Robust Parsing Based on Discourse Information: Completing partial parses of ill-formed sentences on the basis of discourse information

We argue that grammatical analysis is a viable alternative to concept spotting for processing spoken input in a practical spoken dialogue system. We discuss the structure of the grammar, and a model for robust parsing which combines linguistic sources of information and statistical sources of information. We discuss test results suggesting that grammatical processing allows fast and accurate processing of spoken input.

In machine translation and man-machine dialogue, it is important to clarify referents of noun phrases. We present a method for determining the referents of noun phrases in Japanese sentences by using the referential properties, modifiers, and possessors of noun phrases. Since the Japanese language has no articles, it is difficult to decide whether a noun phrase has an antecedent or not. We had previously estimated the referential properties of noun phrases that correspond to ...

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.

The paper describes a parser of sequences of (English) part-of-speech labels which utilises a probabilistic grammar trained using the inside-outside algorithm. The initial (meta)grammar is defined by a linguist and further rules compatible with metagrammatical constraints are automatically generated. During training, rules with very low probability are rejected yielding a wide-coverage parser capable of ranking alternative analyses. A series of corpus-based experiments descri...

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.

The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared, formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected) semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned translations, assuming that the translations are meaning-preserving. The semantic annotation co...

Syntactic and semantic parsing has been investigated for decades, which is one primary topic in the natural language processing community. This article aims for a brief survey on this topic. The parsing community includes many tasks, which are difficult to be covered fully. Here we focus on two of the most popular formalizations of parsing: constituent parsing and dependency parsing. Constituent parsing is majorly targeted to syntactic analysis, and dependency parsing can han...

In this paper I explain the reasons that led me to research and conceive a novel technology for dependency parsing, mixing together the strengths of data-driven transition-based and constraint-based approaches. In particular I highlight the problem to infer the reliability of the results of a data-driven transition-based parser, which is extremely important for high-level processes that expect to use correct parsing results. I then briefly introduce a number of notes about a ...

Automatic segmentation of text into minimal content-bearing units is an unsolved problem even for languages like English. Spaces between words offer an easy first approximation, but this approximation is not good enough for machine translation (MT), where many word sequences are not translated word-for-word. This paper presents an efficient automatic method for discovering sequences of words that are translated as a unit. The method proceeds by comparing pairs of statistical ...

In recent years, There has been a variety of research on discourse parsing, particularly RST discourse parsing. Most of the recent work on RST parsing has focused on implementing new types of features or learning algorithms in order to improve accuracy, with relatively little focus on efficiency, robustness, or practical use. Also, most implementations are not widely available. Here, we describe an RST segmentation and parsing system that adapts models and feature sets from v...