Articles

This paper presents an approach to identifying conjuncts of coordinate conjunctions appearing in text which has been labelled with syntactic and semantic tags. The overall project of which this research is a part is also briefly discussed. The program was tested on a 10,000 word chapter of the Merck Veterinary …...

An algorithm is proposed to determine an- tecedents for VP ellipsis. The algorithm elim- inates impossible antecedents, and then im- poses a preference ordering on possible an- tecedents. The algorithm performs with 94% accuracy on a set of 304 examples of VP el- lipsis collected from the Brown Corpus. The …...

We investigate various contextual effects on text interpretation, and account for them by providing contextual constraints in a logical theory of text interpretation. On the basis of the way these con- straints interact with the other knowledge sources, we draw some general conclusions about the role of domain-specific information, top-down …...

It has been hypothesized that Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is particularly well suited for sentence generation. It is unclear, however, how a sentence generation system based on TAG should choose among the syntactic possibilities made available in the grammar. In this paper we con- sider the question of what needs …...

(LDOCE), is a dictionary for learners of English as Dictionaries contain a rich set of relation- ships between their senses, but often these relationships are only implicit. We report on our experiments to automatically iden- tify links between the senses in a machine- readable dictionary. In particular, we au- tomatically …...

Examples are often used along with textual descrip- tions to help convey particular ideas - especially in instructional or explanatory contexts. These accompa- nying examples reflect information in the surrounding text, and in turn, also influence the text. Sometimes, examples replace possible (textual) elaborations in the description. It is thus …...

In this article we outline a basic approach to treating metonymy properly in a multil- ingual machine translation system. This is the first attempt at treating metonymy in an machine translation environment. The approach is guided by the differences of acceptability of metonymy which were obtained by our comparative survey …...

A pattern in the translation of locative prepositional phrases between English and Spanish is presented. A way of exploiting this pattern is proposed in the con- text of a multilingual machine translation system under development....

The information state of an agent is changed when a text (in natural language) is processed. The meaning of a text can be taken to be this informa- tion state change potential. The inference of a con- sequence make explicit something already implicit in the premises -- i.e. that no …...

Consideration of when Right Association works and when it fails lead to a restatement of this parsing prin- ciple in terms of the notion of heaviness. A computa- tional investigation of a syntactically annotated corpus provides evidence for this proposal and suggest circum- stances when RA is likely to make …...

Recent studies on the analysis of intonational func- tion examine a ran~ of materials from cue phrases in monologue (Litman and Hirschberg, 1990) and dialogue (Hirschberg and Litman, 1987; Hockey, 1991) to longer utterances in both monologue and dialogue (McLemore, 1991). Results match spe- cific intonational tunes to certain discourse …...

This paper reports on the results of the adjunct test performed by GE for the MUC-4 evaluation of text processing systems . In this test, we evaluated the effect of an object-oriented templat e design and associated matching conditions on the scores . The results indicate that the current MUC- …...

This paper reports on the joint GE-CMU Tipster SHOGUN customization effort for MUC-4 , and analyzes the results of the TST3 and TST4 runs in comparison with the GE system ....

Proof-Nets (Roorda 1990) are a good device for processing with eategorial grammars, mainly because they avoid spurious ambiguities. Nevertheless, they do not provide easily readable structures and they hide the true proximity between Categorial Grammars and Dependency Grammars. We give here an other kind of Proof-Nets which is much related …...

A new algorithm is presented for estimating the pa- rameters of a stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG) from ordinary unparsed text. Unlike the Inside/Outside I/O) algorithm which requires a grammar to be spee- fled in Chomsky normal form, the new algorithm can estimate an arbitrary SCFG without ally need for trans- …...

--Human discourse appears coherent when it re- fleets coherent human thought. However, computers do not necessarily store or process information in the same way that people do a.ud~ therefore, cannot rely on the structure of their reuouing for the structure of thehr dialogue,s. In- stead, computer-generated conversation must rely on …...

The process of finding the antecedent of zero pronoun, that is indispensable to Japanese language understanding, is the topic of this paper. Here we mainly concern with dis- courses comprising two sentences that are in a subordinate relation, especially one of them describes the agent's volitional action and the other …...

This paper presents a plan-based model of dialogue that combines world, linguistic, and contextual knowl- edge in order to recognize complex communicative ac- tions such as expressing doubt. Linguistic knowledge suggests certain discourse acts, a speaker's beliefs, aud the strength of those beliefs; contextual knowledge sug- gests the most coherent …...

Language understanding work at Paramax focuses on ap- plying general-purpose language understanding technology to spoken language understanding, text understanding, and document processing, integrating language understanding with speech recognition, knowledge-based information re- trieval and image understanding. 1....

This paper describes recent improvements in the weight esti- mation technique for sentence hypothesis rescoring using the N-Best formalism. Mismatches between training and test data are also explored. 1....