656 research outputs found
Memory-Based Learning: Using Similarity for Smoothing
This paper analyses the relation between the use of similarity in
Memory-Based Learning and the notion of backed-off smoothing in statistical
language modeling. We show that the two approaches are closely related, and we
argue that feature weighting methods in the Memory-Based paradigm can offer the
advantage of automatically specifying a suitable domain-specific hierarchy
between most specific and most general conditioning information without the
need for a large number of parameters. We report two applications of this
approach: PP-attachment and POS-tagging. Our method achieves state-of-the-art
performance in both domains, and allows the easy integration of diverse
information sources, such as rich lexical representations.Comment: 8 pages, uses aclap.sty, To appear in Proc. ACL/EACL 9
SCREEN: Learning a Flat Syntactic and Semantic Spoken Language Analysis Using Artificial Neural Networks
In this paper, we describe a so-called screening approach for learning robust
processing of spontaneously spoken language. A screening approach is a flat
analysis which uses shallow sequences of category representations for analyzing
an utterance at various syntactic, semantic and dialog levels. Rather than
using a deeply structured symbolic analysis, we use a flat connectionist
analysis. This screening approach aims at supporting speech and language
processing by using (1) data-driven learning and (2) robustness of
connectionist networks. In order to test this approach, we have developed the
SCREEN system which is based on this new robust, learned and flat analysis.
In this paper, we focus on a detailed description of SCREEN's architecture,
the flat syntactic and semantic analysis, the interaction with a speech
recognizer, and a detailed evaluation analysis of the robustness under the
influence of noisy or incomplete input. The main result of this paper is that
flat representations allow more robust processing of spontaneous spoken
language than deeply structured representations. In particular, we show how the
fault-tolerance and learning capability of connectionist networks can support a
flat analysis for providing more robust spoken-language processing within an
overall hybrid symbolic/connectionist framework.Comment: 51 pages, Postscript. To be published in Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research 6(1), 199
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Large-scale connectionist natural language parsing using lexical semantic and syntactic knowledge
Syntactic parsing plays a pivotal role in most automatic natural language processing systems. The research project presented in this dissertation has focused on two main characteristics of connectionist models for natural language processing: their adaptability to different tagging conventions, and their ability to use multiple linguistic constraints in parallel during sentence processing. In focusing on these key characteristics, an existing hybrid connectionist, shift-reduce corpus-based parsing model has been modified. This parser, which had earlier been trained to acquire linguistic knowledge from the Lancaster Parsed Corpus, has been adapted to learn linguistic knowledge from the Wall Street Journal Corpus. This adaptation is a novel demonstration that this connectionist parser, and by extension, other similar connectionist models, is able to adapt to more than one syntactic tagging convention; this implies their ability to adapt to the underlying linguistic theories used to annotate these corpora
Domain-Specific Knowledge Acquisition for Conceptual Sentence Analysis
The availability of on-line corpora is rapidly changing the field of natural language processing (NLP) from one dominated by theoretical models of often very specific linguistic phenomena to one guided by computational models that simultaneously account for a wide variety of phenomena that occur in real-world text. Thus far, among the best-performing and most robust systems for reading and summarizing large amounts of real-world text are knowledge-based natural language systems. These systems rely heavily on domain-specific, handcrafted knowledge to handle the myriad syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic ambiguities that pervade virtually all aspects of sentence analysis. Not surprisingly, however, generating this knowledge for new domains is time-consuming, difficult, and error-prone, and requires the expertise of computational linguists familiar with the underlying NLP system. This thesis presents Kenmore, a general framework for domain-specific knowledge acquisition for conceptual sentence analysis. To ease the acquisition of knowledge in new domains, Kenmore exploits an on-line corpus using symbolic machine learning techniques and robust sentence analysis while requiring only minimal human intervention. Unlike most approaches to knowledge acquisition for natural language systems, the framework uniformly addresses a range of subproblems in sentence analysis, each of which traditionally had required a separate computational mechanism. The thesis presents the results of using Kenmore with corpora from two real-world domains (1) to perform part-of-speech tagging, semantic feature tagging, and concept tagging of all open-class words in the corpus; (2) to acquire heuristics for part-ofspeech disambiguation, semantic feature disambiguation, and concept activation; and (3) to find the antecedents of relative pronouns
Improving Syntactic Parsing of Clinical Text Using Domain Knowledge
Syntactic parsing is one of the fundamental tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, few studies have explored syntactic parsing in the medical domain. This dissertation systematically investigated different methods to improve the performance of syntactic parsing of clinical text, including (1) Constructing two clinical treebanks of discharge summaries and progress notes by developing annotation guidelines that handle missing elements in clinical sentences; (2) Retraining four state-of-the-art parsers, including the Stanford parser, Berkeley parser, Charniak parser, and Bikel parser, using clinical treebanks, and comparing their performance to identify better parsing approaches; and (3) Developing new methods to reduce syntactic ambiguity caused by Prepositional Phrase (PP) attachment and coordination using semantic information.
