Automatic acquisition of LFG resources for German - as good as it gets

We present data-driven methods for the acquisition of LFG resources from two German treebanks. We discuss problems specific to semi-free word order languages as well as problems arising fromthe data structures determined by the design of the different treebanks. We compare two ways of encoding semi-free word order, as done in the two German treebanks, and argue that the design of the TiGer treebank is more adequate for the acquisition of LFG resources. Furthermore, we describe an architecture for LFG grammar acquisition for German, based on the two German treebanks, and compare our results with a hand-crafted German LFG grammar

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

RDF/S)XML Linguistic Annotation of Semantic Web Pages

Although with the Semantic Web initiative much research on web pages semantic annotation has already done by AI researchers, linguistic text annotation, including the semantic one, was originally developed in Corpus Linguistics and its results have been somehow neglected by AI. ..

From treebank resources to LFG F-structures

We present two methods for automatically annotating treebank resources with functional structures. Both methods define systematic patterns of correspondence between partial PS configurations and functional structures. These are applied to PS rules extracted from treebanks, or directly to constraint set encodings of treebank PS trees

Implicit learning of recursive context-free grammars

Context-free grammars are fundamental for the description of linguistic syntax. However, most artificial grammar learning experiments have explored learning of simpler finite-state grammars, while studies exploring context-free grammars have not assessed awareness and implicitness. This paper explores the implicit learning of context-free grammars employing features of hierarchical organization, recursive embedding and long-distance dependencies. The grammars also featured the distinction between left- and right-branching structures, as well as between centre- and tail-embedding, both distinctions found in natural languages. People acquired unconscious knowledge of relations between grammatical classes even for dependencies over long distances, in ways that went beyond learning simpler relations (e.g. n-grams) between individual words. The structural distinctions drawn from linguistics also proved important as performance was greater for tail-embedding than centre-embedding structures. The results suggest the plausibility of implicit learning of complex context-free structures, which model some features of natural languages. They support the relevance of artificial grammar learning for probing mechanisms of language learning and challenge existing theories and computational models of implicit learning

Advanced engineering - Supporting research and technology

Telemetry simulations, radar equipment and experiments, and related supporting research for Deep Space Networ

A diachronic approach to scientific lexicon in English: Evidence from Late Modern English corpora

This research focuses on the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), the first sub-corpus of CC, presenting a diachronic approach to astronomy specific lexicon found in texts from 1710 to 1920. The goal of this research is trying to determine the evolution of the lexical astronomy-domain specificity in the CETA. That is, how many astronomy-like lexical features occur in the English astronomic texts gathered in the CETA. This might shed some light on: (i) the introduction rate of new astronomic specific vocabulary along time, (ii) lexical richness in English astronomic texts, (iii) the rate of new astronomic specific vocabulary along time, (iv) the potential lexical specific features of English astronomic texts, and (v) lexico-semantic text difficulty of English astronomic texts.