Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: a cross-sectional study

An analysis of 519 gender errors (out of 9,378 modifiers) in the advanced French interlanguage of 27 Dutch L1 speakers confirms earlier findings that gender assignment and/or agreement remain problematic for learners at all levels. A hypothesis derived from Pienemann's Processability Theory (1998a) that accuracy rates would be higher for gender agreement in structures involving no exchange of grammatical information between constituents was not confirmed. The analysis of interindividual and intra-individual variation in gender accuracy rates revealed effects from avoidance and generalisation strategies, from linguistic variables, sociobiographical variables and psycholinguistic variables. We argue that gender errors can originate at the lemma level, at the gender node level, or at the lexeme level. Different psycholinguistic scenarios are presented to account for intra-individual variation in gender assignment and agreement

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Borrowing

This handbook article gives an overview of the ways in which borrowing has been studied in different languages

Personality trait inference upon manner adverb insertion

Dissertação de mestrado, Ciência Cognitiva, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, Faculdade de Letras, Faculdade de Medicina, Faculdade de Psicologia, 2016A inferência espontânea de traços (IET) é um dos efeitos mais antigos e mais investigados pela Cognição Social, e o estudo de inferências no geral tem cerca de quarenta anos. Durante este tempo, as metodologias para estudar a IET foram manipuladas de várias formas, de forma a fornecer dados com o objetivo de entender completamente este efeito. No entanto, estas metodologias usam sequências linguísticas enquanto transporte de informação que irá elicitar a inferência, e estas mesmas sequências nunca foram controladas sob o ponto de vista da Linguística, o que pode causar vários efeitos inesperados. A Linguística prevê que qualquer mudança na frase cause uma alteração na sua estrutura e no seu significado, mas a investigação de IET não tomou nada disto em consideração. Usando o enquadramento teórico da Linguística, eu estudei o comportamento da IET quando frases com o mesmo grau de complexidade linguística são modificadas ao inserir um advérbio de modo com terminação em –mente. Apesar de a investigação em IET focar-se muitas vezes numa metodologia com falsas memórias (por exemplo em Todorov & Uleman, 2002), a metodologia escolhida para este projeto envolve classificação por parte dos participantes de traços relacionados com as situações descritas em frases que tinham sido apresentadas anteriormente (Carlston, 2005). O estudo foi feito com estudantes jovens adultos de diferentes áreas académicas e os resultados mostram que a inserção destes advérbios faz com que a IET mude em força e no traço que é mais inferido. Os advérbios de modo elicitaram novos traços que não estavam disponíveis anteriormente (ou que, pelo menos, não eram tão relevantes), mas os traços que as frases sem os advérbios de modo transmitiam não foram inibidos, e mantinham-se fortes. Fatores linguísticos da Semântica como a aceitabilidade das frases, a interpretação dos advérbios disponível aos participantes e os papéis temáticos nas frases parecem funcionar como elementos cruciais para as IETs, e o uso descuidado destes fatores pode significar que um novo traço seja inferido em vez de outro já esperado.Spontaneous trait inference (STI) is one of the oldest and more researched effects in Social Cognition, and inferences in general have been studied for about forty years. During this time, methodologies used to study STI were manipulated in several ways, in order to provide data with the objective of fully understanding this effect. However, these methodologies use linguistic cues as a vehicle to express information that will elicit the inference, and these cues were never controlled from a linguistic point of view, which may cause several unexpected effects. Linguistics predicts that any change to the sentence also causes a change in its structure and meaning, but STI research never took this into account. Using Linguistics’ theoretical framework, I studied STI behavior when sentences with the same degree of linguistic complexity are modified by inserting a manner adverb ending in –mente. Although in STI research authors have used methodologies measuring false memories (for instance, Todorov & Uleman, 2002), the methodology I have chosen for this project measures trait ratings after participants have studied situations described by sentences (Carlston & Skowronski, 2005). This project was done with young adult students from different academic fields. The results show that inserting these adverbs change the strength for a trait inference, and changes which trait is preferably inferred by the participants. Inserting manner adverbs elicited new traits that were not available for the same sentences without the adverbs (or that at least were not as relevant). However, traits inferred from the sentences without the adverb were not inhibited and remained strong. Semantic linguistic factors like sentence acceptability, adverb interpretation and thematic roles for each constituent in the sentence seem to work as crucial elements for STI, and using them disregarding their importance can make a new trait other than the one we expect to appear