809 research outputs found
Improving Japanese Zero Pronoun Resolution by Global Word Sense Disambiguation
This paper proposes unsupervised word sense disambiguation based on automatically constructed case frames and its incorporation into our zero pronoun resolution system. The word sense disambiguation is applied to verbs and nouns. We consider that case frames define verb senses and semantic features in a thesaurus define noun senses, respectively, and perform sense disambiguation by selecting them based on case analysis. In addition, according to the one sense per discourse heuristic, the word sense disambiguation results are cached and applied globally to the subsequent words. We integrated this global word sense disambiguation into our zero pronoun resolution system, and conducted experiments of zero pronoun resolution on two different domain corpora. Both of the experimental results indicated the effectiveness of our approach.
Automatic Acquisition of Lexical-Functional Grammar Resources from a Japanese Dependency Corpus
PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200
Vagueness and referential ambiguity in a large-scale annotated corpus
In this paper, we argue that difficulties in the definition of coreference itself contribute to lower inter-annotator agreement in certain cases. Data from a large referentially annotated corpus serves to corroborate this point, using a quantitative investigation to assess which effects or problems are likely to be the most prominent. Several examples where such problems occur are discussed in more detail, and we then propose a generalisation of Poesio, Reyle and Stevensonâs Justified Sloppiness Hypothesis to provide a unified model for these cases of disagreement and argue that a deeper understanding of the phenomena involved allows to tackle problematic cases in a more principled fashion than would be possible using only pre-theoretic intuitions
Domain-Specific Knowledge Acquisition for Conceptual Sentence Analysis
The availability of on-line corpora is rapidly changing the field of natural language processing (NLP) from one dominated by theoretical models of often very specific linguistic phenomena to one guided by computational models that simultaneously account for a wide variety of phenomena that occur in real-world text. Thus far, among the best-performing and most robust systems for reading and summarizing large amounts of real-world text are knowledge-based natural language systems. These systems rely heavily on domain-specific, handcrafted knowledge to handle the myriad syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic ambiguities that pervade virtually all aspects of sentence analysis. Not surprisingly, however, generating this knowledge for new domains is time-consuming, difficult, and error-prone, and requires the expertise of computational linguists familiar with the underlying NLP system. This thesis presents Kenmore, a general framework for domain-specific knowledge acquisition for conceptual sentence analysis. To ease the acquisition of knowledge in new domains, Kenmore exploits an on-line corpus using symbolic machine learning techniques and robust sentence analysis while requiring only minimal human intervention. Unlike most approaches to knowledge acquisition for natural language systems, the framework uniformly addresses a range of subproblems in sentence analysis, each of which traditionally had required a separate computational mechanism. The thesis presents the results of using Kenmore with corpora from two real-world domains (1) to perform part-of-speech tagging, semantic feature tagging, and concept tagging of all open-class words in the corpus; (2) to acquire heuristics for part-ofspeech disambiguation, semantic feature disambiguation, and concept activation; and (3) to find the antecedents of relative pronouns
Structural Analysis of Instruction Utterances
Abstract. In realizing video retrieval system, the crucial point is how to provide an effective access method of video contents. This paper fo-cuses on Japanese cooking instruction utterances and describes a method of analyzing structure of them, which leads to a summary of video. We detect a hierarchical structure of video contents by using linguistic and visual information. We found that the integration of visual information can improve the detection of task units better than using linguistic in-formation alone.
