Data-Oriented Language Processing. An Overview

During the last few years, a new approach to language processing has started to emerge, which has become known under various labels such as "data-oriented parsing", "corpus-based interpretation", and "tree-bank grammar" (cf. van den Berg et al. 1994; Bod 1992-96; Bod et al. 1996a/b; Bonnema 1996; Charniak 1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Kaplan 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Scha 1990-92; Sekine & Grishman 1995; Sima'an et al. 1994; Sima'an 1995-96; Tugwell 1995). This approach, which we will call "data-oriented processing" or "DOP", embodies the assumption that human language perception and production works with representations of concrete past language experiences, rather than with abstract linguistic rules. The models that instantiate this approach therefore maintain large corpora of linguistic representations of previously occurring utterances. When processing a new input utterance, analyses of this utterance are constructed by combining fragments from the corpus; the occurrence-frequencies of the fragments are used to estimate which analysis is the most probable one. In this paper we give an in-depth discussion of a data-oriented processing model which employs a corpus of labelled phrase-structure trees. Then we review some other models that instantiate the DOP approach. Many of these models also employ labelled phrase-structure trees, but use different criteria for extracting fragments from the corpus or employ different disambiguation strategies (Bod 1996b; Charniak 1996a/b; Goodman 1996; Rajman 1995a/b; Sekine & Grishman 1995; Sima'an 1995-96); other models use richer formalisms for their corpus annotations (van den Berg et al. 1994; Bod et al., 1996a/b; Bonnema 1996; Kaplan 1996; Tugwell 1995).Comment: 34 pages, Postscrip

Combining semantic and syntactic structure for language modeling

Structured language models for speech recognition have been shown to remedy the weaknesses of n-gram models. All current structured language models are, however, limited in that they do not take into account dependencies between non-headwords. We show that non-headword dependencies contribute to significantly improved word error rate, and that a data-oriented parsing model trained on semantically and syntactically annotated data can exploit these dependencies. This paper also contains the first DOP model trained by means of a maximum likelihood reestimation procedure, which solves some of the theoretical shortcomings of previous DOP models.Comment: 4 page

Modeling Dependencies in Natural Languages with Latent Variables

In this thesis, we investigate the use of latent variables to model complex dependencies in natural languages. Traditional models, which have a fixed parameterization, often make strong independence assumptions that lead to poor performance. This problem is often addressed by incorporating additional dependencies into the model (e.g., using higher order N-grams for language modeling). These added dependencies can increase data sparsity and/or require expert knowledge, together with trial and error, in order to identify and incorporate the most important dependencies (as in lexicalized parsing models). Traditional models, when developed for a particular genre, domain, or language, are also often difficult to adapt to another. In contrast, previous work has shown that latent variable models, which automatically learn dependencies in a data-driven way, are able to flexibly adjust the number of parameters based on the type and the amount of training data available. We have created several different types of latent variable models for a diverse set of natural language processing applications, including novel models for part-of-speech tagging, language modeling, and machine translation, and an improved model for parsing. These models perform significantly better than traditional models. We have also created and evaluated three different methods for improving the performance of latent variable models. While these methods can be applied to any of our applications, we focus our experiments on parsing. The first method involves self-training, i.e., we train models using a combination of gold standard training data and a large amount of automatically labeled training data. We conclude from a series of experiments that the latent variable models benefit much more from self-training than conventional models, apparently due to their flexibility to adjust their model parameterization to learn more accurate models from the additional automatically labeled training data. The second method takes advantage of the variability among latent variable models to combine multiple models for enhanced performance. We investigate several different training protocols to combine self-training with model combination. We conclude that these two techniques are complementary to each other and can be effectively combined to train very high quality parsing models. The third method replaces the generative multinomial lexical model of latent variable grammars with a feature-rich log-linear lexical model to provide a principled solution to address data sparsity, handle out-of-vocabulary words, and exploit overlapping features during model induction. We conclude from experiments that the resulting grammars are able to effectively parse three different languages. This work contributes to natural language processing by creating flexible and effective latent variable models for several different languages. Our investigation of self-training, model combination, and log-linear models also provides insights into the effective application of these machine learning techniques to other disciplines

Tagging and parsing with cascaded Markov models : automation of corpus annotation

This thesis presents new techniques for parsing natural language. They are based on Markov Models, which are commonly used in part-of-speech tagging for sequential processing on the world level. We show that Markov Models can be successfully applied to other levels of syntactic processing. first two classification task are handled: the assignment of grammatical functions and the labeling of non-terminal nodes. Then, Markov Models are used to recognize hierarchical syntactic structures. Each layer of a structure is represented by a separate Markov Model. The output of a lower layer is passed as input to a higher layer, hence the name: Cascaded Markov Models. Instead of simple symbols, the states emit partial context-free structures. The new techniques are applied to corpus annotation and partial parsing and are evaluated using corpora of different languages and domains.Ausgehend von Markov-Modellen, die für das Part-of-Speech-Tagging eingesetzt werden, stellt diese Arbeit Verfahren vor, die Markov-Modelle auch auf weiteren Ebenen der syntaktischen Verarbeitung erfolgreich nutzen. Dies betrifft zum einen Klassifikationen wie die Zuweisung grammatischer Funktionen und die Bestimmung von Kategorien nichtterminaler Knoten, zum anderen die Zuweisung hierarchischer, syntaktischer Strukturen durch Markov-Modelle. Letzteres geschieht durch die Repräsentation jeder Ebene einer syntaktischen Struktur durch ein eigenes Markov-Modell, was den Namen des Verfahrens prägt: Kaskadierte Markov-Modelle. Deren Zustände geben anstelle atomarer Symbole partielle kontextfreie Strukturen aus. Diese Verfahren kommen in der Korpusannotation und dem partiellen Parsing zum Einsatz und werden anhand mehrerer Korpora evaluiert

Statistical methods in language processing

The term statistical methods here refers to a methodology that has been dominant in computational linguistics since about 1990. It is characterized by the use of stochastic models, substantial data sets, machine learning, and rigorous experimental evaluation. The shift to statistical methods in computational linguistics parallels a movement in artificial intelligence more broadly. Statistical methods have so thoroughly permeated computational linguistics that almost all work in the field draws on them in some way. There has, however, been little penetration of the methods into general linguistics. The methods themselves are largely borrowed from machine learning and information theory. We limit attention to that which has direct applicability to language processing, though the methods are quite general and have many nonlinguistic applications. Not every use of statistics in language processing falls under statistical methods as we use the term. Standard hypothesis testing and experimental design, for example, are not covered in this article. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 315–322 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.111 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs websitePeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83468/1/111_ftp.pd