660 research outputs found
Using a Probabilistic Class-Based Lexicon for Lexical Ambiguity Resolution
This paper presents the use of probabilistic class-based lexica for
disambiguation in target-word selection. Our method employs minimal but precise
contextual information for disambiguation. That is, only information provided
by the target-verb, enriched by the condensed information of a probabilistic
class-based lexicon, is used. Induction of classes and fine-tuning to verbal
arguments is done in an unsupervised manner by EM-based clustering techniques.
The method shows promising results in an evaluation on real-world translations.Comment: 7 pages, uses colacl.st
Inducing a Semantically Annotated Lexicon via EM-Based Clustering
We present a technique for automatic induction of slot annotations for
subcategorization frames, based on induction of hidden classes in the EM
framework of statistical estimation. The models are empirically evalutated by a
general decision test. Induction of slot labeling for subcategorization frames
is accomplished by a further application of EM, and applied experimentally on
frame observations derived from parsing large corpora. We outline an
interpretation of the learned representations as theoretical-linguistic
decompositional lexical entries.Comment: 8 pages, uses colacl.sty. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of
the ACL, 199
D6.1: Technologies and Tools for Lexical Acquisition
This report describes the technologies and tools to be used for Lexical Acquisition in PANACEA. It includes descriptions of existing technologies and tools which can be built on and improved within PANACEA, as well as of new technologies and tools to be developed and integrated in PANACEA platform. The report also specifies the Lexical Resources to be produced. Four main areas of lexical acquisition are included: Subcategorization frames (SCFs), Selectional Preferences (SPs), Lexical-semantic Classes (LCs), for both nouns and verbs, and Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs)
Similarity-Based Models of Word Cooccurrence Probabilities
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to
determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech
recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a
peach'' and ``eat a beach'' is more likely. Statistical NLP methods determine
the likelihood of a word combination from its frequency in a training corpus.
However, the nature of language is such that many word combinations are
infrequent and do not occur in any given corpus. In this work we propose a
method for estimating the probability of such previously unseen word
combinations using available information on ``most similar'' words.
We describe probabilistic word association models based on distributional
word similarity, and apply them to two tasks, language modeling and pseudo-word
disambiguation. In the language modeling task, a similarity-based model is used
to improve probability estimates for unseen bigrams in a back-off language
model. The similarity-based method yields a 20% perplexity improvement in the
prediction of unseen bigrams and statistically significant reductions in
speech-recognition error.
We also compare four similarity-based estimation methods against back-off and
maximum-likelihood estimation methods on a pseudo-word sense disambiguation
task in which we controlled for both unigram and bigram frequency to avoid
giving too much weight to easy-to-disambiguate high-frequency configurations.
The similarity-based methods perform up to 40% better on this particular task.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure
A clustering approach to automatic verb classification incorporating selectional preferences: model, implementation, and user manual
This report presents two variations of an innovative, complex approach to semantic verb classes that relies on selectional preferences as verb properties. The underlying linguistic assumption for this verb class model is that verbs which agree on their selectional preferences belong to a common semantic class. The model is implemented as a soft-clustering approach, in order to capture the polysemy of the verbs. The training procedure uses the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm (Baum, 1972) to iteratively improve the probabilistic parameters of the model, and applies the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle (Rissanen, 1978) to induce WordNet-based selectional preferences for arguments within subcategorisation frames. One variation of the MDL principle replicates a standard MDL approach by Li and Abe (1998), the other variation presents an improved pruning strategy that outperforms the standard implementation considerably. Our model is potentially useful for lexical induction (e.g., verb senses, subcategorisation and selectional preferences, collocations, and verb alternations), and for NLP applications in sparse data situations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model by a standard evaluation (pseudo-word disambiguation), and three applications (selectional preference induction, verb sense disambiguation, and semi-supervised sense labelling)
D7.1. Criteria for evaluation of resources, technology and integration.
This deliverable defines how evaluation is carried out at each integration cycle in the PANACEA project. As PANACEA aims at producing large scale resources, evaluation becomes a critical and challenging issue. Critical because it is important to assess the quality of the results that should be delivered to users. Challenging because we prospect rather new areas, and through a technical platform: some new methodologies will have to be explored or old ones to be adapted
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