A Survey on Semantic Processing Techniques
Semantic processing is a fundamental research domain in computational
linguistics. In the era of powerful pre-trained language models and large
language models, the advancement of research in this domain appears to be
decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in
linguistics. The research depth and breadth of computational semantic
processing can be largely improved with new technologies. In this survey, we
analyzed five semantic processing tasks, e.g., word sense disambiguation,
anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and
subjectivity detection. We study relevant theoretical research in these fields,
advanced methods, and downstream applications. We connect the surveyed tasks
with downstream applications because this may inspire future scholars to fuse
these low-level semantic processing tasks with high-level natural language
processing tasks. The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks
and technologies in the semantic processing domain. Finally, we compare the
different semantic processing techniques and summarize their technical trends,
application trends, and future directions.Comment: Published at Information Fusion, Volume 101, 2024, 101988, ISSN
1566-2535. The equal contribution mark is missed in the published version due
to the publication policies. Please contact Prof. Erik Cambria for detail
Linguistics parameters for zero anaphora resolution
Dissertação de mest., Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology, Univ. do Algarve, 2009This dissertation describes and proposes a set of linguistically motivated rules for zero
anaphora resolution in the context of a natural language processing chain developed for
Portuguese. Some languages, like Portuguese, allow noun phrase (NP) deletion (or zeroing)
in several syntactic contexts in order to avoid the redundancy that would result from
repetition of previously mentioned words. The co-reference relation between the zeroed
element and its antecedent (or previous mention) in the discourse is here called zero
anaphora (Mitkov, 2002). In Computational Linguistics, zero anaphora resolution may be
viewed as a subtask of anaphora resolution and has an essential role in various Natural
Language Processing applications such as information extraction, automatic abstracting,
dialog systems, machine translation and question answering. The main goal of this
dissertation is to describe the grammatical rules imposing subject NP deletion and referential
constraints in the Brazilian Portuguese, in order to allow a correct identification of the
antecedent of the deleted subject NP. Some of these rules were then formalized into the
Xerox Incremental Parser or XIP (Ait-Mokhtar et al., 2002: 121-144) in order to constitute a
module of the Portuguese grammar (Mamede et al. 2010) developed at Spoken Language
Laboratory (L2F). Using this rule-based approach we expected to improve the performance
of the Portuguese grammar namely by producing better dependency structures with
(reconstructed) zeroed NPs for the syntactic-semantic interface. Because of the complexity
of the task, the scope of this dissertation had to be limited: (a) subject NP deletion; b) within
sentence boundaries and (c) with an explicit antecedent; besides, (d) rules were formalized
based solely on the results of the shallow parser (or chunks), that is, with minimal syntactic
(and no semantic) knowledge. A corpus of different text genres was manually annotated for
zero anaphors and other zero-shaped, usually indefinite, subjects. The rule-based
approached is evaluated and results are presented and discussed
Inducing Implicit Arguments via Cross-document Alignment: A Framework and its Applications
Natural language texts frequently contain related information in different positions in discourse. As human readers, we can recognize such information across sentence boundaries and correctly infer relations between them. Given this inference capability, we understand texts that describe complex dependencies even if central aspects are not repeated in every sentence. In linguistics, certain omissions of redundant information are known under the term ellipsis and have been studied as cohesive devices in discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). For computational approaches to semantic processing, such cohesive devices are problematic because methods are traditionally applied on the sentence level and barely take surrounding context
into account.
In this dissertation, we investigate omission phenomena on the level of predicate-argument structures. In particular, we examine instances of structures involving arguments that are not locally realized but inferable from context. The goal of this work is to automatically acquire and process such instances, which we also refer to as implicit arguments, to improve natural language processing applications. Our main contribution is a framework that identifies implicit arguments by aligning and comparing predicate-argument structures across pairs of comparable texts. As part of this framework, we develop a novel graph-based clustering approach, which detects corresponding predicate-argument structures using pairwise similarity metrics. To find discourse antecedents of implicit arguments, we further design a heuristic method that utilizes automatic annotations from various linguistic pre-processing tools.
We empirically validate the utility of automatically induced instances of implicit arguments and discourse antecedents in three extrinsic evaluation scenarios. In the first scenario, we show that our induced pairs of arguments and antecedents can successfully be applied to improve a pre-existing model for linking implicit arguments in discourse. In two further evaluation settings, we show that induced instances of implicit arguments, together with their aligned explicit counterparts, can be used as training material for a novel model of local coherence. Given discourse-level and semantic features, this model can predict whether a specific argument should be explicitly realized to establish local coherence or whether it is inferable and hence redundant in context
- âŚ