34 research outputs found
Using Decision Trees for Coreference Resolution
This paper describes RESOLVE, a system that uses decision trees to learn how
to classify coreferent phrases in the domain of business joint ventures. An
experiment is presented in which the performance of RESOLVE is compared to the
performance of a manually engineered set of rules for the same task. The
results show that decision trees achieve higher performance than the rules in
two of three evaluation metrics developed for the coreference task. In addition
to achieving better performance than the rules, RESOLVE provides a framework
that facilitates the exploration of the types of knowledge that are useful for
solving the coreference problem.Comment: 6 pages; LaTeX source; 1 uuencoded compressed EPS file (separate);
uses ijcai95.sty, named.bst, epsf.tex; to appear in Proc. IJCAI '9
Intonational Features of Local and Global Discourse Structure
We present results of a study of the relationship between intonational features including pitch range, timing, and amplitude and aspects of discourse structure defined in terms of Grosz and Sidner's (1986) model of discourse. We compare structural labelings of AP news text with prosodic/acoustic features examined from recordings of the same text read by a professional newscaster. We find significant correlations between prosodic/acoustic characteristics and both local and global aspects of discourse structure identified by our labelers. Our results have applications for speech synthesis and, potentially, for speech recognition.Engineering and Applied Science
An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution
This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of temporal
reference resolution in scheduling dialogs. The algorithm adopted is primarily
a linear-recency based approach that does not include a model of global focus.
A fully automatic system has been developed and evaluated on unseen test data
with good results. This paper presents the results of an intercoder reliability
study, a model of temporal reference resolution that supports linear recency
and has very good coverage, the results of the system evaluated on unseen test
data, and a detailed analysis of the dialogs assessing the viability of the
approach.Comment: 13 pages, latex using aclap.st
Conceptions of Limited Attention and Discourse Focus.
Walker (1996) presents a cache model of the operation of attention in the processing of discourse as an alternative to the focus space stack that was proposed previously by Grosz and Sidner (Grosz 1977a; Grosz and Sidner 1986). In this squib, we present a critical analysis of the cache model and of Walker's supporting evidence from anaphora in discourses with interruptions and from informationally redundant utterances. We argue that the cache model is underdetermined in several ways that are crucial to a comparison of the two models and conclude that Walker has not established the superiority of the cache model. We also argue that psycholinguistic evidence does not support the cache model over the focus stack model. Engineering and Applied Science
A Corpus-Based Investigation of Definite Description Use
We present the results of a study of definite descriptions use in written
texts aimed at assessing the feasibility of annotating corpora with information
about definite description interpretation. We ran two experiments, in which
subjects were asked to classify the uses of definite descriptions in a corpus
of 33 newspaper articles, containing a total of 1412 definite descriptions. We
measured the agreement among annotators about the classes assigned to definite
descriptions, as well as the agreement about the antecedent assigned to those
definites that the annotators classified as being related to an antecedent in
the text. The most interesting result of this study from a corpus annotation
perspective was the rather low agreement (K=0.63) that we obtained using
versions of Hawkins' and Prince's classification schemes; better results
(K=0.76) were obtained using the simplified scheme proposed by Fraurud that
includes only two classes, first-mention and subsequent-mention. The agreement
about antecedents was also not complete. These findings raise questions
concerning the strategy of evaluating systems for definite description
interpretation by comparing their results with a standardized annotation. From
a linguistic point of view, the most interesting observations were the great
number of discourse-new definites in our corpus (in one of our experiments,
about 50% of the definites in the collection were classified as discourse-new,
30% as anaphoric, and 18% as associative/bridging) and the presence of
definites which did not seem to require a complete disambiguation.Comment: 47 pages, uses fullname.sty and palatino.st