Articles

We describe a method for evaluating a grammar checking application with hand-bracketed parses. A randomly-selected set of sentences was sub- mitted to a grammar checker in both bracketed and unbracketed formats. A comparison of the result- ing error reports illuminates the relationship be- tween the underlying performance of the parser- …...

We describe a generative probabilistic model of natural language, which we call HBG, that takes advantage of detailed linguistic information to re- solve ambiguity. HBG incorporates lexical, syn- tactic, semantic, and structural information from the parse tree into the disambiguation process in a novel way. We use a corpus of …...

The paper describes an algorithm that employs English and French text taggers to associate noun phrases in an aligned bilingual corpus. The tag- gets provide part-of-speech categories which are used by finite-state recognizers to extract simple noun phrases for both languages. Noun phrases are then mapped to each other using …...

This paper describes a method for finding struc- rural matching between parallel sentences of two languages, (such as Japanese and English). Par- allel sentences are analyzed based on unification grammars, and structural matching is performed by making use of a similarity measure of word pairs in the two languages. Syntactic …...

In this paper, we describe a fast algorithm for aligning sentences with their translations in a bilingual corpus. Existing efficient algorithms ig- nore word identities and only consider sentence length (Brown el al., 1991b; Gale and Church, 1991). Our algorithm constructs a simple statisti- cal word-to-word translation model on the …...

There have been a number of recent papers on aligning parallel texts at the sentence level, e.g., Brown et al (1991), Gale and Church (to appear), Isabelle (1992), Kay and R/Ssenschein (to appear), Simard et al (1992), Warwick- Armstrong and Russell (1990). On clean inputs, such as the Canadian Hansards, …...

This paper describes the problems faced while us- ing Kimmo's two-level model to describe certain Indian languages such as Tamil and Hindi. The two-level model is shown to be descriptively inad- equate to address these problems. A simple ex- tension to the basic two-level model is introduced which allows conflicting …...

This paper examines the current performance of the stochastic tagger PARTS (Church 88) in handling phrasal verbs, describes a problem that arises from the statis- tical model used, and suggests a way to improve the tagger's performance. The solution involves a change in the definition of what counts as a …...

1 Efficient natural language generation has been successfully demonstrated using highly compiled knowledge about speech acts and their related social actions. A design and prototype implementation of a parser which utilizes this same pragmatic knowledge to efficiently guide parsing is presented. Such guidance is shown to prune the search space …...

This paper proposes a new indicator of text struc- ture, called the lexical cohesion profile (LCP), which locates segment boundaries in a text. A text segment is a coherent scene; the words in a segment a~e linked together via lexical cohesion relations. LCP records mutual similarity of words in a …...

In the first part of the paper, I present a new treatment of THE IMPERFI~CTIVE PARADOX (Dowty 1979) for the restricted case of trajectory- of-motion events. This treatment extends and re- fines those of Moens and Steedman (1988) and Jackendoff (1991). In the second part, I describe an implemented algorithm …...

We propose a plan-based approach for responding to user queries in a collaborative environment. We argue that in such an environment, the system should not accept the user's query automatically, but should consider it a proposal open for negotiation. In this pa- per we concentrate on cases in which the …...

This paper presents a cooperative consultation system on a restricted domain. The system builds hypotheses on the user's plan and avoids misunderstandings (with consequent repair dialogues) through clarification dialogues in case of ambiguity. The role played by constraints in the generation of the answer is charac- terized in order to …...

When human tutors engage in dialogue, they freely exploit all aspects of the mutually known context, including the previous discourse. Utterances that do not draw on previous discourse seem awkward, unnatural, or even incoherent. Previous discourse must be taken into account in order to relate new information effectively to recently …...

This paper presents a method for inducing the parts of speech of a language and part- of-speech labels for individual words from a large text corpus. Vector representations for the part-of-speech of a word are formed from entries of its near lexical neighbors. A dimen- sionality reduction creates a space …...

Thematic knowledge is a basis of semamic interpreta- tion. In this paper, we propose an acquisition method to acquire thematic knowledge by exploiting syntactic clues from training sentences. The syntactic clues, which may be easily collected by most existing syn- tactic processors, reduce the hypothesis space of the thematic roles. …...

This paper presents a new method for producing a dictionary of subcategorization frames from un- labelled text corpora. It is shown that statistical filtering of the results of a finite state parser run- ning on the output of a stochastic tagger produces high quality results, despite the error rates of …...

In this paper, we discuss the different strategies used in COMET (COordinated Multimedia Explanation Testbed) for selecting words with which the user is familiar. When pictures cannot be used to disambiguate a word or phrase, COMET has four strategies for avoiding unknown words. We give examples for each of these …...

Motivation for including relational constraints other than equality within grammatical formalisms has come from discontinuous constituency and partially free word order for natural languages as well as from the need to define combinatory operations at the most basic level for languages with a two-dimensional syntax (e.g., mathematical notation, chemical equations, …...

Suppose we have a feature system, and we wish to add default values in a well-defined way. We might start with Kasper-Rounds logic, and use Reiter's example to form it into a default logic. Giving a node a default value would be equiv- alent to saying "if it is consistent …...