16,727 research outputs found
The Computational Analysis of the Syntax and Interpretation of Free Word Order in Turkish
In this dissertation, I examine a language with “free” word order, specifically Turkish, in order to develop a formalism that can capture the syntax and the context-dependent interpretation of “free” word order within a computational framework. In “free” word order languages, word order is used to convey distinctions in meaning that are not captured by traditional truth-conditional semantics. The word order indicates the “information structure”, e.g. what is the “topic” and the “focus” of the sentence. The context-appropriate use of “free” word order is of considerable importance in developing practical applications in natural language interpretation, generation, and machine translation.
I develop a formalism called Multiset-CCG, an extension of Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCGs, (Ades/Steedman 1982, Steedman 1985), and demonstrate its advantages in an implementation of a data-base query system that interprets Turkish questions and generates answers with contextually appropriate word orders. Multiset-CCG is a context-sensitive and polynomially parsable grammar that captures the formal and descriptive properties of “free” word order and restrictions on word order in simple and complex sentences (with discontinuous constituents and long distance dependencies). Multiset-CCG captures the context-dependent meaning of word order in Turkish by compositionally deriving the predicate-argument structure and the information structure of a sentence in parallel. The advantages of using such a formalism are that it is computationally attractive and that it provides a compositional and flexible surface structure that allows syntactic constituents to correspond to information structure constituents. A formalism that integrates information structure and syntax such as Multiset-CCG is essential to the computational tasks of interpreting and generating sentences with contextually appropriate word orders in “free” word order languages
Tactical Generation in a Free Constituent Order Language
This paper describes tactical generation in Turkish, a free constituent order
language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to the
information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of any
information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic,
focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default
order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints
of the text flow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured finite
state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a
right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit
system, developed at Carnegie Mellon University--Center for Machine
Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external
morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme
selection and handles morphographemic processes.Comment: gzipped, uuencoded postscript fil
Error-tolerant Finite State Recognition with Applications to Morphological Analysis and Spelling Correction
Error-tolerant recognition enables the recognition of strings that deviate
mildly from any string in the regular set recognized by the underlying finite
state recognizer. Such recognition has applications in error-tolerant
morphological processing, spelling correction, and approximate string matching
in information retrieval. After a description of the concepts and algorithms
involved, we give examples from two applications: In the context of
morphological analysis, error-tolerant recognition allows misspelled input word
forms to be corrected, and morphologically analyzed concurrently. We present an
application of this to error-tolerant analysis of agglutinative morphology of
Turkish words. The algorithm can be applied to morphological analysis of any
language whose morphology is fully captured by a single (and possibly very
large) finite state transducer, regardless of the word formation processes and
morphographemic phenomena involved. In the context of spelling correction,
error-tolerant recognition can be used to enumerate correct candidate forms
from a given misspelled string within a certain edit distance. Again, it can be
applied to any language with a word list comprising all inflected forms, or
whose morphology is fully described by a finite state transducer. We present
experimental results for spelling correction for a number of languages. These
results indicate that such recognition works very efficiently for candidate
generation in spelling correction for many European languages such as English,
Dutch, French, German, Italian (and others) with very large word lists of root
and inflected forms (some containing well over 200,000 forms), generating all
candidate solutions within 10 to 45 milliseconds (with edit distance 1) on a
SparcStation 10/41. For spelling correction in Turkish, error-tolerantComment: Replaces 9504031. gzipped, uuencoded postscript file. To appear in
Computational Linguistics Volume 22 No:1, 1996, Also available as
ftp://ftp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/ko/clpaper9512.ps.
Morphology-Syntax interface for Turkish LFG
This paper investigates the use of sublexical units as a solution to handling the complex morphology with productive derivational processes, in the development of a lexical functional grammar for Turkish. Such sublexical units make it possible to expose the internal structure of words with multiple derivations to the grammar rules in a uniform manner. This in turn leads to more succinct and manageable rules. Further, the semantics of the derivations can also be systematically reflected in a compositional way by constructing PRED values on the fly. We illustrate how we use sublexical units for handling simple productive derivational morphology and more interesting cases such as causativization, etc., which change verb valency. Our priority is to handle several linguistic phenomena in order to observe the effects of our approach on both the c-structure and the f-structure representation, and grammar writing, leaving the coverage and evaluation issues aside for the moment
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
Sparse Coding of Neural Word Embeddings for Multilingual Sequence Labeling
In this paper we propose and carefully evaluate a sequence labeling framework
which solely utilizes sparse indicator features derived from dense distributed
word representations. The proposed model obtains (near) state-of-the art
performance for both part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition for a
variety of languages. Our model relies only on a few thousand sparse
coding-derived features, without applying any modification of the word
representations employed for the different tasks. The proposed model has
favorable generalization properties as it retains over 89.8% of its average POS
tagging accuracy when trained at 1.2% of the total available training data,
i.e.~150 sentences per language
Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania
This report takes its name from the Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLiFF), an informal discussion group for students and faculty. However the scope of the research covered in this report is broader than the title might suggest; this is the yearly report of the LINC Lab, the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania.
It may at first be hard to see the threads that bind together the work presented here, work by faculty, graduate students and postdocs in the Computer Science and Linguistics Departments, and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. It includes prototypical Natural Language fields such as: Combinatorial Categorial Grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, syntactic parsing and the syntax-semantics interface; but it extends to statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, intonation, causal reasoning, free word order languages, geometric reasoning, medical informatics, connectionism, and language acquisition.
Naturally, this introduction cannot spell out all the connections between these abstracts; we invite you to explore them on your own. In fact, with this issue it’s easier than ever to do so: this document is accessible on the “information superhighway”. Just call up http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cliff-group/94/cliffnotes.html
In addition, you can find many of the papers referenced in the CLiFF Notes on the net. Most can be obtained by following links from the authors’ abstracts in the web version of this report.
The abstracts describe the researchers’ many areas of investigation, explain their shared concerns, and present some interesting work in Cognitive Science. We hope its new online format makes the CLiFF Notes a more useful and interesting guide to Computational Linguistics activity at Penn
Design and Implementation of a Tactical Generator for Turkish, a Free Constituent Order Language
This thesis describes a tactical generator for Turkish, a free constituent
order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to
the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of
any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic,
focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default
order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints
of the text flow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured finite
state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a
right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit
system, developed at Carnegie Mellon University--Center for Machine
Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external
morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme
selection and handles morphographemic processes.Comment: M.Sc. Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Engineering and
Information Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. 146 pages (including
title pages). Also available as:
ftp://ftp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/tech-reports/1996/BU-CEIS-9614.ps.
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