4,117 research outputs found
Bayesian Grammar Induction for Language Modeling
We describe a corpus-based induction algorithm for probabilistic context-free
grammars. The algorithm employs a greedy heuristic search within a Bayesian
framework, and a post-pass using the Inside-Outside algorithm. We compare the
performance of our algorithm to n-gram models and the Inside-Outside algorithm
in three language modeling tasks. In two of the tasks, the training data is
generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar and in both tasks our
algorithm outperforms the other techniques. The third task involves
naturally-occurring data, and in this task our algorithm does not perform as
well as n-gram models but vastly outperforms the Inside-Outside algorithm.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, uses aclap.st
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
Combining semantic and syntactic structure for language modeling
Structured language models for speech recognition have been shown to remedy
the weaknesses of n-gram models. All current structured language models are,
however, limited in that they do not take into account dependencies between
non-headwords. We show that non-headword dependencies contribute to
significantly improved word error rate, and that a data-oriented parsing model
trained on semantically and syntactically annotated data can exploit these
dependencies. This paper also contains the first DOP model trained by means of
a maximum likelihood reestimation procedure, which solves some of the
theoretical shortcomings of previous DOP models.Comment: 4 page
Global Thresholding and Multiple Pass Parsing
We present a variation on classic beam thresholding techniques that is up to
an order of magnitude faster than the traditional method, at the same
performance level. We also present a new thresholding technique, global
thresholding, which, combined with the new beam thresholding, gives an
additional factor of two improvement, and a novel technique, multiple pass
parsing, that can be combined with the others to yield yet another 50%
improvement. We use a new search algorithm to simultaneously optimize the
thresholding parameters of the various algorithms.Comment: Fixed latex errors; fixed minor errors in published versio
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
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