2,346 research outputs found
Similarity-Based Models of Word Cooccurrence Probabilities
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to
determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech
recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a
peach'' and ``eat a beach'' is more likely. Statistical NLP methods determine
the likelihood of a word combination from its frequency in a training corpus.
However, the nature of language is such that many word combinations are
infrequent and do not occur in any given corpus. In this work we propose a
method for estimating the probability of such previously unseen word
combinations using available information on ``most similar'' words.
We describe probabilistic word association models based on distributional
word similarity, and apply them to two tasks, language modeling and pseudo-word
disambiguation. In the language modeling task, a similarity-based model is used
to improve probability estimates for unseen bigrams in a back-off language
model. The similarity-based method yields a 20% perplexity improvement in the
prediction of unseen bigrams and statistically significant reductions in
speech-recognition error.
We also compare four similarity-based estimation methods against back-off and
maximum-likelihood estimation methods on a pseudo-word sense disambiguation
task in which we controlled for both unigram and bigram frequency to avoid
giving too much weight to easy-to-disambiguate high-frequency configurations.
The similarity-based methods perform up to 40% better on this particular task.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure
Thematic Annotation: extracting concepts out of documents
Contrarily to standard approaches to topic annotation, the technique used in
this work does not centrally rely on some sort of -- possibly statistical --
keyword extraction. In fact, the proposed annotation algorithm uses a large
scale semantic database -- the EDR Electronic Dictionary -- that provides a
concept hierarchy based on hyponym and hypernym relations. This concept
hierarchy is used to generate a synthetic representation of the document by
aggregating the words present in topically homogeneous document segments into a
set of concepts best preserving the document's content.
This new extraction technique uses an unexplored approach to topic selection.
Instead of using semantic similarity measures based on a semantic resource, the
later is processed to extract the part of the conceptual hierarchy relevant to
the document content. Then this conceptual hierarchy is searched to extract the
most relevant set of concepts to represent the topics discussed in the
document. Notice that this algorithm is able to extract generic concepts that
are not directly present in the document.Comment: Technical report EPFL/LIA. 81 pages, 16 figure
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Co-training and Self-training for Word Sense Disambiguation
This paper investigates the application of co-training and self-training to word sense disambiguation. Optimal and empirical parameter selection methods for co-training and self-training are investigated, with various degrees of error reduction. A new method that combines co-training with majority voting is introduced, with the effect of smoothing the bootstrapping learning curves, and improving the average performance
Exploiting source similarity for SMT using context-informed features
In this paper, we introduce context informed features in a log-linear phrase-based SMT framework; these features enable us to exploit source similarity in addition to target similarity modeled by the language model. We
present a memory-based classification framework that enables the estimation of these features while avoiding
sparseness problems. We evaluate the performance of our approach on Italian-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tasks using a state-of-the-art phrase-based SMT
system, and report significant improvements for both BLEU and NIST scores when adding the context-informed features
A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter
Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are
central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic
identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been
explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network
platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of
tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and
real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained
significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing
with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and
context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall
picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the
prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We
first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing
Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then
structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency
is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies
adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two
related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest
recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur
Inducing a Semantically Annotated Lexicon via EM-Based Clustering
We present a technique for automatic induction of slot annotations for
subcategorization frames, based on induction of hidden classes in the EM
framework of statistical estimation. The models are empirically evalutated by a
general decision test. Induction of slot labeling for subcategorization frames
is accomplished by a further application of EM, and applied experimentally on
frame observations derived from parsing large corpora. We outline an
interpretation of the learned representations as theoretical-linguistic
decompositional lexical entries.Comment: 8 pages, uses colacl.sty. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of
the ACL, 199
Probabilistic Bag-Of-Hyperlinks Model for Entity Linking
Many fundamental problems in natural language processing rely on determining
what entities appear in a given text. Commonly referenced as entity linking,
this step is a fundamental component of many NLP tasks such as text
understanding, automatic summarization, semantic search or machine translation.
Name ambiguity, word polysemy, context dependencies and a heavy-tailed
distribution of entities contribute to the complexity of this problem.
We here propose a probabilistic approach that makes use of an effective
graphical model to perform collective entity disambiguation. Input mentions
(i.e.,~linkable token spans) are disambiguated jointly across an entire
document by combining a document-level prior of entity co-occurrences with
local information captured from mentions and their surrounding context. The
model is based on simple sufficient statistics extracted from data, thus
relying on few parameters to be learned.
Our method does not require extensive feature engineering, nor an expensive
training procedure. We use loopy belief propagation to perform approximate
inference. The low complexity of our model makes this step sufficiently fast
for real-time usage. We demonstrate the accuracy of our approach on a wide
range of benchmark datasets, showing that it matches, and in many cases
outperforms, existing state-of-the-art methods
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