134 research outputs found
Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization from Corpora
We describe a novel technique and implemented system for constructing a
subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Each dictionary entry
encodes the relative frequency of occurrence of a comprehensive set of
subcategorization classes for English. An initial experiment, on a sample of 14
verbs which exhibit multiple complementation patterns, demonstrates that the
technique achieves accuracy comparable to previous approaches, which are all
limited to a highly restricted set of subcategorization classes. We also
demonstrate that a subcategorization dictionary built with the system improves
the accuracy of a parser by an appreciable amount.Comment: 8 pages; requires aclap.sty. To appear in ANLP-9
Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation
We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic
parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and
punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present
evaluations of the system's performance along several different dimensions;
these enable us to assess the contribution that each individual part is making
to the success of the system as a whole, and thus prioritise the effort to be
devoted to its further enhancement. Currently, the system is able to parse
around 80% of sentences in a substantial corpus of general text containing a
number of distinct genres. On a random sample of 250 such sentences the system
has a mean crossing bracket rate of 0.71 and recall and precision of 83% and
84% respectively when evaluated against manually-disambiguated analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 1 Postscript figure. To Appear in Proceedings of the
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, University of
Pennsylvania, May 199
Corpus Annotation for Parser Evaluation
We describe a recently developed corpus annotation scheme for evaluating
parsers that avoids shortcomings of current methods. The scheme encodes
grammatical relations between heads and dependents, and has been used to mark
up a new public-domain corpus of naturally occurring English text. We show how
the corpus can be used to evaluate the accuracy of a robust parser, and relate
the corpus to extant resources.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX (uses eaclap.sty
Can Subcategorisation Probabilities Help a Statistical Parser?
Research into the automatic acquisition of lexical information from corpora
is starting to produce large-scale computational lexicons containing data on
the relative frequencies of subcategorisation alternatives for individual
verbal predicates. However, the empirical question of whether this type of
frequency information can in practice improve the accuracy of a statistical
parser has not yet been answered. In this paper we describe an experiment with
a wide-coverage statistical grammar and parser for English and
subcategorisation frequencies acquired from ten million words of text which
shows that this information can significantly improve parse accuracy.Comment: 9 pages, uses colacl.st
Disambiguating Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Using Automatically Acquired Selectional Preferences
Selectional preferences have been used by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems as one source of disambiguating information. We evaluate WSD using selectional preferences acquired for English adjective—noun, subject, and direct object grammatical relationships with respect to a standard test corpus. The selectional preferences are specific to verb or adjective classes, rather than individual word forms, so they can be used to disambiguate the co-occurring adjectives and verbs, rather than just the nominal argument heads. We also investigate use of the one-senseper-discourse heuristic to propagate a sense tag for a word to other occurrences of the same word within the current document in order to increase coverage. Although the preferences perform well in comparison with other unsupervised WSD systems on the same corpus, the results show that for many applications, further knowledge sources would be required to achieve an adequate level of accuracy and coverage. In addition to quantifying performance, we analyze the results to investigate the situations in which the selectional preferences achieve the best precision and in which the one-sense-per-discourse heuristic increases performance
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Looking for Hyponyms in Vector Space.
The task of detecting and generating hyponyms
is at the core of semantic understanding
of language, and has numerous
practical applications. We investigate how
neural network embeddings perform on
this task, compared to dependency-based
vector space models, and evaluate a range
of similarity measures on hyponym generation.
A new asymmetric similarity measure
and a combination approach are described,
both of which significantly improve
precision. We release three new
datasets of lexical vector representations
trained on the BNC and our evaluation
dataset for hyponym generation
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