Articles

The paper presents and compares two different methods of parsing, a regular expression method and a stochastic method, with respect to their success in identifying basic clauses in unrestricted English text. These methods of parsing were developed in order to be applied to the task of improving the detection of …...

This paper gives an overview of the natural language problems addressed in the Traffic Information CoHator/Condenscr (TICC) pro- jeer, and describes in some detail the "interesting-corner parser" used in the TICC's Natural Language Summariser. The TICC is designed to take free text input describing local traffic incidents, and automatically out- …...

This paper describes enhancements made to techniques currently used to search large databases of proper names. Improvements included use of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) statistical classifier to identify the likely linguistic provenance of a surname, and application of language-specific rules to generate plausible spelling variations of names. These two …...

Luke is a knowledge editor designed to support two tasks; the first is editing the classes and relations in a knowledge base. The second is editing and maintaining the semantic mapping knowledge neccesery to allow a natural language interface to understand sentences with respect to that knowledge base. In order …...

In this paper, we describe a system which models a set of concurrent processes that are encountered in a typical office environment, using a body of explic- itly sequenced production rules. The system employs an interval-based temporal network for storing histor- ical information. A text planning module traverses this network …...

This paper describes a valency model, developed within the Belgian METAL project, aimed at enhancing the modularity and multilinguality of the METAL system. The...

This paper describes an exploration of the implicit synonymy relationship expressed by synonym lists in an on-line thesaurus. A series of automatic steps was taken to properly con- strain this relationship. The resulting groupings of semantically related word senses are believed to constitute a useful tool for natural language processing …...

The SCISOR. system is a computer program designed to scan naturally occurring texts in constrained do- mains, extract information, and answer questions about that information. The system currently reads newspapers stories in the domain of corporate merg- ers and acquisitions. The language analysis strategy used by SCISOR combines full syntactic …...

This paper describes our experience in devel- oping the CRITIQUE system. It describes three application areas in which the system is being used and discusses some characteristics of CRITIQUE which we believe are applicable to large-scale natural language systems in general: performance, robustness, flexibility, presentation, and accuracy....

: In this paper we describe a meta level representation used for mapping natural language input into propositions of an expert system. This representation is based on verb classes that are structured hierarchically, with more general information encoded in the top level nodes and more specific information in the lower …...

This paper describes strategies for automatic recognition of unknown variants of known words in a natural language processing system. The types of lexical variants which are detectable include in- flexional aberrations, ad hoc abbreviations and spelling/typographical errors. This technique is independent of any particular grammar or parsing formalism, and can …...

Users of computerized dictionaries require powerful and flexible tools for analyzing and manipulating the informa- tion in them. This paper discusses a system for grammat- ically describing and parsing entries from machine-readable dictionary tapes and a lexicai data base representation for storing the dictionary information. It also describes a lan- …...

We describe a parallel implementation of a chart parser for a shared-memory multipro- cessor. The speed-ups obtained with this parser have been measured for a number of small natural-language grammars. For the largest of these, part of an operational question-answering system, the parser ran 5 to 7 times faster than …...

One cause of failure in natural language in- terfaces is semantic overshoot; this is re- flected in input sentences which do not cor- respond to any semantic pattern in the sys- tem. We describe a system which provides helpful feedback in such cases by identifying the "semantically closest" inputs which …...

This paper describes a program for handling "scope ambiguities" in individual English sentences. The program operates on initial logical translations, generated by a parser/translator, in which "unscoped elements" such as quantifiers, coordinators and negation are left in place to be extracted and positioned by the scoping program. The program produces …...

This paper presents SPQR (Selectional Pat- tern Queries and Responses), a module of the PUNDIT text-processing system designed to facili- tate the acquisition of domain-specific semantic information, and to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the parser. SPQR operates by interactively and incrementally collecting informa- tion about the semantic acceptability …...

In this paper we present a means of compensating for the semantic deficits of linguistically naive underlying application programs without com- promising principled grammatical treatments in natural language generation. We present a method for building an interface from today's underlying application programs to the linguistic realization component Mumble-86. The goal …...

Most existing systems for the correction of word level errors are oriented toward either typographical or orthographical errors. Triphone analysis is a new correction strategy which combines phonemic transcription with trigram analysis. It corrects both kinds of errors (also in combination) and is superior for orthographical errors. 1....

Several simple prediction schemes are presented for systems intended to facili- tate text production for handicapped individuals. The schemes are based on single-subject language models, where the system is self-adapting to the past language use of the subject. Sentence position, the immediately preceding one or two words, and initial letters …...

In this paper, we describe the pronominal anaphora resolution module of Lucy, a portable English understanding system. The design of this mo;clule was motivated by the observation that, al- though there exist many theories of anaphora resolu- tion, no one of these theories is complete. Thus we have implemented a …...