33,211 research outputs found
Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage
Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic
transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance
in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this
process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities
derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and
equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native
languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological
similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of
typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target
languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task,
a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on
typological resources.Comment: CoNLL 201
DepAnn - An Annotation Tool for Dependency Treebanks
DepAnn is an interactive annotation tool for dependency treebanks, providing
both graphical and text-based annotation interfaces. The tool is aimed for
semi-automatic creation of treebanks. It aids the manual inspection and
correction of automatically created parses, making the annotation process
faster and less error-prone. A novel feature of the tool is that it enables the
user to view outputs from several parsers as the basis for creating the final
tree to be saved to the treebank. DepAnn uses TIGER-XML, an XML-based general
encoding format for both, representing the parser outputs and saving the
annotated treebank. The tool includes an automatic consistency checker for
sentence structures. In addition, the tool enables users to build structures
manually, add comments on the annotations, modify the tagsets, and mark
sentences for further revision
Extracting corpus specific knowledge bases from Wikipedia
Thesauri are useful knowledge structures for assisting information retrieval. Yet their production is labor-intensive, and few domains have comprehensive thesauri that cover domain-specific concepts and contemporary usage. One approach, which has been attempted without much success for decades, is to seek statistical natural language processing algorithms that work on free text. Instead, we propose to replace costly professional indexers with thousands of dedicated amateur volunteers--namely, those that are producing Wikipedia. This vast, open encyclopedia represents a rich tapestry of topics and semantics and a huge investment of human effort and judgment. We show how this can be directly exploited to provide WikiSauri: manually-defined yet inexpensive thesaurus structures that are specifically tailored to expose the topics, terminology and semantics of individual document collections. We also offer concrete evidence of the effectiveness of WikiSauri for assisting information retrieval
C-structures and f-structures for the British national corpus
We describe how the British National Corpus (BNC), a one hundred million word balanced corpus of British English, was parsed into Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) c-structures and f-structures, using a treebank-based
parsing architecture. The parsing architecture uses a state-of-the-art statistical parser and reranker trained on the Penn Treebank to produce context-free phrase structure trees, and an annotation algorithm to automatically annotate
these trees into LFG f-structures. We describe the pre-processing steps which were taken to accommodate the differences between the Penn Treebank and the BNC. Some of the issues encountered in applying the parsing
architecture on such a large scale are discussed. The process of annotating a gold standard set of 1,000 parse trees is described. We present evaluation results obtained by evaluating the c-structures produced by the statistical parser against the c-structure gold standard. We also present the results obtained by evaluating the f-structures produced by the annotation algorithm against an
automatically constructed f-structure gold standard. The c-structures achieve an f-score of 83.7% and the f-structures an f-score of 91.2%
Language choice models for microplanning and readability
This paper describes the construction of language choice models for the microplanning of discourse relations in a Natural Language Generation system that attempts to generate appropriate texts for users with varying levels of literacy. The models consist of constraint satisfaction problem graphs that have been derived from the results of a corpus analysis. The corpus that the models are based on was written for good readers. We adapted the models for poor readers by allowing certain constraints to be tightened, based on psycholinguistic evidence. We describe how the design of microplanner is evolving. We discuss the compromises involved in generating more readable textual output and implications of our design for NLG architectures. Finally we describe plans for future work
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
DCU 250 Arabic dependency bank: an LFG gold standard resource for the Arabic Penn treebank
This paper describes the construction of a dependency bank gold standard for Arabic, DCU 250 Arabic Dependency Bank (DCU 250), based on the Arabic Penn Treebank Corpus (ATB) (Bies and Maamouri, 2003; Maamouri and Bies, 2004) within the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). For parsing and automatically extracting grammatical and lexical resources from treebanks, it is necessary to evaluate against established gold standard resources. Gold standards for various languages have been developed, but to our knowledge, such a resource has not yet been constructed for Arabic. The construction of the DCU 250 marks the first step
towards the creation of an automatic LFG f-structure annotation algorithm for the ATB,
and for the extraction of Arabic grammatical and lexical resources
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