Learning Correlations between Linguistic Indicators and Semantic Constraints: Reuse of Context-Dependent Descriptions of Entities

This paper presents the results of a study on the semantic constraints imposed on lexical choice by certain contextual indicators. We show how such indicators are computed and how correlations between them and the choice of a noun phrase description of a named entity can be automatically established using supervised learning. Based on this correlation, we have developed a technique for automatic lexical choice of descriptions of entities in text generation. We discuss the underlying relationship between the pragmatics of choosing an appropriate description that serves a specific purpose in the automatically generated text and the semantics of the description itself. We present our work in the framework of the more general concept of reuse of linguistic structures that are automatically extracted from large corpora. We present a formal evaluation of our approach and we conclude with some thoughts on potential applications of our method.Comment: 7 pages, uses colacl.sty and acl.bst, uses epsfig. To appear in the Proceedings of the Joint 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL'98

Interaction Grammars

Interaction Grammar (IG) is a grammatical formalism based on the notion of polarity. Polarities express the resource sensitivity of natural languages by modelling the distinction between saturated and unsaturated syntactic structures. Syntactic composition is represented as a chemical reaction guided by the saturation of polarities. It is expressed in a model-theoretic framework where grammars are constraint systems using the notion of tree description and parsing appears as a process of building tree description models satisfying criteria of saturation and minimality

Stabilizing knowledge through standards - A perspective for the humanities

It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences

TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF