Articles

We have been developing a spoken language system to recognize and understand spontaneous speech. It is difficult for such systems to achieve good coverage of the lexicon and grammar that subjects might use because spontaneous speech often contains disfluencies and ungrammatical constructions. Our goal is to respond appropri- ately to …...

Recently we have begun to build the basic tools for a genetic speech-dialog system. The main modules, their function and internal ccommunication have been specified. The different components ~e connected through a computer network. A preliminary version of the system has been tested, using simplified versions of the modules. The …...

This paper describes PEGASUS, a spoken language inter- face for on-line air travel planning that we have recently devel- oped. PEGASUS leverages off our spoken language technology development in the ATIS domain, and enables users to book flights using the American Airlines EAASY SABRE system. The input query is transformed …...

This paper presents a model for generating prosodically ap- propriate synthesized responses to database queries using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG - cf. [22]), a for- malism which easily integrates the notions of syntactic con- stituency, prosodic phrasing and information structure. The model determines accent locations within phrases on the ba- …...

This paper describes a method of detecting speechrepairs that uses a part-of-speech tagger. The tagger is given knowledge about category transitions for speechrepairs, and so is able to mark a transition either as a likely repair or as fluent speech. Other contextual clues, such as editing terms, word fragments, and …...

An ongoing debate in text understanding efforts centers on the use of pattern-matching techniques, which some have characterized as "designed to ignore as much text as possible," versus approaches which primarily employ rules that are domain-independent and linguisticaUy-motivated. For instance, in the message-processing community, there has been a noticeable pulling …...

The functionality of systems that extract information from texts can be specified quite simply: the input is a stream of texts and the output is some representation of the informa- tion to be extracted. Hence, the problem of template design is an instance of the problem of knowledge representation. In …...

We present the newest implementation of the LINGSTAT machine-aided translation system. The moat signiflcsat change from earlier versions is a new set of modules that pro- duce a draft translation of the document for the user to refer to or modify. This paper describes these modules, with spe- cial emphasis …...

We present an overview of Candide, a system for automatic translation of French text to English text. Candide uses methods of information theory and statistics to develop a probability model of the translation process. This model, which is made to accord as closely as possible with a large body of …...

Current MT systems, whatever translation method they at present employ, do not reach an optimum output on free text. Our hy- pothesis for the experiment reported in this paper is that if an MT environment can use the best results from a variety of MT systems working simultaneously on the …...

This paper describes a semi-automatic method for associating a Japanese lexicon with a semantic concept taxonomy called an ontology, using a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary as a "bridge". The ontology supports semantic processing in a knowledge-based machine translation system by providing a set of language-neutral symbols and semantic information. To put …...

In the second year of evaluations of the ARPA HLT Machine Translation (MT) Initiative, methodologies developed and tested in 1992 were applied to the 1993 MT test runs. The current methodology optimizes the inherently subjective judgments on translation accuracy and quality by channeling the judgments of non-translators into many data …...

Collocations are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to translate, primarily because they are opaque and can not be translated on a word by word basis. We describe a program named Champollion which, given a pair of parallel corpora in two different languages, automatically produces translations of an input list of …...

Development has begun on a semantic evaluation (Se- mEval) methodology and infrastructure for the ARPA Spo- ken Language Program. SemEval is an attempt to define a task-independent technology-based evaluation for language- understanding systems consisting of three parts: word-sense identification, predicate-argument structure determination, and identification of coreference relations. An initial spoken- …...

The Penn Treebank has recently implemented a new syn- tactic annotation scheme, designed to highlight aspects of predicate-argument structure. This paper discusses the implementation of crucial aspects of this new annotation scheme. It incorporates a more consistent treatment of a wide range of grammatical phenomena, provides a set of coin- …...

We present results of experiments designed to assess the usefulness of a new technique for the evaluation of translation quality, comparing human rankings with automatic measures. The basis of our approach is the use of a standard set and the adoption of a statistical view of translation quality. This approach …...

This paper considers key elements of evaluation methodol- ogy, indicating the many points involved and advocating an unpacking approach in specifying an evaluation remit and de- sign. Recognising the importance of both environment vari- ables and system parameters leads to a grid organisation for tests. The paper illustrates the application …...

We attemped to improve recognition accuracy by reduc- ing the inadequacies of the lexicon and language model. Specifically we address the following three problems: (1) the best size for the lexicon, (2) conditioning written text for spoken language recognition, and (3) using additional training outside the text distribution. We found …...

In this paper, we propose a new stochastic language model that integrates local and global constraints effectively and describe a speechrecognition system basedon it. Theproposedlanguagemodel uses the dependencies within adjacent words as local constraints in the same way as conventional word N-gram models. To capture the global constraints between non-contiguous …...

This paperintroduces a simple mixtare language model that attempts to capture long distance conslraints in a sentence or paragraph. The model is an m-component mixture of Irigram models. The models were constructed using a 5K vocabulary and trained using a 76 mil- lion word Wail Street Journal text corpus. Using …...