Our evaluation showed that clinical treebanks greatly improved the performance of existing parsers. The Berkeley parser achieved the best F-1 score of 86.39% on the MiPACQ treebank. For PP attachment, our proposed methods improved the accuracies of PP attachment by 2.35% on the MiPACQ corpus and 1.77% on the I2b2 corpus. For coordination, our method achieved a precision of 94.9% and a precision of 90.3% for the MiPACQ and i2b2 corpus, respectively. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved parsing approaches, we applied outputs of our parsers to two external NLP tasks: semantic role labeling and temporal relation extraction. The experimental results showed that performance of both tasksâ was improved by using the parse tree information from our optimized parsers, with an improvement of 3.26% in F-measure for semantic role labelling and an improvement of 1.5% in F-measure for temporal relation extraction
Learning, using examples, to translate phrases and sentences to meanings
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-91).Before we can create intelligent systems that exhibit the versatility of the human intellect, we must understand how our command of language enables the uniquely broad scope of our reasoning ability. To pursue such an understanding, we must discover the ways by which language gives rise to representations which, in turn, serve as the building blocks of models that capture constraints and regularities of our environment. The work described in this thesis constitutes a step toward this goal. I have combined aspects of Winston's Arch learning methodology with implementations of three powerful representations: Lexical Conceptual Semantics[Jackendoff 1983], Transition Spaces[Borchardt 1993], and Thread Memory[Vaina, Greenblatt 1979], in a system that learns to instantiate semantic descriptions from language based on a sequence of examples. My program, Lance, builds models of the correspondences between parse trees and semantic descriptions by generalizing from a sequence of pairs of sentence fragments and descriptions. Additionally, counterexamples of one type of correspondence model may be generated from examples of similar models in order to facilitate learning by near miss. The result is that my system can learn such constraints as in order for a sentence to convey a transition, it must contain a verb that means either "change," "appear, " or "disappear."(cont.) In this work I developed an approach based on presentation of parse trees paired with instantiated representations and the Arch-Learning paradigm, and implemented Lance, a 12,000 line Java program. I demonstrated that from a training sequence of 95 examples, Lance learned 27 models of THINGS PARTS, PLACES, PATHELEMENTS, TRAJECTORY-SPACES, TRANSITION-SPACES, CAUSES, and IS-A relations.by Adam Davis Kraft.M.Eng
Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds
The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical
language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two
main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by
specifying an architecture for natural language analysis in which probabilities
are given to semantic forms rather than to more superficial linguistic
elements; and (ii) it explores the development of a mathematical theory to
predict the expected accuracy of statistical language learning systems in terms
of the volume of data used to train them.
The theoretical work is illustrated by applying statistical language learning
designs to the analysis of noun compounds. Both syntactic and semantic analysis
of noun compounds are attempted using the proposed architecture. Empirical
comparisons demonstrate that the proposed syntactic model is significantly
better than those previously suggested, approaching the performance of human
judges on the same task, and that the proposed semantic model, the first
statistical approach to this problem, exhibits significantly better accuracy
than the baseline strategy. These results suggest that the new class of designs
identified is a promising one. The experiments also serve to highlight the need
for a widely applicable theory of data requirements.Comment: PhD thesis (Macquarie University, Sydney; December 1995), LaTeX
source, xii+214 page
Probabilistic models of language processing and acquisition
Probabilistic methods are providing new explanatory approaches to fundamental cognitive science questions of how humans structure, process and acquire language. This review examines probabilistic models defined over traditional symbolic structures. Language comprehension and production involve probabilistic inference in such models; and acquisition involves choosing the best model, given innate constraints and linguistic and other input. Probabilistic models can account for the learning and processing of language, while maintaining the sophistication of symbolic models. A recent burgeoning of theoretical developments and online corpus creation has enabled large models to be tested, revealing probabilistic constraints in processing, undermining acquisition arguments based on a perceived poverty of the stimulus, and suggesting fruitful links with probabilistic theories of categorization and ambiguity resolution in perception
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