Generating a 3D Simulation of a Car Accident from a Written Description in Natural Language: the CarSim System

This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a 3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2001, Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processin

Investigating multilingual dependency parsing

In this paper, we describe a system for the CoNLL-X shared task of multilingual dependency parsing. It uses a baseline Nivre’s parser (Nivre, 2003) that first identifies the parse actions and then labels the dependency arcs. These two steps are implemented as SVM classifiers using LIBSVM. Features take into account the static context as well as relations dynamically built during parsing. We experimented two main additions to our implementation of Nivre’s parser: N-best search and bidirectional parsing. We trained the parser in both left-right and right-left directions and we combined the results. To construct a single-head, rooted, and cycle-free tree, we applied the Chu-Liu/Edmonds optimization algorithm. We ran the same algorithm with the same parameters on all the languages

Using WordNet to Extend FrameNet Coverage

We present two methods to address the problem of sparsity in the FrameNet lexical database. The first method is based on the idea that a word that belongs to a frame is ``similar'' to the other words in that frame. We measure the similarity using a WordNet-based variant of the Lesk metric. The second method uses the sequence of synsets in WordNet hypernym trees as feature vectors that can be used to train a classifier to determine whether a word belongs to a frame or not. The extended dictionary produced by the second method was used in a system for FrameNet-based semantic analysis and gave an improvement in recall. We believe that the methods are useful for bootstrapping FrameNets for new languages

Natural language programming of industrial robots

In this paper, we introduce a method to use written natural language instructions to program assembly tasks for industrial robots. In our application, we used a state-of-the-art semantic and syntactic parser together with semantically rich world and skill descriptions to create highlevel symbolic task sequences. From these sequences, we generated executable code for both virtual and physical robot systems. Our focus lays on the applicability of these methods in an industrial setting with real-time constraints

Exploring Lexicalized Features for Coreference Resolution

In this paper, we describe a coreference solver based on the extensive use of lexical features and features extracted from dependency graphs of the sentences. The solver uses Soon et al. (2001)'s classical resolution algorithm based on a pairwise classification of the mentions. We applied this solver to the closed track of the CoNLL 2011 shared task (Pradhan et al., 2011). We carried out a systematic optimization of the feature set using cross-validation that led us to retain 24 features. Using this set, we reached a MUC score of 58.61 on the test set of the shared task. We analyzed the impact of the features on the development set and we show the importance of lexicalization as well as of properties related to dependency links in coreference resolution

KOSHIK: A large-scale distributed computing framework for NLP

In this paper, we describe KOSHIK, an end-to-end framework to process the unstructured natural language content of multilingual documents. We used the Hadoop distributed computing infrastructure to build this framework as it enables KOSHIK to easily scale by adding inexpensive commodity hardware. We designed an annotation model that allows the processing algorithms to incrementally add layers of annotation without modifyingtheoriginaldocument. We used the Avro binary format to serialize th edocuments. Avro is designed for Hadoop and allows other data warehousing tools to directly query the documents. This paper reports the implementation choices and details of the framework,the annotation model,the options for querying processed data, and the parsing results on the English and Swedish editions of Wikipedia

Evaluating Stages of Development in Second Language French: A Machine-Learning Approach

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 73-80

Investigating multilingual dependency parsing

In this paper, we describe a system for the CoNLL-X shared task of multilingual dependency parsing. It uses a baseline Nivre’s parser (Nivre, 2003) that first identifies the parse actions and then labels the dependency arcs. These two steps are implemented as SVM classifiers using LIBSVM. Features take into account the static context as well as relations dynamically built during parsing. We experimented two main additions to our implementation of Nivre’s parser: N-best search and bidirectional parsing. We trained the parser in both left-right and right-left directions and we combined the results. To construct a single-head, rooted, and cycle-free tree, we applied the Chu-Liu/Edmonds optimization algorithm. We ran the same algorithm with the same parameters on all the languages

WikiParq: A Tabulated Wikipedia Resource Using the Parquet Format

Wikipedia has become one of the most popular resources in natural language processing and it is used in quantities of applications. However, Wikipedia requires a substantial pre-processing step before it can be used. For instance, its set of nonstandardized annotations, referred to as the wiki markup, is language-dependent and needs specific parsers from language to language, for English, French, Italian, etc. In addition, the intricacies of the different Wikipedia resources: main article text, categories, wikidata, infoboxes, scattered into the article document or in different files make it difficult to have global view of this outstanding resource. In this paper, we describe WikiParq, a unified format based on the Parquet standard to tabulate and package the Wikipedia corpora. In combination with Spark, a map-reduce computing framework, and the SQL query language, WikiParq makes it much easier to write database queries to extract specific information or subcorpora from Wikipedia, such as all the first paragraphs of the articles in French, or all the articles on persons in Spanish, or all the articles on persons that have versions in French, English, and Spanish. WikiParq is available in six language versions and is potentially extendible to all the languages of Wikipedia. The WikiParq files are downloadable as tarball archives from this location: http://semantica.cs.lth.se/wikiparq/