57,138 research outputs found
Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences
Given the lack of word delimiters in written Japanese, word segmentation is
generally considered a crucial first step in processing Japanese texts. Typical
Japanese segmentation algorithms rely either on a lexicon and syntactic
analysis or on pre-segmented data; but these are labor-intensive, and the
lexico-syntactic techniques are vulnerable to the unknown word problem. In
contrast, we introduce a novel, more robust statistical method utilizing
unsegmented training data. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm yields
performance on long kanji sequences comparable to and sometimes surpassing that
of state-of-the-art morphological analyzers over a variety of error metrics.
The algorithm also outperforms another mostly-unsupervised statistical
algorithm previously proposed for Chinese.
Additionally, we present a two-level annotation scheme for Japanese to
incorporate multiple segmentation granularities, and introduce two novel
evaluation metrics, both based on the notion of a compatible bracket, that can
account for multiple granularities simultaneously.Comment: 22 pages. To appear in Natural Language Engineerin
Adaptive Sentence Boundary Disambiguation
Labeling of sentence boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for many natural
language processing tasks, including part-of-speech tagging and sentence
alignment. End-of-sentence punctuation marks are ambiguous; to disambiguate
them most systems use brittle, special-purpose regular expression grammars and
exception rules. As an alternative, we have developed an efficient, trainable
algorithm that uses a lexicon with part-of-speech probabilities and a
feed-forward neural network. After training for less than one minute, the
method correctly labels over 98.5\% of sentence boundaries in a corpus of over
27,000 sentence-boundary marks. We show the method to be efficient and easily
adaptable to different text genres, including single-case texts.Comment: This is a Latex version of the previously submitted ps file
(formatted as a uuencoded gz-compressed .tar file created by csh script). The
software from the work described in this paper is available by contacting
[email protected]
Morphological Analysis as Classification: an Inductive-Learning Approach
Morphological analysis is an important subtask in text-to-speech conversion,
hyphenation, and other language engineering tasks. The traditional approach to
performing morphological analysis is to combine a morpheme lexicon, sets of
(linguistic) rules, and heuristics to find a most probable analysis. In
contrast we present an inductive learning approach in which morphological
analysis is reformulated as a segmentation task. We report on a number of
experiments in which five inductive learning algorithms are applied to three
variations of the task of morphological analysis. Results show (i) that the
generalisation performance of the algorithms is good, and (ii) that the lazy
learning algorithm IB1-IG performs best on all three tasks. We conclude that
lazy learning of morphological analysis as a classification task is indeed a
viable approach; moreover, it has the strong advantages over the traditional
approach of avoiding the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck, being fast and
deterministic in learning and processing, and being language-independent.Comment: 11 pages, 5 encapsulated postscript figures, uses non-standard NeMLaP
proceedings style nemlap.sty; inputs ipamacs (international phonetic
alphabet) and epsf macro
Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation
We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for
the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose
two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov
models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech
recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech
waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the
DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is
competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a
significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based
knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure
Text Segmentation Using Exponential Models
This paper introduces a new statistical approach to partitioning text
automatically into coherent segments. Our approach enlists both short-range and
long-range language models to help it sniff out likely sites of topic changes
in text. To aid its search, the system consults a set of simple lexical hints
it has learned to associate with the presence of boundaries through inspection
of a large corpus of annotated data. We also propose a new probabilistically
motivated error metric for use by the natural language processing and
information retrieval communities, intended to supersede precision and recall
for appraising segmentation algorithms. Qualitative assessment of our algorithm
as well as evaluation using this new metric demonstrate the effectiveness of
our approach in two very different domains, Wall Street Journal articles and
the TDT Corpus, a collection of newswire articles and broadcast news
transcripts.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX source and postscript figures for EMNLP-2 pape
Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction,
topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and
topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically
present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in
spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from
the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and
hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based
approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and
Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with,
or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and
automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves
comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no
hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a
significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination
of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic
models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the
literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause
and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas
pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2),
Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200
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