Tagging the Teleman Corpus

Experiments were carried out comparing the Swedish Teleman and the English Susanne corpora using an HMM-based and a novel reductionistic statistical part-of-speech tagger. They indicate that tagging the Teleman corpus is the more difficult task, and that the performance of the two different taggers is comparable.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, to appear in Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, Finland, 199

Chunk Tagger - Statistical Recognition of Noun Phrases

We describe a stochastic approach to partial parsing, i.e., the recognition of syntactic structures of limited depth. The technique utilises Markov Models, but goes beyond usual bracketing approaches, since it is capable of recognising not only the boundaries, but also the internal structure and syntactic category of simple as well as complex NP's, PP's, AP's and adverbials. We compare tagging accuracy for different applications and encoding schemes.Comment: 7 pages, LaTe

A Maximum-Entropy Partial Parser for Unrestricted Text

This paper describes a partial parser that assigns syntactic structures to sequences of part-of-speech tags. The program uses the maximum entropy parameter estimation method, which allows a flexible combination of different knowledge sources: the hierarchical structure, parts of speech and phrasal categories. In effect, the parser goes beyond simple bracketing and recognises even fairly complex structures. We give accuracy figures for different applications of the parser.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe

What limits to harmonising justice?

This chapter is concerned with how tradition and change affect differences between jurisdictions within the European Union (EU), where supranational legal structures and ideologies appear to leave little room for the ‘insider perspective’. The principles of mutual recognition and harmonisation of criminal law and procedure in Member States have created a legal sphere transcending the national. It presupposes a common legal order in which a shared conception of fair trial is the norm and provisions of substantive law are, if not identical, then at least totally compatible and based on common notions of harm. Whether or not harmonisation is desirable is not the issue here. My concern is with the assumptions that underlie an ongoing process and their effect on criminal justice in the national sphere. Can we assume a common legal order of criminal justice in which conceptions of fair trial and harmonised substantive law are shared across the European Union? Or do different social constructions and legal cultures at the national level (and the resulting supranational political compromise) pose limits to how far we can approach this purportedly ideal state of affairs? And, if that is the case, how do they make themselves felt and what are the consequences