An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range of situations

New Methods, Current Trends and Software Infrastructure for NLP

The increasing use of `new methods' in NLP, which the NeMLaP conference series exemplifies, occurs in the context of a wider shift in the nature and concerns of the discipline. This paper begins with a short review of this context and significant trends in the field. The review motivates and leads to a set of requirements for support software of general utility for NLP research and development workers. A freely-available system designed to meet these requirements is described (called GATE - a General Architecture for Text Engineering). Information Extraction (IE), in the sense defined by the Message Understanding Conferences (ARPA \cite{Arp95}), is an NLP application in which many of the new methods have found a home (Hobbs \cite{Hob93}; Jacobs ed. \cite{Jac92}). An IE system based on GATE is also available for research purposes, and this is described. Lastly we review related work.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, uses nemlap.sty (included

A Wishy-Washy, Sort-of-Feeling: Episodes in the History of the Wishy-Washy Aesthetic

Following Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), this thesis studies the wishy-washy as an aesthetic category. Consisting of three art world and visual culture case studies, this thesis reveals the surprising strength that lies behind the wishy-washy’s weak veneer. The first case study draws out the subtle power in Victorian flower painting by analyzing the work and reception of the successful (though largely unstudied) painters Annie and Martha Mutrie. Subsequently, case studies of Maurizio Cattelan’s roaming artwork Charlie (2003) and the Andrew Bujalski’s mumblecore film Funny Ha Ha (2002) bring the discussion into the twenty-first century, when such phenomena as “openness,” mumbled dialogue, wishy-washy personalities and filmic devices secure an artwork’s place as a commodity in the global art market and as a way for young people to navigate their financial reality, respectively. The wishy-washy proves to be hard to describe, yet unmistakable: a half-hearted, flakey, neither here nor there quality that powerfully refuses to commit and covertly gets under our skin

Evaluating two methods for Treebank grammar compaction

Treebanks, such as the Penn Treebank, provide a basis for the automatic creation of broad coverage grammars. In the simplest case, rules can simply be ‘read off’ the parse-annotations of the corpus, producing either a simple or probabilistic context-free grammar. Such grammars, however, can be very large, presenting problems for the subsequent computational costs of parsing under the grammar. In this paper, we explore ways by which a treebank grammar can be reduced in size or ‘compacted’, which involve the use of two kinds of technique: (i) thresholding of rules by their number of occurrences; and (ii) a method of rule-parsing, which has both probabilistic and non-probabilistic variants. Our results show that by a combined use of these two techniques, a probabilistic context-free grammar can be reduced in size by 62% without any loss in parsing performance, and by 71% to give a gain in recall, but some loss in precision