151,410 research outputs found
Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation
In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse
structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware
similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse
trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show
that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various
existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with
human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests
that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of
the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when
developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined
metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of
various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine
translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST
tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii)
the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively
correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse
analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201
Extracting Formal Models from Normative Texts
We are concerned with the analysis of normative texts - documents based on
the deontic notions of obligation, permission, and prohibition. Our goal is to
make queries about these notions and verify that a text satisfies certain
properties concerning causality of actions and timing constraints. This
requires taking the original text and building a representation (model) of it
in a formal language, in our case the C-O Diagram formalism. We present an
experimental, semi-automatic aid that helps to bridge the gap between a
normative text in natural language and its C-O Diagram representation. Our
approach consists of using dependency structures obtained from the
state-of-the-art Stanford Parser, and applying our own rules and heuristics in
order to extract the relevant components. The result is a tabular data
structure where each sentence is split into suitable fields, which can then be
converted into a C-O Diagram. The process is not fully automatic however, and
some post-editing is generally required of the user. We apply our tool and
perform experiments on documents from different domains, and report an initial
evaluation of the accuracy and feasibility of our approach.Comment: Extended version of conference paper at the 21st International
Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB
2016). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1607.0148
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Artificial Sequences and Complexity Measures
In this paper we exploit concepts of information theory to address the
fundamental problem of identifying and defining the most suitable tools to
extract, in a automatic and agnostic way, information from a generic string of
characters. We introduce in particular a class of methods which use in a
crucial way data compression techniques in order to define a measure of
remoteness and distance between pairs of sequences of characters (e.g. texts)
based on their relative information content. We also discuss in detail how
specific features of data compression techniques could be used to introduce the
notion of dictionary of a given sequence and of Artificial Text and we show how
these new tools can be used for information extraction purposes. We point out
the versatility and generality of our method that applies to any kind of
corpora of character strings independently of the type of coding behind them.
We consider as a case study linguistic motivated problems and we present
results for automatic language recognition, authorship attribution and self
consistent-classification.Comment: Revised version, with major changes, of previous "Data Compression
approach to Information Extraction and Classification" by A. Baronchelli and
V. Loreto. 15 pages; 5 figure
Automated assessment of non-native learner essays: Investigating the role of linguistic features
Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text
responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold
standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and
aptitude exams. Hence, AES became an active and established area of research,
and there are many proprietary systems used in real life applications today.
However, not much is known about which specific linguistic features are useful
for prediction and how much of this is consistent across datasets. This article
addresses that by exploring the role of various linguistic features in
automatic essay scoring using two publicly available datasets of non-native
English essays written in test taking scenarios. The linguistic properties are
modeled by encoding lexical, syntactic, discourse and error types of learner
language in the feature set. Predictive models are then developed using these
features on both datasets and the most predictive features are compared. While
the results show that the feature set used results in good predictive models
with both datasets, the question "what are the most predictive features?" has a
different answer for each dataset.Comment: Article accepted for publication at: International Journal of
Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED). To appear in early 2017
(journal url: http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/40593
Adaptive content mapping for internet navigation
The Internet as the biggest human library ever assembled keeps on growing. Although all kinds of information carriers (e.g. audio/video/hybrid file formats) are available, text based documents dominate. It is estimated that about 80% of all information worldwide stored electronically exists in (or can be converted into) text form. More and more, all kinds of documents are generated by means of a text processing system and are therefore available electronically. Nowadays, many printed journals are also published online and may even discontinue to appear in print form tomorrow. This development has many convincing advantages: the documents are both available faster (cf. prepress services) and cheaper, they can be searched more easily, the physical storage only needs a fraction of the space previously necessary and the medium will not age. For most people, fast and easy access is the most interesting feature of the new age; computer-aided search for specific documents or Web pages becomes the basic tool for information-oriented work. But this tool has problems. The current keyword based search machines available on the Internet are not really appropriate for such a task; either there are (way) too many documents matching the specified keywords are presented or none at all. The problem lies in the fact that it is often very difficult to choose appropriate terms describing the desired topic in the first place. This contribution discusses the current state-of-the-art techniques in content-based searching (along with common visualization/browsing approaches) and proposes a particular adaptive solution for intuitive Internet document navigation, which not only enables the user to provide full texts instead of manually selected keywords (if available), but also allows him/her to explore the whole database
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