10,818 research outputs found
Combining independent modules to solve multiple-choice synonym and analogy problems
Existing statistical approaches to natural language problems are very
coarse approximations to the true complexity of language processing.
As such, no single technique will be best for all problem instances.
Many researchers are examining ensemble methods that combine the
output of successful, separately developed modules to create more
accurate solutions. This paper examines three merging rules for
combining probability distributions: the well known mixture rule, the
logarithmic rule, and a novel product rule. These rules were applied
with state-of-the-art results to two problems commonly used to assess
human mastery of lexical semantics -- synonym questions and analogy
questions. All three merging rules result in ensembles that are more
accurate than any of their component modules. The differences among the
three rules are not statistically significant, but it is suggestive
that the popular mixture rule is not the best rule for either of the
two problems
Learning Analogies and Semantic Relations
We present an algorithm for learning from unlabeled text, based on the
Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval, that can solve verbal
analogy questions of the kind found in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
A verbal analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning "A is to B as C is to D";
for example, mason:stone::carpenter:wood. SAT analogy questions provide
a word pair, A:B, and the problem is to select the most analogous word
pair, C:D, from a set of five choices. The VSM algorithm correctly
answers 47% of a collection of 374 college-level analogy questions
(random guessing would yield 20% correct). We motivate this research by
relating it to work in cognitive science and linguistics, and by applying
it to a difficult problem in natural language processing, determining
semantic relations in noun-modifier pairs. The problem is to classify a
noun-modifier pair, such as "laser printer", according to the semantic
relation between the noun (printer) and the modifier (laser). We use a
supervised nearest-neighbour algorithm that assigns a class to a given
noun-modifier pair by finding the most analogous noun-modifier pair in
the training data. With 30 classes of semantic relations, on a collection
of 600 labeled noun-modifier pairs, the learning algorithm attains an F
value of 26.5% (random guessing: 3.3%). With 5 classes of semantic
relations, the F value is 43.2% (random: 20%). The performance is
state-of-the-art for these challenging problems
The Latent Relation Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Experiments
Many AI researchers and cognitive scientists have argued that analogy is the
core of cognition. The most influential work on computational modeling of
analogy-making is Structure Mapping Theory (SMT) and its implementation in the
Structure Mapping Engine (SME). A limitation of SME is the requirement for
complex hand-coded representations. We introduce the Latent Relation Mapping
Engine (LRME), which combines ideas from SME and Latent Relational Analysis
(LRA) in order to remove the requirement for hand-coded representations. LRME
builds analogical mappings between lists of words, using a large corpus of raw
text to automatically discover the semantic relations among the words. We
evaluate LRME on a set of twenty analogical mapping problems, ten based on
scientific analogies and ten based on common metaphors. LRME achieves
human-level performance on the twenty problems. We compare LRME with a variety
of alternative approaches and find that they are not able to reach the same
level of performance.Comment: related work available at http://purl.org/peter.turney
Human-Level Performance on Word Analogy Questions by Latent Relational Analysis
This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason/stone is analogous to the pair carpenter/wood; the relations between mason and stone are highly similar to the relations between carpenter and wood. Past work on semantic similarity measures has mainly been concerned with attributional similarity. For instance, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can measure the degree of similarity between two words, but not between two relations. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to the task of measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus (they are not predefined), (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data (it is also used this way in LSA), and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore reformulations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying noun-modifier relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM, while using a smaller corpus
Information Extraction, Data Integration, and Uncertain Data Management: The State of The Art
Information Extraction, data Integration, and uncertain data management are different areas of research that got vast focus in the last two decades. Many researches tackled those areas of research individually. However, information extraction systems should have integrated with data integration methods to make use of the extracted information. Handling uncertainty in extraction and integration process is an important issue to enhance the quality of the data in such integrated systems. This article presents the state of the art of the mentioned areas of research and shows the common grounds and how to integrate information extraction and data integration under uncertainty management cover
A Uniform Approach to Analogies, Synonyms, Antonyms, and Associations
Recognizing analogies, synonyms, antonyms, and associations appear to be four\ud
distinct tasks, requiring distinct NLP algorithms. In the past, the four\ud
tasks have been treated independently, using a wide variety of algorithms.\ud
These four semantic classes, however, are a tiny sample of the full\ud
range of semantic phenomena, and we cannot afford to create ad hoc algorithms\ud
for each semantic phenomenon; we need to seek a unified approach.\ud
We propose to subsume a broad range of phenomena under analogies.\ud
To limit the scope of this paper, we restrict our attention to the subsumption\ud
of synonyms, antonyms, and associations. We introduce a supervised corpus-based\ud
machine learning algorithm for classifying analogous word pairs, and we\ud
show that it can solve multiple-choice SAT analogy questions, TOEFL\ud
synonym questions, ESL synonym-antonym questions, and similar-associated-both\ud
questions from cognitive psychology
The interaction of knowledge sources in word sense disambiguation
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a computational linguistics task likely to benefit from the tradition of combining different knowledge sources in artificial in telligence research. An important step in the exploration of this hypothesis is to determine which linguistic knowledge sources are most useful and whether their combination leads to improved results.
We present a sense tagger which uses several knowledge sources. Tested accuracy exceeds 94% on our evaluation corpus.Our system attempts to disambiguate all content words in running text rather than limiting itself to treating a restricted vocabulary of words. It is argued that this approach is more likely to assist the creation of practical systems
Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue
One of the biggest challenges in the development and deployment of spoken
dialogue systems is the design of the spoken language generation module. This
challenge arises from the need for the generator to adapt to many features of
the dialogue domain, user population, and dialogue context. A promising
approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic
knowledge that is automatically adapted to the features of interest, such as
the application domain, individual user, or user group. In this paper we
present and evaluate a trainable sentence planner for providing restaurant
information in the MATCH dialogue system. We show that trainable sentence
planning can produce complex information presentations whose quality is
comparable to the output of a template-based generator tuned to this domain. We
also show that our method easily supports adapting the sentence planner to
individuals, and that the individualized sentence planners generally perform
better than models trained and tested on a population of individuals. Previous
work has documented and utilized individual preferences for content selection,
but to our knowledge, these results provide the first demonstration of
individual preferences for sentence planning operations, affecting the content
order, discourse structure and sentence structure of system responses. Finally,
we evaluate the contribution of different feature sets, and show that, in our
application, n-gram features often do as well as features based on higher-level
linguistic representations
Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation
This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language
Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from
non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the
field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new
(usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology.
This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on
the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are
organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that
have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas
of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG
evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural
Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the
relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118
pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Similarity of Semantic Relations
There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is
correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity,
which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high
degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs
of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their
relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason:stone is analogous
to the pair carpenter:wood. This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA),
a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many
areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation,
and information retrieval. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information
retrieval has been adapted to measuring relational similarity,
achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice
word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is
characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus.
LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically
from the corpus, (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency
data, and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore variations of the
word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the
average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying semantic relations, LRA
achieves similar gains over the VSM
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