Generic dialogue modeling for multi-application dialogue systems

We present a novel approach to developing interfaces for multi-application dialogue systems. The targeted interfaces allow transparent switching between a large number of applications within one system. The approach, based on the Rapid Dialogue Prototyping Methodology (RDPM) and the Vector Space model techniques from Information Retrieval, is composed of three main steps: (1) producing finalized dia logue models for applications using the RDPM, (2) designing an application interaction hierarchy, and (3) navigating between the applications based on the user's application of interest

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

The logic and linguistic model for automatic extraction of collocation similarity

The article discusses the process of automatic identification of collocation similarity. The semantic analysis is one of the most advanced as well as the most difficult NLP task. The main problem of semantic processing is the determination of polysemy and synonymy of linguistic units. In addition, the task becomes complicated in case of word collocations. The paper suggests a logical and linguistic model for automatic determining semantic similarity between colocations in Ukraine and English languages. The proposed model formalizes semantic equivalence of collocations by means of semantic and grammatical characteristics of collocates. The basic idea of this approach is that morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics of lexical units are to be taken into account for the identification of collocation similarity. Basic mathematical means of our model are logical-algebraic equations of the finite predicates algebra. Verb-noun and noun-adjective collocations in Ukrainian and English languages consist of words belonged to main parts of speech. These collocations are examined in the model. The model allows extracting semantically equivalent collocations from semi-structured and non-structured texts. Implementations of the model will allow to automatically recognize semantically equivalent collocations. Usage of the model allows increasing the effectiveness of natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, ontology generation, sentiment analysis and some others

A Context-theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics

Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We present a framework for natural language semantics in which words, phrases and sentences are all represented as vectors, based on a theoretical analysis which assumes that meaning is determined by context. In the theoretical analysis, we define a corpus model as a mathematical abstraction of a text corpus. The meaning of a string of words is assumed to be a vector representing the contexts in which it occurs in the corpus model. Based on this assumption, we can show that the vector representations of words can be considered as elements of an algebra over a field. We note that in applications of vector spaces to representing meanings of words there is an underlying lattice structure; we interpret the partial ordering of the lattice as describing entailment between meanings. We also define the context-theoretic probability of a string, and, based on this and the lattice structure, a degree of entailment between strings. We relate the framework to existing methods of composing vector-based representations of meaning, and show that our approach generalises many of these, including vector addition, component-wise multiplication, and the tensor product.Comment: Submitted to Computational Linguistics on 20th January 2010 for revie