53,121 research outputs found

    Conceptual coherence in the generation of referring expressions

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    One of the challenges in the automatic generation of referring expressions is to identify a set of domain entities coherently, that is, from the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm that generates a conceptually coherent description of a target set. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.peer-reviewe

    Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

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    We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

    The Influence of layout on the interpretation of referring expressions

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    From the introduction: The division of text into visual segments such as sentences, paragraphs and sections achieves many functions, such as easing navigation, achieving pragmatic effect, improving readability and reflecting the organisation of information (Wright, 1983; Schriver 1997). In this paper, we report a small experiment that investigates the effect of different layout configurations on the interpretation of the antecedent of anaphoric referring expressions. Layout has so far played little role in Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. The layout of output texts is generally very simple. At worst, it consists of only a single paragraph consisting of a few sentences; at best it is predetermined by schemas (Coch, 1996; Porter and Lester, 1997) or discourse plans (Milosavljevic, 1999). However, recent work by Power (2000) and Bouayad et al. (2000) has integrated graphically signalled segments (e.g., by whitespace, punctuation, font and face alternation) such as paragraphs, lists, text-sentences and text-clauses in a hierarchical tree-like representation called the document structure.2 This work was carried out within the ICONOCLAST project (Integrating CONstraints On Layout and Style), which aims at automatically generating formatted texts in which the formatting decisions affect the wording and vice-versa.3 If document structure affects the comprehensibility of referring expressions, this must be taken into account in any attempt to generate felicitous formatted texts. This will go a step further from current research in the automatic generation of referring expressions, where only the effect of discourse structure and grammatical function has been investigated (Dale and Reiter, 1995; Cristea et al., 1998;Walker et al., 1998; Kibble and Power, 1999)

    Metaphoric coherence: Distinguishing verbal metaphor from `anomaly\u27

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    Theories and computational models of metaphor comprehension generally circumvent the question of metaphor versus “anomaly” in favor of a treatment of metaphor versus literal language. Making the distinction between metaphoric and “anomalous” expressions is subject to wide variation in judgment, yet humans agree that some potentially metaphoric expressions are much more comprehensible than others. In the context of a program which interprets simple isolated sentences that are potential instances of cross‐modal and other verbal metaphor, I consider some possible coherence criteria which must be satisfied for an expression to be “conceivable” metaphorically. Metaphoric constraints on object nominals are represented as abstracted or extended along with the invariant structural components of the verb meaning in a metaphor. This approach distinguishes what is preserved in metaphoric extension from that which is “violated”, thus referring to both “similarity” and “dissimilarity” views of metaphor. The role and potential limits of represented abstracted properties and constraints is discussed as they relate to the recognition of incoherent semantic combinations and the rejection or adjustment of metaphoric interpretations

    Lexical choice and conceptual perspective in the generation of plural referring expressions

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    A fundamental part of the process of referring to an entity is to categorise it (for instance, as the woman). Where multiple categorisations exist, this implicitly involves the adoption of a conceptual perspective. A challenge for the automatic Generation of Referring Expressions is to identify a set of referents coherently, adopting the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm to achieve this. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.peer-reviewe

    From Monologue to Dialogue: Natural Language Generation in OVIS

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    This paper describes how a language generation system that was originally designed for monologue generation, has been adapted for use in the OVIS spoken dialogue system. To meet the requirement that in a dialogue, the system's utterances should make up a single, coherent dialogue turn, several modifications had to be made to the system. The paper also discusses the influence of dialogue context on information status, and its consequences for the generation of referring expressions and accentuation

    Troping the Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, and the Big Data Black Boxes of National Security

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    This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community\u27s (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of the opacity of these risks for analysts, even as such predictive cultural analytics are becoming a part of intelligence forecasting. This article examines the problem of information secrecy in two ways, by unpacking the opacity of “black box,” algorithm-based social science of culture for end users with little appreciation of their potential biases, and by evaluating the IC\u27s nontransparent approach to foreign cultures, as it underwrites national security assessments
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