8,560 research outputs found
Data-Oriented Language Processing. An Overview
During the last few years, a new approach to language processing has started
to emerge, which has become known under various labels such as "data-oriented
parsing", "corpus-based interpretation", and "tree-bank grammar" (cf. van den
Berg et al. 1994; Bod 1992-96; Bod et al. 1996a/b; Bonnema 1996; Charniak
1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Kaplan 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Scha 1990-92; Sekine &
Grishman 1995; Sima'an et al. 1994; Sima'an 1995-96; Tugwell 1995). This
approach, which we will call "data-oriented processing" or "DOP", embodies the
assumption that human language perception and production works with
representations of concrete past language experiences, rather than with
abstract linguistic rules. The models that instantiate this approach therefore
maintain large corpora of linguistic representations of previously occurring
utterances. When processing a new input utterance, analyses of this utterance
are constructed by combining fragments from the corpus; the
occurrence-frequencies of the fragments are used to estimate which analysis is
the most probable one.
In this paper we give an in-depth discussion of a data-oriented processing
model which employs a corpus of labelled phrase-structure trees. Then we review
some other models that instantiate the DOP approach. Many of these models also
employ labelled phrase-structure trees, but use different criteria for
extracting fragments from the corpus or employ different disambiguation
strategies (Bod 1996b; Charniak 1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Sekine &
Grishman 1995; Sima'an 1995-96); other models use richer formalisms for their
corpus annotations (van den Berg et al. 1994; Bod et al., 1996a/b; Bonnema
1996; Kaplan 1996; Tugwell 1995).Comment: 34 pages, Postscrip
A Unified Multilingual Handwriting Recognition System using multigrams sub-lexical units
We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting
recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that
are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time.
While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing
with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language
models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per
language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on
sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongly reduces
the lexicon size and thus decreases the language model complexity. This makes
pos- sible the design of an end-to-end unified multilingual recognition system
where both a single optical model and a single language model are trained on
all the languages. We discuss the impact of the language unification on each
model and show that our system reaches state-of-the-art methods perfor- mance
with a strong reduction of the complexity.Comment: preprin
Meta-Learning for Phonemic Annotation of Corpora
We apply rule induction, classifier combination and meta-learning (stacked
classifiers) to the problem of bootstrapping high accuracy automatic annotation
of corpora with pronunciation information. The task we address in this paper
consists of generating phonemic representations reflecting the Flemish and
Dutch pronunciations of a word on the basis of its orthographic representation
(which in turn is based on the actual speech recordings). We compare several
possible approaches to achieve the text-to-pronunciation mapping task:
memory-based learning, transformation-based learning, rule induction, maximum
entropy modeling, combination of classifiers in stacked learning, and stacking
of meta-learners. We are interested both in optimal accuracy and in obtaining
insight into the linguistic regularities involved. As far as accuracy is
concerned, an already high accuracy level (93% for Celex and 86% for Fonilex at
word level) for single classifiers is boosted significantly with additional
error reductions of 31% and 38% respectively using combination of classifiers,
and a further 5% using combination of meta-learners, bringing overall word
level accuracy to 96% for the Dutch variant and 92% for the Flemish variant. We
also show that the application of machine learning methods indeed leads to
increased insight into the linguistic regularities determining the variation
between the two pronunciation variants studied.Comment: 8 page
Nonuniform Markov models
A statistical language model assigns probability to strings of arbitrary
length. Unfortunately, it is not possible to gather reliable statistics on
strings of arbitrary length from a finite corpus. Therefore, a statistical
language model must decide that each symbol in a string depends on at most a
small, finite number of other symbols in the string. In this report we propose
a new way to model conditional independence in Markov models. The central
feature of our nonuniform Markov model is that it makes predictions of varying
lengths using contexts of varying lengths. Experiments on the Wall Street
Journal reveal that the nonuniform model performs slightly better than the
classic interpolated Markov model. This result is somewhat remarkable because
both models contain identical numbers of parameters whose values are estimated
in a similar manner. The only difference between the two models is how they
combine the statistics of longer and shorter strings.
Keywords: nonuniform Markov model, interpolated Markov model, conditional
independence, statistical language model, discrete time series.Comment: 17 page
Calibrated Multivariate Regression with Application to Neural Semantic Basis Discovery
We propose a calibrated multivariate regression method named CMR for fitting
high dimensional multivariate regression models. Compared with existing
methods, CMR calibrates regularization for each regression task with respect to
its noise level so that it simultaneously attains improved finite-sample
performance and tuning insensitiveness. Theoretically, we provide sufficient
conditions under which CMR achieves the optimal rate of convergence in
parameter estimation. Computationally, we propose an efficient smoothed
proximal gradient algorithm with a worst-case numerical rate of convergence
\cO(1/\epsilon), where is a pre-specified accuracy of the
objective function value. We conduct thorough numerical simulations to
illustrate that CMR consistently outperforms other high dimensional
multivariate regression methods. We also apply CMR to solve a brain activity
prediction problem and find that it is as competitive as a handcrafted model
created by human experts. The R package \texttt{camel} implementing the
proposed method is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network
\url{http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/camel/}.Comment: Journal of Machine Learning Research, 201
A Machine Learning Approach to the Classification of Dialogue Utterances
The purpose of this paper is to present a method for automatic classification
of dialogue utterances and the results of applying that method to a corpus.
Superficial features of a set of training utterances (which we will call cues)
are taken as the basis for finding relevant utterance classes and for
extracting rules for assigning these classes to new utterances. Each cue is
assumed to partially contribute to the communicative function of an utterance.
Instead of relying on subjective judgments for the tasks of finding classes and
rules, we opt for using machine learning techniques to guarantee objectivity.Comment: 12 pages, using nemlap.sty, harvard.sty and agsm.bst, to appear in
Proceedings of NeMLaP-2, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turke
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