12,311 research outputs found
A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods
Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or
longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information.
Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract
pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts)
the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is
also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and
methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful,
at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing
applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and
machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering
in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to
prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of
Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201
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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)
Movie Description
Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows
visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such
descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting
data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we
propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally
aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie
scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In
total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel
corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we
characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating
video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more
visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen
according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we
present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a
challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and
Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at
ICCV 2015
Semantic Interaction in Web-based Retrieval Systems : Adopting Semantic Web Technologies and Social Networking Paradigms for Interacting with Semi-structured Web Data
Existing web retrieval models for exploration and interaction with web data do not take into account semantic information, nor do they allow for new forms of interaction by employing meaningful interaction and navigation metaphors in 2D/3D. This thesis researches means for introducing a semantic dimension into the search and exploration process of web content to enable a significantly positive user experience. Therefore, an inherently dynamic view beyond single concepts and models from semantic information processing, information extraction and human-machine interaction is adopted. Essential tasks for semantic interaction such as semantic annotation, semantic mediation and semantic human-computer interaction were identified and elaborated for two general application scenarios in web retrieval: Web-based Question Answering in a knowledge-based dialogue system and semantic exploration of information spaces in 2D/3D
PowerAqua: fishing the semantic web
The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources
Parsing and Evaluation. Improving Dependency Grammars Accuracy. Anà lisi Sintà ctica Automà tica i Avaluació. Millora de qualitat per a Gramà tiques de Dependències
Because parsers are still limited in analysing specific ambiguous constructions, the research presented in this thesis mainly aims to contribute to the improvement of parsing performance when it has knowledge integrated in order to deal with ambiguous linguistic phenomena. More precisely, this thesis intends to provide empirical solutions to the disambiguation of prepositional phrase attachment and argument recognition in order to assist parsers in generating a more accurate syntactic analysis. The disambiguation of these two highly ambiguous linguistic phenomena by the integration of knowledge about the language necessarily relies on linguistic and statistical strategies for knowledge acquisition.
The starting point of this research proposal is the development of a rule-based grammar for Spanish and for Catalan following the theoretical basis of Dependency Grammar (Tesnière, 1959; Mel’čuk, 1988) in order to carry out two experiments about the integration of automatically- acquired knowledge. In order to build two robust grammars that understand a sentence, the FreeLing pipeline (Padró et al., 2010) has been used as a framework. On the other hand, an eclectic repertoire of criteria about the nature of syntactic heads is proposed by reviewing the postulates of Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1981; Bonet and Solà , 1986; Haegeman, 1991) and Dependency Grammar (Tesnière, 1959; Mel’čuk, 1988). Furthermore, a set of dependency relations is provided and mapped to Universal Dependencies (Mcdonald et al., 2013).
Furthermore, an empirical evaluation method has been designed in order to carry out both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. In particular, the dependency parsed trees generated by the grammars are compared to real linguistic data. The quantitative evaluation is based on the Spanish Tibidabo Treebank (Marimon et al., 2014), which is large enough to carry out a real analysis of the grammars performance and which has been annotated with the same formalism as the grammars, syntactic dependencies. Since the criteria between both resources are differ- ent, a process of harmonization has been applied developing a set of rules that automatically adapt the criteria of the corpus to the grammar criteria. With regard to qualitative evaluation, there are no available resources to evaluate Spanish and Catalan dependency grammars quali- tatively. For this reason, a test suite of syntactic phenomena about structure and word order has been built. In order to create a representative repertoire of the languages observed, descriptive grammars (Bosque and Demonte, 1999; Solà et al., 2002) and the SenSem Corpus (Vázquez and Fernández-Montraveta, 2015) have been used for capturing relevant structures and word order patterns, respectively.
Thanks to these two tools, two experiments have been carried out in order to prove that knowl- edge integration improves the parsing accuracy. On the one hand, the automatic learning of lan- guage models has been explored by means of statistical methods in order to disambiguate PP- attachment. More precisely, a model has been learned with a supervised classifier using Weka (Witten and Frank, 2005). Furthermore, an unsupervised model based on word embeddings has been applied (Mikolov et al., 2013a,b). The results of the experiment show that the supervised method is limited in predicting solutions for unseen data, which is resolved by the unsupervised method since provides a solution for any case. However, the unsupervised method is limited if it
Parsing and Evaluation Improving Dependency Grammars Accuracy
only learns from lexical data. For this reason, training data needs to be enriched with the lexical value of the preposition, as well as semantic and syntactic features. In addition, the number of patterns used to learn language models has to be extended in order to have an impact on the grammars.
