1,371 research outputs found
Unsupervised Language Acquisition
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language
acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary
spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory
is based heavily on concepts borrowed from machine learning and statistical
estimation. In particular, learning takes place by fitting a stochastic,
generative model of language to the evidence. Much of the thesis is devoted to
explaining conditions that must hold for this general learning strategy to
arrive at linguistically desirable grammars. The thesis introduces a variety of
technical innovations, among them a common representation for evidence and
grammars, and a learning strategy that separates the ``content'' of linguistic
parameters from their representation. Algorithms based on it suffer from few of
the search problems that have plagued other computational approaches to
language acquisition.
The theory has been tested on problems of learning vocabularies and grammars
from unsegmented text and continuous speech, and mappings between sound and
representations of meaning. It performs extremely well on various objective
criteria, acquiring knowledge that causes it to assign almost exactly the same
structure to utterances as humans do. This work has application to data
compression, language modeling, speech recognition, machine translation,
information retrieval, and other tasks that rely on either structural or
stochastic descriptions of language.Comment: PhD thesis, 133 page
A framework for active software engineering ontology
The passive structure of ontologies results in the ineffectiveness to access and manage the knowledge captured in them. This research has developed a framework for active Software Engineering Ontology based on a multi-agent system. It assists software development teams to effectively access, manage and share software engineering knowledge as well as project information to enable effective and efficient communication and coordination among teams. The framework has been evaluated through the prototype system as proof-of-concept experiments
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