2,847 research outputs found
Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation
Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural
language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution
of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon
like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and
devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She
presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally
implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun
resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a
better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational
point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments,
and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the
statistical results.Comment: iii + 49 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript file; revised
version of the first author's Bilkent M.S. thesis, written under the
supervision of the second author; notify Akman via e-mail
([email protected]) or fax (+90-312-266-4126) if you are unable to
obtain hardcopy, he'll work out somethin
Text as scene: discourse deixis and bridging relations
En este artículo se presenta un nuevo marco, “el texto como escena”, que establece
las bases para la anotación de dos relaciones de correferencia: la deixis discursiva y las
relaciones de bridging. La incorporación de lo que llamamos escenas textuales y contextuales
proporciona unas directrices de anotación más flexibles, que diferencian claramente entre tipos
de categorías generales. Un marco como éste, capaz de tratar la deixis discursiva y las
relaciones de bridging desde una perspectiva común, tiene como objetivo mejorar el bajo grado
de acuerdo entre anotadores obtenido por esquemas de anotación anteriores, que son incapaces
de captar las referencias vagas inherentes a estos dos tipos de relaciones. Las directrices aquí
presentadas completan el esquema de anotación diseñado para enriquecer el corpus español
CESS-ECE con información correferencial y así construir el corpus CESS-Ancora.This paper presents a new framework, “text as scene”, which lays the foundations for
the annotation of two coreferential links: discourse deixis and bridging relations. The
incorporation of what we call textual and contextual scenes provides more flexible annotation
guidelines, broad type categories being clearly differentiated. Such a framework that is capable
of dealing with discourse deixis and bridging relations from a common perspective aims at
improving the poor reliability scores obtained by previous annotation schemes, which fail to
capture the vague references inherent in both these links. The guidelines presented here
complete the annotation scheme designed to enrich the Spanish CESS-ECE corpus with
coreference information, thus building the CESS-Ancora corpus.This paper has been supported by the FPU
grant (AP2006-00994) from the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science. It is based
on work supported by the CESS-ECE
(HUM2004-21127), Lang2World (TIN2006-
15265-C06-06), and Praxem (HUM2006-
27378-E) projects
Design and enhanced evaluation of a robust anaphor resolution algorithm
Syntactic coindexing restrictions are by now known to be of central importance to practical anaphor resolution approaches. Since, in particular due to structural ambiguity, the assumption of the availability of a unique syntactic reading proves to be unrealistic, robust anaphor resolution relies on techniques to overcome this deficiency.
This paper describes the ROSANA approach, which generalizes the verification of coindexing restrictions in order to make it applicable to the deficient syntactic descriptions that are provided by a robust state-of-the-art parser. By a formal evaluation on two corpora that differ with respect to text genre and domain, it is shown that ROSANA achieves high-quality robust coreference resolution. Moreover, by an in-depth analysis, it is proven that the robust implementation of syntactic disjoint reference is nearly optimal. The study reveals that, compared with approaches that rely on shallow preprocessing, the largely nonheuristic disjoint reference algorithmization opens up the possibility/or a slight improvement. Furthermore, it is shown that more significant gains are to be expected elsewhere, particularly from a text-genre-specific choice of preference strategies.
The performance study of the ROSANA system crucially rests on an enhanced evaluation methodology for coreference resolution systems, the development of which constitutes the second major contribution o/the paper. As a supplement to the model-theoretic scoring scheme that was developed for the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) evaluations, additional evaluation measures are defined that, on one hand, support the developer of anaphor resolution systems, and, on the other hand, shed light on application aspects of pronoun interpretation
Evaluating Centering for Information Ordering Using Corpora
In this article we discuss several metrics of coherence defined using centering theory and investigate the usefulness of such metrics for information ordering in automatic text generation. We estimate empirically which is the most promising metric and how useful this metric is using a general methodology applied on several corpora. Our main result is that the simplest metric (which relies exclusively on NOCB transitions) sets a robust baseline that cannot be outperformed by other metrics which make use of additional centering-based features. This baseline can be used for the development of both text-to-text and concept-to-text generation systems. </jats:p
Modelling the flow of discourse in a corpus of written academic English
Discourse studies attempt to describe how context affects text, and how text progresses from
one sentence to the next. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers a model of language
to describe how information flow varies according to context and co-text through the Textual
metafunction, especially using the functions of Participant Identification and Tracking,
Theme and Information Structure. These systems were evaluated by assembling a corpus of
academic texts and assessing their information flow. Results of the analysis of the three
grammatical systems in the Textual Metafunction demonstrate significant patterns, or
unmarked choices, where the participant, thematic and information systems combine to
powerful effect. Where the systems are not aligned, there is a recognisable effect on the flow
of information
Do You See What I Mean? Visual Resolution of Linguistic Ambiguities
Understanding language goes hand in hand with the ability to integrate
complex contextual information obtained via perception. In this work, we
present a novel task for grounded language understanding: disambiguating a
sentence given a visual scene which depicts one of the possible interpretations
of that sentence. To this end, we introduce a new multimodal corpus containing
ambiguous sentences, representing a wide range of syntactic, semantic and
discourse ambiguities, coupled with videos that visualize the different
interpretations for each sentence. We address this task by extending a vision
model which determines if a sentence is depicted by a video. We demonstrate how
such a model can be adjusted to recognize different interpretations of the same
underlying sentence, allowing to disambiguate sentences in a unified fashion
across the different ambiguity types.Comment: EMNLP 201
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