Parsing coordinations

The present paper is concerned with statistical parsing of constituent structures in German. The paper presents four experiments that aim at improving parsing performance of coordinate structure: 1) reranking the n-best parses of a PCFG parser, 2) enriching the input to a PCFG parser by gold scopes for any conjunct, 3) reranking the parser output for all possible scopes for conjuncts that are permissible with regard to clause structure. Experiment 4 reranks a combination of parses from experiments 1 and 3. The experiments presented show that n- best parsing combined with reranking improves results by a large margin. Providing the parser with different scope possibilities and reranking the resulting parses results in an increase in F-score from 69.76 for the baseline to 74.69. While the F-score is similar to the one of the first experiment (n-best parsing and reranking), the first experiment results in higher recall (75.48% vs. 73.69%) and the third one in higher precision (75.43% vs. 73.26%). Combining the two methods results in the best result with an F-score of 76.69

KARL: A Knowledge-Assisted Retrieval Language

Data classification and storage are tasks typically performed by application specialists. In contrast, information users are primarily non-computer specialists who use information in their decision-making and other activities. Interaction efficiency between such users and the computer is often reduced by machine requirements and resulting user reluctance to use the system. This thesis examines the problems associated with information retrieval for non-computer specialist users, and proposes a method for communicating in restricted English that uses knowledge of the entities involved, relationships between entities, and basic English language syntax and semantics to translate the user requests into formal queries. The proposed method includes an intelligent dictionary, syntax and semantic verifiers, and a formal query generator. In addition, the proposed system has a learning capability that can improve portability and performance. With the increasing demand for efficient human-machine communication, the significance of this thesis becomes apparent. As human resources become more valuable, software systems that will assist in improving the human-machine interface will be needed and research addressing new solutions will be of utmost importance. This thesis presents an initial design and implementation as a foundation for further research and development into the emerging field of natural language database query systems

What is Needed the Most in MT-Supported Paper Writing

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Ellipsis Resolution as Question Answering: An Evaluation

Most, if not all forms of ellipsis (e.g., so does Mary) are similar to reading comprehension questions (what does Mary do), in that in order to resolve them, we need to identify an appropriate text span in the preceding discourse. Following this observation, we present an alternative approach for English ellipsis resolution relying on architectures developed for question answering (QA). We present both single-task models, and joint models trained on auxiliary QA and coreference resolution datasets, clearly outperforming the current state of the art for Sluice Ellipsis (from 70.00 to 86.01 F1) and Verb Phrase Ellipsis (from 72.89 to 78.66 F1).Comment: To appear in EACL 202

Recurrent and not-so-recurrent pragmatic errors in academic writing in English as a Foreign Language

In our globalised world, the need of a common language is encouraging the massive learning of English. Much effort has been dedicated to help improve proficiency at different levels of language learning, but, as students face greater levels of complexity, proficiency in pragmatic aspects of language continues being deficient (Romero-Trillo, 2002; Author and Carrió Pastor, 2013). This must be addressed in the Foreign Language (FL) classroom (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Wang, 2007). In this regard, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), grounded on the communicative approach, has provided guidelines to teach and established Foreign Language proficiency levels. The CEFR Companion Volume proposed more detailed descriptors to identify and outline language proficiency. The present paper displays a 10-year pseudo-longitudinal study of a learner corpus of 125 written texts produced by University students in which pragmatic (coherence and cohesion) errors are analysed. The aim of the study has been to examine improvement in student production in the years subsequent to the publication of the reference book. Results point to errors that have been minimised after training and instruction, but they also identify some recurrent errors in English as an FL writing.En un mundo globalizado, la necesidad de una lengua común está fomentando el aprendizaje masivo del inglés. Se ha dedicado mucho esfuerzo a ayudar a mejorar la competencia en diferentes niveles de aprendizaje de la lengua, pero, a medida que los estudiantes enfrentan mayores niveles de complejidad, la competencia en los aspectos pragmáticos de la lengua extranjera (LE) sigue siendo deficiente (Romero-Trillo, 2002; Author y Carrió Pastor, 2013). Esta cuestión debe abordarse en el aula de lengua extranjera (Sperber y Wilson, 1995; Wang, 2007). En este sentido, el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las Lenguas (MCER), basado en el enfoque comunicativo, ha proporcionado pautas para enseñar y ha establecido niveles de competencia en lenguas extranjeras. El volumen complementario del MCER propuso descriptores más detallados para identificar y representar el dominio de la lengua. El presente artículo presenta un estudio pseudo-longitudinal de un corpus de aprendices de 125 textos escritos producidos por estudiantes universitarios en los que se analizan errores pragmáticos (de coherencia y cohesión). El objetivo del estudio ha sido examinar la mejora en la producción de los estudiantes en los años posteriores a la publicación del libro de referencia. Los resultados apuntan a errores que se han minimizado después de la preparación y la instrucción, pero también identifican algunos errores recurrentes en la escritura del inglés como LE

DeepEval: An Integrated Framework for the Evaluation of Student Responses in Dialogue Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

The automatic assessment of student answers is one of the critical components of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) because accurate assessment of student input is needed in order to provide effective feedback that leads to learning. But this is a very challenging task because it requires natural language understanding capabilities. The process requires various components, concepts identification, co-reference resolution, ellipsis handling etc. As part of this thesis, we thoroughly analyzed a set of student responses obtained from an experiment with the intelligent tutoring system DeepTutor in which college students interacted with the tutor to solve conceptual physics problems, designed an automatic answer assessment framework (DeepEval), and evaluated the framework after implementing several important components. To evaluate our system, we annotated 618 responses from 41 students for correctness. Our system performs better as compared to the typical similarity calculation method. We also discuss various issues in automatic answer evaluation