An incremental procedural grammar for sentence formulation

This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he or she is going to express in that sentence. Apparently, the speaker is able to build up a syntactically coherent utterance out of a series of syntactic fragments each rendering a new part of the meaning content. This incremental, left-to-right mode of sentence production is the central capability of the proposed Incremental Procedural Grammar (IPG). Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, self-repairs, and language pathology, are accounted for as well. The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions which are in line with current theories of grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistics rules is proposed. The basic design feature of IPG which gives rise to these psychologically and linguistically desirable properties, is the “Procedures + Stack” concept. Sentences are built not by a central constructing agency which overlooks the whole process but by a team of syntactic procedures (modules) which work-in parallel-on small parts of the sentence, have only a limited overview, and whose sole communication channel is a stock. IPG covers object complement constructions, interrogatives, and word order in main and subordinate clauses. It handles unbounded dependencies, cross-serial dependencies and coordination phenomena such as gapping and conjunction reduction. It is also capable of generating self-repairs and elliptical answers to questions. IPG has been implemented as an incremental Dutch sentence generator written in LISP

Incremental sentence generation

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production

Analysis of the Impact of Data Granularity on Privacy for the Smart Grid

The upgrade of the electricity network to the "smart grid" has been intensified in the last years. The new automated devices being deployed gather large quantities of data that offer promises of a more resilient grid but also raise privacy concerns among customers and energy distributors. In this paper, we focus on the energy consumption traces that smart meters generate and especially on the risk of being able to identify individual customers given a large dataset of these traces. This is a question raised in the related literature and an important privacy research topic. We present an overview of the current research regarding privacy in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. We make a formalization of the problem of de-anonymization by matching low-frequency and high-frequency smart metering datasets and we also build a threat model related to this problem. Finally, we investigate the characteristics of these datasets in order to make them more resilient to the de-anonymization process. Our methodology can be used by electricity companies to better understand the properties of their smart metering datasets and the conditions under which such datasets can be released to third parties