schemata annotated rules and the LFG uniquen- …...

This paper qualifies what a true term- recognition systems would have to recog- nize. The exact bracketing of the maximal termform is then proposed as an achieve- able goal upon which current system per- formance should be measured. How recall and precision metrics are best adapted for measuring term recognition …...

This paper shows first the problems raised by proper names in natural language processing. Second, it in- troduces the knowledge representation structure we use based on conceptual graphs. Then it explains the techniques which are used to process known and unknown proper names. At last, it gives the perfor- mance …...