On the other hand, another experiment is carried out in order to improve the argument recog- nition in the grammars by the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. In this experiment, knowledge is acquired automatically from the extraction of verb subcategorization frames from the SenSem Corpus (Vázquez and Fernández-Montraveta, 2015) which contains the verb predicate and its arguments annotated syntactically. As a result of the information extracted, subcategorization frames have been classified into subcategorization classes regarding the patterns observed in the corpus. The results of the subcategorization classes integration in the grammars prove that this information increases the accuracy of the argument recognition in the grammars.
The results of the research of this thesis show that grammars’ rules on their own are not ex- pressive enough to resolve complex ambiguities. However, the integration of knowledge about these ambiguities in the grammars may be decisive in the disambiguation. On the one hand, sta- tistical knowledge about PP-attachment can improve the grammars accuracy, but syntactic and semantic information, and new patterns of PP-attachment need to be included in the language models in order to contribute to disambiguate this phenomenon. On the other hand, linguistic knowledge about verb subcategorization acquired from annotated linguistic resources show a positive influence positively on grammars’ accuracy.Aquesta tesi vol tractar les limitacions amb què es troben els analitzadors sintĂ ctics automĂ tics actualment. Tot i els progressos que s’han fet en l’à rea del Processament del Llenguatge Nat- ural en els darrers anys, les tecnologies del llenguatge i, en particular, els analitzadors sintĂ c- tics automĂ tics no han pogut traspassar el llindar de certes ambiguĂŻtats estructurals com ara l’agrupaciĂł del sintagma preposicional i el reconeixement d’arguments. És per aquest motiu que la recerca duta a terme en aquesta tesi tĂ© com a objectiu aportar millores signiflcatives de quali- tat a l’anĂ lisi sintĂ ctica automĂ tica per mitjĂ de la integraciĂł de coneixement lingĂĽĂstic i estadĂstic per desambiguar construccions sintĂ ctiques ambigĂĽes.
El punt de partida de la recerca ha estat el desenvolupament de d’una gramĂ tica en espanyol i una altra en catalĂ basades en regles que segueixen els postulats de la GramĂ tica de Dependèn- dencies (Tesnière, 1959; Mel’čuk, 1988) per tal de dur a terme els experiments sobre l’adquisiciĂł de coneixement automĂ tic. Per tal de crear dues gramĂ tiques robustes que analitzin i entenguin l’oraciĂł en profunditat, ens hem basat en l’arquitectura de FreeLing (PadrĂł et al., 2010), una lli- breria de Processament de Llenguatge Natural que proveeix una anĂ lisi lingĂĽĂstica automĂ tica de l’oraciĂł. Per una altra banda, s’ha elaborat una proposta eclèctica de criteris lingĂĽĂstics per determinar la formaciĂł dels sintagmes i les clĂ usules a la gramĂ tica per mitjĂ de la revisiĂł de les propostes teòriques de la GramĂ tica Generativa (Chomsky, 1981; Bonet and SolĂ , 1986; Haege- man, 1991) i de la GramĂ tica de Dependències (Tesnière, 1959; Mel’čuk, 1988). Aquesta proposta s’acompanya d’un llistat de les etiquetes de relaciĂł de dependència que fan servir les regles de les gramĂ tques. A mĂ©s a mĂ©s de l’elaboraciĂł d’aquest llistat, s’han establert les correspondències amb l’estĂ ndard d’anotaciĂł de les Dependències Universals (Mcdonald et al., 2013).
Alhora, s’ha dissenyat un sistema d’avaluaciĂł empĂric que tĂ© en compte l’anĂ lisi quantitativa i qualitativa per tal de fer una valoraciĂł completa dels resultats dels experiments. Precisament, es tracta una tasca empĂrica pel fet que es comparen les anĂ lisis generades per les gramĂ tiques amb dades reals de la llengua. Per tal de dur a terme l’avaluaciĂł des d’una perspectiva quan- titativa, s’ha fet servir el corpus Tibidabo en espanyol (Marimon et al., 2014) disponible nomĂ©s en espanyol que Ă©s prou extens per construir una anĂ lisi real de les gramĂ tiques i que ha estat anotat amb el mateix formalisme que les gramĂ tiques. En concret, per tal com els criteris de les gramĂ tiques i del corpus no sĂłn coincidents, s’ha dut a terme un procĂ©s d’harmonitzaciĂł de cri- teris per mitjĂ d’unes regles creades manualment que adapten automĂ ticament l’estructura i la relaciĂł de dependència del corpus al criteri de les gramĂ tiques. Pel que fa a l’avaluaciĂł qualitativa, pel fet que no hi ha recursos disponibles en espanyol i catalĂ , hem dissenyat un reprertori de test de fenòmens sintĂ ctics estructurals i relacionats amb l’ordre de l’oraciĂł. Amb l’objectiu de crear un repertori representatiu de les llengĂĽes estudiades, s’han fet servir gramĂ tiques descriptives per fornir el repertori d’estructures sintĂ ctiques (Bosque and Demonte, 1999; SolĂ et al., 2002) i el Corpus SenSem (Vázquez and Fernández-Montraveta, 2015) per capturar automĂ ticament l’ordre oracional.
