15,084 research outputs found
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
Retrieving with good sense
Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information
retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in
disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information
retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt
from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval
Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey
The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread
applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and
some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have
been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use
of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has
received little attention. Even though they have traditionally performed poorly
when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely
attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and
their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness.
Therefore, this paper presents a detailed study of distributional measures.
Particular attention is paid to flesh out the strengths and limitations of both
WordNet-based and distributional measures, and how distributional measures of
distance can be brought more in line with human notions of semantic distance.
We conclude with a brief discussion of recent work on hybrid measures
Event Representations with Tensor-based Compositions
Robust and flexible event representations are important to many core areas in
language understanding. Scripts were proposed early on as a way of representing
sequences of events for such understanding, and has recently attracted renewed
attention. However, obtaining effective representations for modeling
script-like event sequences is challenging. It requires representations that
can capture event-level and scenario-level semantics. We propose a new
tensor-based composition method for creating event representations. The method
captures more subtle semantic interactions between an event and its entities
and yields representations that are effective at multiple event-related tasks.
With the continuous representations, we also devise a simple schema generation
method which produces better schemas compared to a prior discrete
representation based method. Our analysis shows that the tensors capture
distinct usages of a predicate even when there are only subtle differences in
their surface realizations.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 201
There may be regular guys but there are no regular native speakers: lexis and native-speaker-like competence.
An analysis of different dimensions of meaning available to a native speaker (though with some variation across any given population of native speakers) in making judgments about English usage. Argues that research into such intuitions is essential in understanding lexis, alongside the kinds of electronic corpus analysis favoured by Swedish scholar Moira Linnarud to whom the Festschrift is dedicated
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