1,301 research outputs found
Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation
Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural
language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution
of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon
like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and
devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She
presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally
implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun
resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a
better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational
point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments,
and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the
statistical results.Comment: iii + 49 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript file; revised
version of the first author's Bilkent M.S. thesis, written under the
supervision of the second author; notify Akman via e-mail
([email protected]) or fax (+90-312-266-4126) if you are unable to
obtain hardcopy, he'll work out somethin
Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation
We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and
their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world
NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about
language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We
discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for
sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a
preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st
PERFORMING ANAPHORA IN MODERN GREEK: A NEO-GRICEAN PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS
The paper addresses the problem of interpreting anaphoric NPs in Modern Greek. It includes a proposal of a novel analysis based on the systematic interaction of the neo- Gricean pragmatic principles of communication, which provides a neat and elegant approach to NP-anaphora resolution. The findings of this study provide evidence for an account of NP-anaphora in terms of the division of labour between syntax and pragmatics and more accurately in terms of the systematic interaction of the neo-Gricean pragmatic principles
Translation of Pronominal Anaphora between English and Spanish: Discrepancies and Evaluation
This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of
pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua
approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation)
improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate
intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish
zero pronouns into English---issues hardly considered by other systems. The
paper presents the resolution and evaluation of these anaphora problems in AGIR
with the use of different kinds of knowledge (lexical, morphological,
syntactic, and semantic). The translation of English and Spanish anaphoric
third-person personal pronouns (including Spanish zero pronouns) into the
target language has been evaluated on unrestricted corpora. We have obtained a
precision of 80.4% and 84.8% in the translation of Spanish and English
pronouns, respectively. Although we have only studied the Spanish and English
languages, our approach can be easily extended to other languages such as
Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese
AnaPro, Tool for Identification and Resolution of Direct Anaphora in Spanish
Introduction Anaphora is a relation of coreference between linguistic terms. According to Webster’s dictionary: “It is the use of a grammatical substitute (as a pronoun or a pro-verb) to refer to the denotation of a preceding word or group of words; also : the relation between a grammatical substitute and its antecedent.” Therefore, anaphora is a discourse relation. Anaphora resolution is very important in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This work is part of Project OM* (Ontology Merging), which seeks to build a large ontology by fusing smaller ontologies extracted from textual documents. An important part of the project is to analyze the sentences in a document with the goal to transform that text into an ontology that comprises its contents. A brief description of Project OM* follows.AnaPro is software that solves direct anaphora in Spanish, specifically pronouns: it finds the noun or group of words to which the pronoun refers. It locates in the previous sentenc es the referent or antecedent which the pronoun replaces. An example of a direct anaphora solved is the pronoun “ he” in the sentence “He is sad.” Much of the work on anaphora has been done for texts in English; thus , we specifically focus on Spanish documents. AnaPro directly supports text analys is (to understand what a document says ), a non trivial task since there are different writing styles, references, idiomatic expressions, etc. The problem grows if t he analyzer is a computer, because they lack “common sense” (which persons possess) . Hence, before text analysis, its preprocessing is required, in order to assign tags (noun, verb,...) to each word, find the stems, disambiguate nouns, verbs, prepositions, identify colloquial expressions, i dentify and resolve anaphor a, among other chores. AnaPro works for Spanish sentences. It is a novel procedure, since it is automatic (no user intervenes during the resolution) and it does not need dictionaries. It employs heu ristics procedures to discover the semantics and help in the decisions; they are rather easy to implement and use li mited knowledge. Nevertheless, its results are good (81% of correct answers, at least). However, more tests will give a better idea of its goodness.Authors I.T. and E.V. would like to acknowledge ESCOM-IPN, where they defended their thesis, #20110083 , which gives a more detailed description of AnaPro. Work herein reported was partially sponsored by CONACYT Grant #128163 (Project OM*), by IPN and by SNI and UAEM
Binding theory in LTAG
This paper provides a unification-based implementation of Binding Theory (BT) for the English language in the framework of feature-based lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG). The grammar presented here does not actually coindex any noun phrases, it merely outputs a set of constraints on co- and contraindexation that may later be processed by a separate anaphora resolution module. It improves on previous work by implementing the full BT rather than just Condition A. The main technical innovation consists in allowing lists to appear as values of semantic features
I Can Parse You: Grammars for Dialogs
Humans and computers increasingly converse via natural language. Those conversations are moving from today\u27s simple question answering and command-and-control to more complex dialogs. Developers must specify those dialogs. This paper explores how to assist developers in this specification. We map out the staggering variety of applications for human-computer dialogs and distill it into a catalog of flow patterns. Based on that, we articulate the requirements for dialog programming models and offer our vision for satisfying these requirements using grammars. If our approach catches on, computers will soon parse you to better assist you in your daily life
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