Articles

In this paper we relate a number of parsing algorithms which have been developed in very different areas of parsing theory, and which include deterministic algo- rithms, tabular algorithms, and a parallel algorithm. We show that these algorithms are based on the same underlying ideas. By relating existing ideas, we …...

We describe an efficient bottom-up parser that in- terleaves syntactic and semantic structure build- ing. Two techniques are presented for reducing search by reducing local ambiguity: Limited left- context constraints are used to reduce local syn- tactic ambiguity, and deferred sortal-constraint application is used to reduce local semantic am- biguity. …...

Human face-to-face conversation is an ideal model for human-computer dialogue. One of the major features of face-to-face communication is its multi- plicity of communication channels that act on mul- tiple modalities. To realize a natural multimodal dialogue, it is necessary to study how humans per- ceive information and determine the …...

This paper presents a statistical decision procedure for lexical ambiguity resolution. The algorithm exploits both local syntactic patterns and more distant collo- cational evidence, generating an efficient, effective, and highly perspicuous recipe for resolving a given ambigu- ity. By identifying and utilizing only the single best dis- ambiguating evidence in …...

We describe our experience with automatic align- ment of sentences in parallel English-Chinese texts. Our report concerns three related topics: (1) progress on the HKUST English-Chinese Par- allel Bilingual Corpus; (2) experiments addressing the applicability of Gale ~ Church's (1991) length- based statistical method to the task of align- ment …...

We present an algorithm for computing n-gram probabil- ities from stochastic context-free grammars, a procedure that can alleviate some of the standard problems associated with n-grams (estimation from sparse data, lack of linguis- tic structure, among others). The method operates via the computation of substring expectations, which in turn is …...

This paper presents our implemented computa- tional model for interpreting and generating in- direct answers to Yes-No questions. Its main fea- tures are 1) a discourse-plan-based approach to implicature, 2) a reversible architecture for gen- eration and interpretation, 3) a hybrid reasoning model that employs both plan inference and log- …...

This study employs a knowledge intensive corpus analysis to identify the elements of the commu- nicative context which can be used to determine the appropriate lexical and grammatical form of instructional texts. IMAGENE, an instructional text generation system based on this analysis: is presented, particularly with reference to its ex- …...

It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellip- sis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in ques- tion: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the syntax, and (2) whether the form is anaphoric in the …...

This paper is about the flow of inference between com- municative intentions, discourse structure and the do- main during discourse processing. We augment a the- ory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and reasoning about them, in order to provide an account of how the attitudes …...

We describe and evaluate hidden understanding models, a statistical learning approach to natural language understanding. Given a string of words, hidden understanding models determine the most likely meaning for the string. We discuss 1) the problem of representing meaning in this framework, 2) the structure of the statistical model, 3) …...

This paper describes TextTiling, an algorithm for parti- tioning expository texts into coherent multi-paragraph discourse units which reflect the subtopic structure of the texts. The algorithm uses domain-independent lex- ical frequency and distribution information to recog- nize the interactions of multiple simultaneous themes. Two fully-implemented versions of the algorithm are …...

We describe a prototype system which induces a categorial grammar from a simple text corpus of children's reading books. Unlike previous attempts at grammar induction, (I) there are no rules of grammar, only a richly structured lexicon; (2) we rely both on an informing linguistic theory and on statistical methods …...

W~ describe an implementation of a hybrid statisti- cal/symbolic approach to repairing parser failures in a speech-to-speech translation system. I We describe a rnodale which takes as input a fragmented parse and ree- turas a repaired meaning representation. It negotiates with the speaker about what the complete meaning of the …...

This paper describes a "bootstrapping" method which uses a broad-coverage, rule-based parser to compute probabilities while parsing an untagged corpus of NL text, and which then incorporates those probabilities into the processing of the same parser as it analyzes new text. Results are reported which show that this method can …...

Symbolic and statistical approaches have traditionally been kept separate and applied to very different problems. Symbolic techniques apply best where we have a priori knowledge of the language or the domain and where the application of a theory or study of selected examples can help leverage and extend our knowledge. …...

This paper is an attempt to bring together two ap- proaches to language analysis. The possible use of prob- abilistic information in principle-based grammars and parsers is considered, including discussion on some the- oretical and computational problems that arise. Finally a partial implementation of these ideas is presented, along with …...

This paper presents an original method and its imple- mentation to extract terminology from corpora by com- bining linguistic filters and statistical methods. Start- ing from a linguistic study of the terms of telecommu- nication domain, we designed a number of filters which enable us to obtain a first selection …...

This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hy- pothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and pointing out which of its char- acteristics are best preserved or eliminated in moving to the …...

We present a comparative analysis of the performance of a statistics-based system for the formation of semantic groups of adjectives when various sources of linguistic knowledge are introduced. We identify four different types of slufllow linguistic knowledge that are applicable to this system, and we quantify the performance gained by …...