Articles

We argue that there are two qualitatively different modes of using a machine-readable dictionary in the context of research in computational linguistics: batch processing of the source with the purpose of collating information for subsequent use by a natural language application, and placing the dictionary on-line in an environment which …...

Languages other than English have received little attention as far as the application of natural language processing techniques to text composition is concer- ned. The present paper describes briefly work under development aiming at the design of an integrated environment for the construction and verification of documents written in Spanish. …...

Xn recent years the nature and the role of a morphological component in NLP systems has attracted a lot of attention. The two-level model of Koskenniemi which relates graphemlc to morphological structure has been succesfully implemented in the form of finite state automata. Xn EUROTRA a solution which combines morphological …...

A morphologic and morphosyntactic analyzer for the Italian language has been implemented in VM/Prolog 131 at the IBM Romc Scientific Center as part of a project on text understanding. Aim of this project is the development of a prototype which analyzes short narrative texts (press agency news) and gives a …...

A new method is presented for simplifying the logical expressions used to represent utterance meaning in a natural language system. 1 This simplification method utilizes the encoded knowledge and the limited inference-making capability of a taxonomic knowledge representation system to reduce the constituent structure of logical expressions. The specific application …...

Consideration of the question of meaning in the frame- work of linguistics often requires an allusion to sets and other higher-order notions. The traditional approach to representing and reasoning about meaning in a computa- tional setting has been to use knowledge representation sys 7 tems that are either based on …...

FOCUSING AND ANAPHORA RESOLUTION Novice users engaged in task-oriented dialogues with an adviser to learn how to use an unfamiliar statistical package. The users', task was analyzed and a task structure was derived. The task structure was used to segment the dialogue into subdialogues associated with the subtasks of the …...

To fully understand a sequence of utterances, one must be able to infer implicit relationships between the utterances. Although the identification of sets of utterance relationships forms the basis for many theories of discourse, the formalization and recogni- tion of such relationships has proven to be an extremely difficult computational …...

Existing models of plan inference (PI) in conversation have as- sumed that the agent whose plan is being inferred (the actor) and the agent drawing the inference (the observer) have iden- tical beliefs about actions in the domain. I argue that this as- sumption often results in failure of both …...

Ambiguities related to intension and their consequent inference failures are a diverse group, both syntacti- cally and semantically. One particular kind of ambi- guity that has received little attention so far is a whether it is the speaker or the third party to whom description in an opaque third-party attitude …...

In this paper, I describe how Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions should be represented in a computational model of reference. After briefly discussing the significance of Donnellan's distinction, I reinterpret it as being three-tiered, relating to object represen- tation, referring intentions, and choice of rehrring …...

A computer program for synthesizing Japanese fundamental frequency contours implements our theory of Japanese intonation. This theory provides a complete qualitative description of the known characteristics of Japanese intonation, as well as a quantitative model of tone-scaling and timing precise enough to translate straightforwardly into a computational algorithm. An important …...

The following proposal is for a Japanese sentence analysis method to be used in a Japanese book reading machine. This method is designed to allow for several candidates in case of ambiguous characters. Each sentence is analyzed to compose a data structure by defining the relationship between words and phrases. …...

While various aspects of syntactic structure have been shown to bear on the determination of phrase- level prosody, the text-to-speech field has lacked a robust working system to test the possible relations between syntax and prosody. We describe an implemented system which uses the deterministic parser Fidditch to create the …...

We propose a mapping between prosodic phenomena and semantico-pragmatic effects based upon the hypothesis that intona- tion conveys information about the intentional as well as the atten- tional structure of discourse. In particular, we discuss how varia- tions in pitch range and choice of accent and tune can help to …...

Natural language processing systems need large lexicons containing explicit information about lexical-semantlc relationships, selection restrictions, and verb categories. Because the labor involved in constructing such lexicons by hand is overwhelming, we have been trying to construct lexical entries automatically from information available in the machine-readable version of Webst@r's ~@ve~h Col!eglate …...

1.1 The Task Domain Here we address the problem of mapping phrase meanings into their conceptual representations. Figurative phrases are pervasive in human communication, yet they are difficult to explain theoretically. In fact, the ability to handle idiosyncrat- ic behavior of phrases should be a criterion for any theory of …...

I As a user interacts with a database or expert system, s/he may reveal a misconception about the objects modeled by the system. This paper discusses the ROMPER system for responding to such misconceptions in a domain independent and context sensitive fashion. ROMPER reasons about possible sources of the misconception. …...

We outline a model of generation with revision, focusing on improving textual coherence. We argue that high quality text is more easily produced by iteratively revising and regenerating, as people do, rather than by using an architecturally more complex single pass generator. As a general area of study, the revision …...

The documentation of (unbounded-len~h) copying and cross-serial constructions in a few languages in the recent literature is usually taken to mean that natural languages are slightly context-sensitive. However, this ignores those copying constructions which, while productive, cannot be easily shown to apply to infinite sublanguages. To allow such finite copying …...