11,595 research outputs found
A discriminative approach to grounded spoken language understanding in interactive robotics
Spoken Language Understanding in Interactive Robotics provides computational models of human-machine communication based on the vocal input. However, robots operate in specific environments and the correct interpretation of the spoken sentences depends on the physical, cognitive and linguistic aspects triggered by the operational environment. Grounded language processing should exploit both the physical constraints of the context as well as knowledge assumptions of the robot. These include the subjective perception of the environment that explicitly affects linguistic reasoning. In this work, a standard linguistic pipeline for semantic parsing is extended toward a form of perceptually informed natural language processing that combines discriminative learning and distributional semantics. Empirical results achieve up to a 40% of relative error reduction
Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in
conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question,
Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and
predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as
well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue
model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a
hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating
from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are
modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined
with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the
idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We
develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue
modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification
accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database
of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous
human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling
accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody,
and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of
35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling
changed
Linguistics and some aspects of its underlying dynamics
In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the
Minimalist Program (MP) have come closer to physics. Features of the Minimalist
Program, such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of
the Labeling Algorithm that only operates at the interface of Narrow Syntax
with the Conceptual-Intentional and the Sensory-Motor interfaces, the
difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a
sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation
of sentence structures, are directly accessible to representation in terms of
algebraic formalism. Although in our scheme linguistic structures are classical
ones, we find that an interesting and productive isomorphism can be established
between the MP structure, algebraic structures and many-body field theory
opening new avenues of inquiry on the dynamics underlying some central aspects
of linguistics.Comment: 17 page
VerbAtlas: a novel large-scale verbal semantic resource and its application to semantic role labeling
We present VerbAtlas, a new, hand-crafted lexical-semantic resource whose goal is to bring together all verbal synsets from WordNet into semantically-coherent frames. The frames define a common, prototypical argument structure while at the same time providing new concept-specific information. In contrast to PropBank, which defines enumerative semantic roles, VerbAtlas comes with an explicit, cross-frame set of semantic roles linked to selectional preferences expressed in terms of WordNet synsets, and is the first resource enriched with semantic information about implicit, shadow, and default arguments.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of VerbAtlas in the task of dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling and show how its integration into a high-performance system leads to improvements on both the in-domain and out-of-domain test sets of CoNLL-2009. VerbAtlas is available at http://verbatlas.org
- …