Articles

Determining the relationship between the intona- tional characteristics of an utterance and other features inferable from its text is important both for speech recognition and for speech synthesis. This work investigates the use of text analysis in predicting the location of intonational phrase boundaries in natural speech, through analyzing 298 …...

In previous papers we presented methods for retrieving collocations from large samples of texts. We described a tool, Xtract, that im- plements these methods and able to retrieve a wide range of collocations in a two stage process. These methods a.s well as other re- lated methods however have some …...

In the general framework of a constraint-based grammar formalism often some sort of feature logic serves as the constraint language to de- scribe linguistic objects. We investigate the ex- tension of basic feature logic with subsumption (or matching) constraints, based on a weak no- tion of subsumption. This mechanism of …...

Strategies are proposed for combining different kinds of constraints in declarative grammars with a detachable layer of control information. The added control information is the basis for parametrized dynamically controlled linguistic deduction, a form of linguistic processing that permits the implementation of plausible linguistic performance models without giving up the …...

We propose that ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment can be resolved on the basis of the relative strength of association of the preposition with noun and verb, estimated on the basis of word distribution in a large corpus. This work suggests that a distributional approach can be effective in resolving parsing …...

This paper presents a method for interpret- ing metaphoric language in the context of a portable natural language interface. The method licenses metaphoric uses via coercions between incompatible ontological sorts. The machinery allows both previously-known and unexpected metaphoric uses to be correctly interpreted and evaluated with respect to the backend …...

A formalism is presented for lexical specification in unification-based grammars which exploits defeasi- ble multiple inheritance to express regularity, sub- regularity, and exceptions in classifying the prop- erties of words. Such systems are in the general case intractable; the present proposal represents an attempt to reduce complexity while retaining suf- …...

This paper describes an implemented program that takes a raw, untagged text corpus as its only input (no open-class dictionary) and gener- ates a partial list of verbs occurring in the text and the subcategorization frames (SFs) in which they occur. Verbs are detected by a novel tech- nique based …...

We describe a statistical technique for assign- ing senses to words. An instance of a word is as- signed a sense by asking a question about the con- text in which the word appears. The question is constructed to have high mutual information with the translation of that instance in …...

This paper describes a method of classifying semantically similar nouns. The approach is based on the "distributional hypothesis". Our approach is characterized by distinguishing among senses of the same word in order to resolve the "polysemy" issue. The classification result demonstrates that our approach is successful. 1....

Languages differ in the concepts and real-world en- tities for which they have words and grammatical constructs. Therefore translation must sometimes be a matter of approximating the meaning of a source language text rather than finding an exact counterpart in the target language. We propose a translation framework based on …...

EBMT (Example-Based Machine Translation) is proposed. EBMT retrieves similar examples (pairs of source phrases, sentences, or texts and their translations) from a d~t.hase of examples, adapting the examples to translate a new input. EBMT has the following features: (1) It is easily upgraded simply by inputting appropriate examples to the …...

In this paper we describe a statistical tech- nique for aligning sentences with their translations in two parallel corpora. In addition to certain anchor points that are available in our da.ta, the only information about the sentences that we use for calculating alignments is the number of tokens that they …...

The paper describes work on applying a gen- eral purpose natural language processing system to transfer-based interactive translation. Trans- fer takes place at the level of Quasi Logical Form (QLF), a contextually sensitive logical form rep- resentation which is deep enough for dealing with cross-linguistic differences. Theoretical arguments and experimental …...

Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward, even between closely re- lated languages. This paper discusses a sys- tem of translation of locative prepositions be- tween English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way, …...

A method is presented for acquiring perceptually- grounded semantics for spatial terms in a simple visual domain, as a part of the L0 miniature language acquisi- tion project. Two central problems in this learning task are (a) ensuring that the terms learned generalize well, so that they can be accurately …...

This paper presents a new approach for resolving lex- ical ambiguities in one language using statistical data on lexical relations in another language. This ap- proach exploits the differences between mappings of words to senses in different languages. We concen- trate on the problem of target word selection in ma- …...

Researchers in both machine Iranslation (e.g., Brown et al., 1990) and bilingual lexicography (e.g., Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990) have recently become interested in studying parallel texts, texts such as the Canadian Hansards (parliamentary proceedings) which are available in multiple languages (French and English). This paper describes a method for aligning …...

Department of Computer Sciences, AI Lab University of Texas, Austin Tx 78712 A system is described for acquiring a context- sensitive, phrase structure grammar which is applied by a best-path, bottom-up, deterministic parser. The gram- mar was based on English news stories and a high degree of success in parsing …...

I describe a head-driven parser for a class of gram- mars that handle discontinuous constituency by a richer notion of string combination than ordinary concatenation. The parser is a generalization of the left-corner parser (Matsumoto et al., 1983) and can be used for grammars written in power- ful formalisms such …...