Towards Universal Semantic Tagging

The paper proposes the task of universal semantic tagging---tagging word tokens with language-neutral, semantically informative tags. We argue that the task, with its independent nature, contributes to better semantic analysis for wide-coverage multilingual text. We present the initial version of the semantic tagset and show that (a) the tags provide semantically fine-grained information, and (b) they are suitable for cross-lingual semantic parsing. An application of the semantic tagging in the Parallel Meaning Bank supports both of these points as the tags contribute to formal lexical semantics and their cross-lingual projection. As a part of the application, we annotate a small corpus with the semantic tags and present new baseline result for universal semantic tagging.Comment: 9 pages, International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS

Learning to Disambiguate Syntactic Relations

Natural Language is highly ambiguous, on every level. This article describes a fast broad-coverage state-of-the-art parser that uses a carefully hand-written grammar and probability-based machine learning approaches on the syntactic level. It is shown in detail which statistical learning models based on Maximum-Likelihood Estimation (MLE) can support a highly developed linguistic grammar in the disambiguation process

The linguistics of gender

This chapter explores grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon. First, I define gender in terms of agreement, and look at the parts of speech that can take gender agreement. Because it relates to assumptions underlying much psycholinguistic gender research, I also examine the reasons why gender systems are thought to emerge, change, and disappear. Then, I describe the gender system of Dutch. The frequent confusion about the number of genders in Dutch will be resolved by looking at the history of the system, and the role of pronominal reference therein. In addition, I report on three lexical- statistical analyses of the distribution of genders in the language. After having dealt with Dutch, I look at whether the genders of Dutch and other languages are more or less randomly assigned, or whether there is some system to it. In contrast to what many people think, regularities do indeed exist. Native speakers could in principle exploit such regularities to compute rather than memorize gender, at least in part. Although this should be taken into account as a possibility, I will also argue that it is by no means a necessary implication

POS tagging for German : how important is the right context?

Part-of-Speech tagging is generally performed by Markov models, based on bigram or trigram models. While Markov models have a strong concentration on the left context of a word, many languages require the inclusion of right context for correct disambiguation. We show for German that the best results are reached by a combination of left and right context. If only left context is available, then changing the direction of analysis and going from right to left improves the results. In a version of MBT (Daelemans et al., 1996) with default parameter settings, the inclusion of the right context improved POS tagging accuracy from 94.00% to 96.08%, thus corroborating our hypothesis. The version with optimized parameters reaches 96.73%

Language sample analysis for Spanish speakers

textThe purpose of this project was to develop a Spanish language sample analysis (LSA) scoring procedure for English-Spanish bilinguals used to guide clinicians in developing language goals and monitoring progress on those goals. A Spanish LSA procedure was created and was tested on 20 typically developing and 16 language impaired English-Spanish bilinguals. Each utterance of each language sample was analyzed for correct and attempted use of the 20 grammatical forms selected for the LSA procedure. Based on the results, a preliminary profile of impairment was established. It showed that Relative Clauses, Infinitive Clauses, Present Subjunctive, Third Person Plural Present and Preterit Indicative, Irregular Preterit Indicative, Indirect and Direct Object Clitics, Imperfect, and Plural Nouns were the most problematic forms for English-Spanish bilinguals with LI. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.Communication Sciences and Disorder