23 research outputs found

    Modality Choice for Generation of Referring Acts: Pointing versus Describing

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    The main aim of this paper is to challenge two commonly held assumptions regarding modality selection in the generation of referring acts: the assumption that non-verbal means of referring are secondary to verbal ones, and the assumption that there is a single strategy that speakers follow for generating referring acts. Our evidence is drawn from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues that was obtained through an observational study. We propose two alternative strategies for modality selection based on correlation data from the observational study. Speakers that follow the first strategy simply abstain from pointing. Speakers that follow the other strategy make the decision whether to point dependent on whether the intended referent is in focus and/or important. This decision precedes the selection of verbal means (i.e., words) for referring

    Using Regular Tree Grammars to enhance Sentence Realisation

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    International audienceFeature-based regular tree grammars (FRTG) can be used to generate the derivation trees of a feature-based tree adjoining grammar (FTAG). We make use of this fact to specify and implement both an FTAG-based sentence realiser and a benchmark generator for this realiser. We argue furthermore that the FRTG encoding enables us to improve on other proposals based on a grammar of TAG derivation trees in several ways. It preserves the compositional semantics that can be encoded in feature-based TAGs; it increases efficiency and restricts overgeneration; and it provides a uniform resource for generation, benchmark construction, and parsing

    User Interfaces to the Web of Data based on Natural Language Generation

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    We explore how Virtual Research Environments based on Semantic Web technologies support research interactions with RDF data in various stages of corpus-based analysis, analyze the Web of Data in terms of human readability, derive labels from variables in SPARQL queries, apply Natural Language Generation to improve user interfaces to the Web of Data by verbalizing SPARQL queries and RDF graphs, and present a method to automatically induce RDF graph verbalization templates via distant supervision

    Semantic consistency in text generation

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    Automatic input-grounded text generation tasks process input texts and generate human-understandable natural language text for the processed information. The development of neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, which are usually trained in an end-to-end fashion, pushed the frontier of the performance on text generation tasks expeditiously. However, they are claimed to be defective in semantic consistency w.r.t. their corresponding input texts. Also, not only the models are to blame. The corpora themselves always include examples whose output is semantically inconsistent to its input. Any model that is agnostic to such data divergence issues will be prone to semantic inconsistency. Meanwhile, the most widely-used overlap-based evaluation metrics comparing the generated texts to their corresponding references do not evaluate the input-output semantic consistency explicitly, which makes this problem hard to detect. In this thesis, we focus on studying semantic consistency in three automatic text generation scenarios: Data-to-text Generation, Single Document Abstractive Summarization, and Chit-chat Dialogue Generation, by seeking for the answers to the following research questions: (1) how to define input-output semantic consistency in different text generation tasks? (2) how to quantitatively evaluate the input-output semantic consistency? (3) how to achieve better semantic consistency in individual tasks? We systematically define the semantic inconsistency phenomena in these three tasks as omission, intrinsic hallucination, and extrinsic hallucination. For Data-to-text Generation, we jointly learn a sentence planner that tightly controls which part of input source gets generated in what sequence, with a neural seq2seq text generator, to decrease all three types of semantic inconsistency in model-generated texts. The evaluation results confirm that the texts generated by our model contain much less omissions while maintaining low level of extrinsic hallucinations without sacrificing fluency compared to seq2seq models. For Single Document Abstractive Summarization, we reduce the level of extrinsic hallucinations in training data by automatically introducing assisting articles to each document-summary instance to provide the supplemental world-knowledge that is present in the summary but missing from the doc ument. With the help of a novel metric, we show that seq2seq models trained with as sisting articles demonstrate less extrinsic hallucinations than the ones trained without them. For Chit-chat Dialogue Generation, by filtering out the omitted and hallucinated examples from training set using a newly introduced evaluation metric, and encoding it into the neural seq2seq response generation models as a control factor, we diminish the level of omissions and extrinsic hallucinations in the generated dialogue responses

    From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches

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    Synopsis: This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/195, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255 , and http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/287.Fifth revised and extended editio

    Grammatical theory

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    This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 201

    Superseded: Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Second revised and extended edition.

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    This book is superseded by the third edition, available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255. This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012   This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25

    Superseded: Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Second revised and extended edition.

    Get PDF
    This book is superseded by the third edition, available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255. This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012   This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25
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