Complexity of Lexical Descriptions and its Relevance to Partial Parsing

In this dissertation, we have proposed novel methods for robust parsing that integrate the flexibility of linguistically motivated lexical descriptions with the robustness of statistical techniques. Our thesis is that the computation of linguistic structure can be localized if lexical items are associated with rich descriptions (supertags) that impose complex constraints in a local context. However, increasing the complexity of descriptions makes the number of different descriptions for each lexical item much larger and hence increases the local ambiguity for a parser. This local ambiguity can be resolved by using supertag co-occurrence statistics collected from parsed corpora. We have explored these ideas in the context of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) framework wherein supertag disambiguation provides a representation that is an almost parse. We have used the disambiguated supertag sequence in conjunction with a lightweight dependency analyzer to compute noun groups, verb groups, dependency linkages and even partial parses. We have shown that a trigram-based supertagger achieves an accuracy of 92.1‰ on Wall Street Journal (WSJ) texts. Furthermore, we have shown that the lightweight dependency analysis on the output of the supertagger identifies 83‰ of the dependency links accurately. We have exploited the representation of supertags with Explanation-Based Learning to improve parsing effciency. In this approach, parsing in limited domains can be modeled as a Finite-State Transduction. We have implemented such a system for the ATIS domain which improves parsing eciency by a factor of 15. We have used the supertagger in a variety of applications to provide lexical descriptions at an appropriate granularity. In an information retrieval application, we show that the supertag based system performs at higher levels of precision compared to a system based on part-of-speech tags. In an information extraction task, supertags are used in specifying extraction patterns. For language modeling applications, we view supertags as syntactically motivated class labels in a class-based language model. The distinction between recursive and non-recursive supertags is exploited in a sentence simplification application

In-domain relation discovery with meta-constraints via posterior regularization

We present a novel approach to discovering relations and their instantiations from a collection of documents in a single domain. Our approach learns relation types by exploiting meta-constraints that characterize the general qualities of a good relation in any domain. These constraints state that instances of a single relation should exhibit regularities at multiple levels of linguistic structure, including lexicography, syntax, and document-level context. We capture these regularities via the structure of our probabilistic model as well as a set of declaratively-specified constraints enforced during posterior inference. Across two domains our approach successfully recovers hidden relation structure, comparable to or outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we find that a small set of constraints is applicable across the domains, and that using domain-specific constraints can further improve performance.United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Machine Reading Program under Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) prime contract no. FA8750-09-C-0172

DISCOver: DIStributional approach based on syntactic dependencies for discovering COnstructions

One of the goals in Cognitive Linguistics is the automatic identification and analysis of constructions, since they are fundamental linguistic units for understanding language. This article presents DISCOver, an unsupervised methodology for the automatic discovery of lexico-syntactic patterns that can be considered as candidates for constructions. This methodology follows a distributional semantic approach. Concretely, it is based on our proposed pattern-construction hypothesis: those contexts that are relevant to the definition of a cluster of semantically related words tend to be (part of) lexico-syntactic constructions. Our proposal uses Distributional Semantic Models for modelling the context taking into account syntactic dependencies. After a clustering process, we linked all those clusters with strong relationships and we use them as a source of information for deriving lexico-syntactic patterns, obtaining a total number of 220,732 candidates from a 100 million token corpus of Spanish. We evaluated the patterns obtained intrinsically, applying statistical association measures and they were also evaluated qualitatively by experts. Our results were superior to the baseline in both quality and quantity in all cases. While our experiments have been carried out using a Spanish corpus, this methodology is language independent and only requires a large corpus annotated with the parts of speech and dependencies to be applied

Current trends

Deep parsing is the fundamental process aiming at the representation of the syntactic structure of phrases and sentences. In the traditional methodology this process is based on lexicons and grammars representing roughly properties of words and interactions of words and structures in sentences. Several linguistic frameworks, such as Headdriven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), etc., offer different structures and combining operations for building grammar rules. These already contain mechanisms for expressing properties of Multiword Expressions (MWE), which, however, need improvement in how they account for idiosyncrasies of MWEs on the one hand and their similarities to regular structures on the other hand. This collaborative book constitutes a survey on various attempts at representing and parsing MWEs in the context of linguistic theories and applications

Representation and parsing of multiword expressions

This book consists of contributions related to the definition, representation and parsing of MWEs. These reflect current trends in the representation and processing of MWEs. They cover various categories of MWEs such as verbal, adverbial and nominal MWEs, various linguistic frameworks (e.g. tree-based and unification-based grammars), various languages including English, French, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian), and various applications (namely MWE detection, parsing, automatic translation) using both symbolic and statistical approaches