Using graphical models for PP attachment

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), 206-213. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955

LexRank: Graph-based Lexical Centrality as Salience in Text Summarization

We introduce a stochastic graph-based method for computing relative importance of textual units for Natural Language Processing. We test the technique on the problem of Text Summarization (TS). Extractive TS relies on the concept of sentence salience to identify the most important sentences in a document or set of documents. Salience is typically defined in terms of the presence of particular important words or in terms of similarity to a centroid pseudo-sentence. We consider a new approach, LexRank, for computing sentence importance based on the concept of eigenvector centrality in a graph representation of sentences. In this model, a connectivity matrix based on intra-sentence cosine similarity is used as the adjacency matrix of the graph representation of sentences. Our system, based on LexRank ranked in first place in more than one task in the recent DUC 2004 evaluation. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of our approach and apply it to a larger data set including data from earlier DUC evaluations. We discuss several methods to compute centrality using the similarity graph. The results show that degree-based methods (including LexRank) outperform both centroid-based methods and other systems participating in DUC in most of the cases. Furthermore, the LexRank with threshold method outperforms the other degree-based techniques including continuous LexRank. We also show that our approach is quite insensitive to the noise in the data that may result from an imperfect topical clustering of documents

Similarity based smoothing in language modeling

In this paper, we improve our previously proposed Similarity Based Smoothing (SBS) algorithm. The idea of the SBS is to map words or part of sentences to an Euclidean space, and approximate the language model in that space. The bottleneck of the original algorithm was to train a regularized logistic regression model, which was incapable to deal with real world data. We replace the logistic regression by regularized maximum entropy estimation and a Gaussian mixture approach to model the language in the Euclidean space, showing other possibilities to use the main idea of SBS. We show that the regularized maximum entropy model is flexible enough to handle conditional probability density estimation, thus enable parallel computation tasks with significantly decreased iteration steps. The experimental results demonstrate the success of our method, we achieve 14% improvement on a reail world corpus

Random walk and web information processing for mobile devices

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH