612 research outputs found
A Corpus of Sentence-level Revisions in Academic Writing: A Step towards Understanding Statement Strength in Communication
The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on
the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the
media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected
because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to
understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to
distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is
understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently
relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on
strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level
revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our
annotation efforts for this task.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 2014 (short paper
A Sentimental Education: Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity Summarization Based on Minimum Cuts
Sentiment analysis seeks to identify the viewpoint(s) underlying a text span;
an example application is classifying a movie review as "thumbs up" or "thumbs
down". To determine this sentiment polarity, we propose a novel
machine-learning method that applies text-categorization techniques to just the
subjective portions of the document. Extracting these portions can be
implemented using efficient techniques for finding minimum cuts in graphs; this
greatly facilitates incorporation of cross-sentence contextual constraints.Comment: Data available at
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/pabo/movie-review-data
Bootstrapping Lexical Choice via Multiple-Sequence Alignment
An important component of any generation system is the mapping dictionary, a
lexicon of elementary semantic expressions and corresponding natural language
realizations. Typically, labor-intensive knowledge-based methods are used to
construct the dictionary. We instead propose to acquire it automatically via a
novel multiple-pass algorithm employing multiple-sequence alignment, a
technique commonly used in bioinformatics. Crucially, our method leverages
latent information contained in multi-parallel corpora -- datasets that supply
several verbalizations of the corresponding semantics rather than just one.
We used our techniques to generate natural language versions of
computer-generated mathematical proofs, with good results on both a
per-component and overall-output basis. For example, in evaluations involving a
dozen human judges, our system produced output whose readability and
faithfulness to the semantic input rivaled that of a traditional generation
system.Comment: 8 pages; to appear in the proceedings of EMNLP-200
Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences
Given the lack of word delimiters in written Japanese, word segmentation is
generally considered a crucial first step in processing Japanese texts. Typical
Japanese segmentation algorithms rely either on a lexicon and syntactic
analysis or on pre-segmented data; but these are labor-intensive, and the
lexico-syntactic techniques are vulnerable to the unknown word problem. In
contrast, we introduce a novel, more robust statistical method utilizing
unsegmented training data. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm yields
performance on long kanji sequences comparable to and sometimes surpassing that
of state-of-the-art morphological analyzers over a variety of error metrics.
The algorithm also outperforms another mostly-unsupervised statistical
algorithm previously proposed for Chinese.
Additionally, we present a two-level annotation scheme for Japanese to
incorporate multiple segmentation granularities, and introduce two novel
evaluation metrics, both based on the notion of a compatible bracket, that can
account for multiple granularities simultaneously.Comment: 22 pages. To appear in Natural Language Engineerin
- …