Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization from Corpora

We describe a novel technique and implemented system for constructing a subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Each dictionary entry encodes the relative frequency of occurrence of a comprehensive set of subcategorization classes for English. An initial experiment, on a sample of 14 verbs which exhibit multiple complementation patterns, demonstrates that the technique achieves accuracy comparable to previous approaches, which are all limited to a highly restricted set of subcategorization classes. We also demonstrate that a subcategorization dictionary built with the system improves the accuracy of a parser by an appreciable amount.Comment: 8 pages; requires aclap.sty. To appear in ANLP-9

Syn-QG: Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Rules for Question Generation

Question Generation (QG) is fundamentally a simple syntactic transformation; however, many aspects of semantics influence what questions are good to form. We implement this observation by developing Syn-QG, a set of transparent syntactic rules leveraging universal dependencies, shallow semantic parsing, lexical resources, and custom rules which transform declarative sentences into question-answer pairs. We utilize PropBank argument descriptions and VerbNet state predicates to incorporate shallow semantic content, which helps generate questions of a descriptive nature and produce inferential and semantically richer questions than existing systems. In order to improve syntactic fluency and eliminate grammatically incorrect questions, we employ back-translation over the output of these syntactic rules. A set of crowd-sourced evaluations shows that our system can generate a larger number of highly grammatical and relevant questions than previous QG systems and that back-translation drastically improves grammaticality at a slight cost of generating irrelevant questions.Comment: Some of the results in the paper were incorrec

An Efficient Distribution of Labor in a Two Stage Robust Interpretation Process

Although Minimum Distance Parsing (MDP) offers a theoretically attractive solution to the problem of extragrammaticality, it is often computationally infeasible in large scale practical applications. In this paper we present an alternative approach where the labor is distributed between a more restrictive partial parser and a repair module. Though two stage approaches have grown in popularity in recent years because of their efficiency, they have done so at the cost of requiring hand coded repair heuristics. In contrast, our two stage approach does not require any hand coded knowledge sources dedicated to repair, thus making it possible to achieve a similar run time advantage over MDP without losing the quality of domain independence.Comment: 9 pages, 1 Postscript figure, uses aclap.sty and psfig.tex, In Proceedings of EMNLP 199

Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration