This volume provides a selection of the papers which were presented at the eleventh conference on Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (Tilburg, 2000). It gives an accurate and up-to-date picture of the lively scene of computational linguistics in the Netherlands and Flanders. The volume covers the whole range from theoretical to applied research and development, and is hence of interest to both academia and industry. The target audience consists of students and scholars of computational linguistics, and speech and language processing (Linguistics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering).
This volume provides a selection of the papers which were presented at the eleventh conference on Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (Tilburg, 2000). It gives an accurate and up-to-date picture of the lively scene of computational linguistics in the Netherlands and Flanders. The volume covers the whole range from theoretical to applied research and development, and is hence of interest to both academia and industry. The target audience consists of students and scholars of computational linguistics, and speech and language processing (Linguistics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering).
This volume provides a selection of the papers which were presented at the thirteenth conference on Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (held in Groningen in November 2002). The subjects covered in this book represent a cross-section of current research topics in computational linguistics ranging from theoretical to applied research and development. The target audience consists of students and scholars of computational linguistics as well as speech and language processing, both in academia and industry.
From the contents: Ideas on multi-layer dialogue management for multi-party, multi-conversation, multi-modal communication. - The alpino dependency treebank. - Corpus-based acquisition of collocational prepositional phrases. - Conservative vs set-driven learning functions for the classes k-valued. - Memory-based phoneme-to-grapheme conversion. - Tagging the Dutch parole corpus. - A named entity recognition system for Dutch.
From the contents: Ideas on multi-layer dialogue management for multi-party, multi-conversation, multi-modal communication. - The alpino dependency treebank. - Corpus-based acquisition of collocational prepositional phrases. - Conservative vs set-driven learning functions for the classes k-valued. - Memory-based phoneme-to-grapheme conversion. - Tagging the Dutch parole corpus. - A named entity recognition system for Dutch.
From the contents: Stig JOHANSSON: Towards a multilingual corpus for contrastive analysis and translation studies. - Anna SAGVALL HEIN: The PLUG project: parallel corpora in Linkoping, Uppsala, Goteborg: aims and achievements. - Raphael SALKIE: How can linguists profit from parallel corpora? - Trond TROSTERUD: Parallel corpora as tools for investigating and developing minority languages."
Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools, and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable. This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a series of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.
This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?". The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language. Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi). Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film. Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions. "The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies." Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany
This volume aims to overcome sub-disciplinary boundaries in the study of linguistic variation - be it language-internal or cross-linguistic. Even though dialectologists, register analysts, typologists, and quantitative linguists all deal with linguistic variation, there is astonishingly little interaction across these fields. But the fourteen contributions in this volume show that these subdisciplines actually share many interests and methodological concerns in common. The chapters specifically converge in the following ways: First, they all seek to explore linguistic variation, within or across languages. Second, they are based on usage data, that is, on corpora of (more or less) authentic text or speech of different languages or language varieties. Third, all chapters are concerned with the joint analysis (also sometimes known as “aggregation” or “data synthesis”) of multiple phenomena, features, or measurements of some sort. And lastly, the contributors all marshal quantitative analysis techniques to analyse the data. In short, the volume explores the text-feature-aggregation pipeline in variation studies, demonstrating that there is much mutual inspiration to be had by thinking outside the disciplinary box.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).