Grà cies a aquestes dues eines, s’han pogut dur a terme dos experiments per provar que la integració de coneixement en l’anà lisi sintà ctica automà tica en millora la qualitat. D’una banda,
Parsing and Evaluation Improving Dependency Grammars Accuracy
s’ha explorat l’aprenentatge de models de llenguatge per mitjĂ de models estadĂstics per tal de proposar solucions a l’agrupaciĂł del sintagma preposicional. MĂ©s concretament, s’ha desen- volupat un model de llenguatge per mitjĂ d’un classiflcador d’aprenentatge supervisat de Weka (Witten and Frank, 2005). A mĂ©s a mĂ©s, s’ha après un model de llenguatge per mitjĂ d’un mètode no supervisat basat en l’aproximaciĂł distribucional anomenat word embeddings (Mikolov et al., 2013a,b). Els resultats de l’experiment posen de manifest que el mètode supervisat tĂ© greus lim- itacions per fer donar una resposta en dades que no ha vist prèviament, cosa que Ă©s superada pel mètode no supervisat pel fet que Ă©s capaç de classiflcar qualsevol cas. De tota manera, el mètode no supervisat que s’ha estudiat Ă©s limitat si aprèn a partir de dades lèxiques. Per aquesta raĂł, Ă©s necessari que les dades utilitzades per entrenar el model continguin el valor de la preposi- ciĂł, trets sintĂ ctics i semĂ ntics. A mĂ©s a mĂ©s, cal ampliar el nĂşmero de patrons apresos per tal d’ampliar la cobertura dels models i tenir un impacte en els resultats de les gramĂ tiques.
D’una altra banda, s’ha proposat una manera de millorar el reconeixement d’arguments a les gramĂ tiques per mitjĂ de l’adquisiciĂł de coneixement lingĂĽĂstic. En aquest experiment, s’ha op- tat per extreure automĂ ticament el coneixement en forma de classes de subcategoritzaciĂł verbal d’el Corpus SenSem (Vázquez and Fernández-Montraveta, 2015), que contĂ© anotats sintĂ ctica- ment el predicat verbal i els seus arguments. A partir de la informaciĂł extreta, s’ha classiflcat les diverses diĂ tesis verbals en classes de subcategoritzaciĂł verbal en funciĂł dels patrons observats en el corpus. Els resultats de la integraciĂł de les classes de subcategoritzaciĂł a les gramĂ tiques mostren que aquesta informaciĂł determina positivament el reconeixement dels arguments.
Els resultats de la recerca duta a terme en aquesta tesi doctoral posen de manifest que les regles de les gramĂ tiques no sĂłn prou expressives per elles mateixes per resoldre ambigĂĽitats complexes del llenguatge. No obstant això, la integraciĂł de coneixement sobre aquestes am- bigĂĽitats pot ser decisiu a l’hora de proposar una soluciĂł. D’una banda, el coneixement estadĂstic sobre l’agrupaciĂł del sintagma preposicional pot millorar la qualitat de les gramĂ tiques, però per aflrmar-ho cal incloure informaciĂł sintĂ ctica i semĂ ntica en els models d’aprenentatge automĂ tic i capturar mĂ©s patrons per contribuir en la desambiguaciĂł de fenòmens complexos. D’una al- tra banda, el coneixement lingĂĽĂstic sobre subcategoritzaciĂł verbal adquirit de recursos lingĂĽĂs- tics anotats influeix decisivament en la qualitat de les gramĂ tiques per a l’anĂ lisi sintĂ ctica au- tomĂ tica
A Mobile-Health Information Access System
Patients using the Mobile-Health Information System
can send SMS requests to a Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ) web server with the expectation of receiving an appropriate
feedback on issues that relate to their health. The accuracy of
such feedback is paramount to the mobile search user. However,
automating SMS-based information search and retrieval poses
significant challenges because of the inherent noise in SMS
communication. First, in this paper an architecture is proposed
for the implementation of the retrieval process, and second, an
algorithm is developed for the best-ranked question-answer pair
retrieval. We present an algorithm that assists in the selection of
the best FAQ-query after the ranking of the query-answer pair.
Results are generated based on the ranking of the FAQ-query.
Our algorithm gives a better result in terms of average precision
and recall when compared with the naıve retrieval algorithm.Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC)Department of HE and Training approved lis
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