12,138 research outputs found
New Technique to Enhance the Performance of Spoken Dialogue Systems by Means of Implicit Recovery of ASR Errors
This paper proposes a new technique to implicitly correct some ASR
errors made by spoken dialogue systems, which is implemented at two levels:
statistical and linguistic. The goal of the former level is to employ for the correction
knowledge extracted from the analysis of a training corpus comprised of
utterances and their corresponding ASR results. The outcome of the analysis is
a set of syntactic-semantic models and a set of lexical models, which are optimally
selected during the correction. The goal of the correction at the linguistic
level is to repair errors not detected during the statistical level which affects the
semantics of the sentences. Experiments carried out with a previouslydeveloped
spoken dialogue system for the fast food domain indicate that the
technique allows enhancing word accuracy, spoken language understanding and
task completion by 8.5%, 16.54% and 44.17% absolute, respectively.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64718 HAD
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
Evaluation of automatic hypernym extraction from technical corpora in English and Dutch
In this research, we evaluate different approaches for the automatic extraction of hypernym relations from English and Dutch technical text. The detected hypernym relations should enable us to semantically structure automatically obtained term lists from domain- and user-specific data. We investigated three different hypernymy extraction approaches for Dutch and English: a lexico-syntactic pattern-based approach, a distributional model and a morpho-syntactic method. To test the performance of the different approaches on domain-specific data, we collected and manually annotated English and Dutch data from two technical domains, viz. the dredging and financial domain. The experimental results show that especially the morpho-syntactic approach obtains good results for automatic hypernym extraction from technical and domain-specific texts
Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs
The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often
domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have
happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary
source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from
Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This
is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate
quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based
representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close
and a Distant Reading of the collection.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
A Deep Network Model for Paraphrase Detection in Short Text Messages
This paper is concerned with paraphrase detection. The ability to detect
similar sentences written in natural language is crucial for several
applications, such as text mining, text summarization, plagiarism detection,
authorship authentication and question answering. Given two sentences, the
objective is to detect whether they are semantically identical. An important
insight from this work is that existing paraphrase systems perform well when
applied on clean texts, but they do not necessarily deliver good performance
against noisy texts. Challenges with paraphrase detection on user generated
short texts, such as Twitter, include language irregularity and noise. To cope
with these challenges, we propose a novel deep neural network-based approach
that relies on coarse-grained sentence modeling using a convolutional neural
network and a long short-term memory model, combined with a specific
fine-grained word-level similarity matching model. Our experimental results
show that the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art
approaches on user-generated noisy social media data, such as Twitter texts,
and achieves highly competitive performance on a cleaner corpus
Multi-Tier Annotations in the Verbmobil Corpus
In very large and diverse scientific projects where as different groups as linguists and engineers with different intentions work on the same signal data or its orthographic transcript and annotate new valuable information, it will not be easy to build a homogeneous corpus. We will describe how this can be achieved, considering the fact that some of these annotations have not been updated properly, or are based on erroneous or deliberately changed versions of the basis transcription. We used an algorithm similar to dynamic programming to detect differences between the transcription on which the annotation depends and the reference transcription for the whole corpus. These differences are automatically mapped on a set of repair operations for the transcriptions such as splitting compound words and merging neighbouring words. On the basis of these operations the correction process in the annotation is carried out. It always depends on the type of the annotation as well as on the position and the nature of the difference, whether a correction can be carried out automatically or has to be fixed manually. Finally we present a investigation in which we exploit the multi-tier annotations of the Verbmobil corpus to find out how breathing is correlated with prosodic-syntactic boundaries and dialog acts. 1
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