1,721,044 research outputs found
Semantic and Pragmatic Computing with GETARUNS
Full text linkWe present a system for text understanding called GETARUNS, in its deep
version applicable only to Closed Domains. We will present the low
level component organized according to LFG theory. The system also does
pronominal binding, quantifier raising and temporal interpretation. Then we
will introduce the high level component where the Discourse Model is created
from a text. Texts belonging to closed domains are characterized by the fact
that their semantics is controlled or under command of the system; and most
importantly, sentences making up the texts are fully parsed without failures.
In practice, these texts are short and sentences are also below a certain
threshold, typically less than 25 words. For longer sentences the system
switches from the topdown to the bottomup system. In case of failure it will
backoff to the partial system which produces a very lean and shallow semantics
with no inference rules. The small text we will present contains what is
called a “psychological statement” sentence which contributes an important bias
as to the linking of the free pronominal expression contained in the last sentence
Answering Why-Questions in Closed Domains from a Discourse Model
No full textIn this paper we will present a system for Question Answering called GETARUNS, in its deep version applicable to closed domains, that is to say domains for which the lexical semantics is fully specified and does not have to be induced. In addition, no ontology is needed: semantic re- lations are derived from linguistic relations encoded in the syntax. The main tenet of the system is that it is possible to produce consistent seman- tic representations using a strict linguistic approach without resorting to extralinguistic knowledge sources. The paper will briefly present the low level component which is responsible for pronominal binding, quantifier raising and temporal interpretation. Then it will discuss in more detail the high level component where a Discourse Model is created from text. The system has been evaluated on a wide variety of texts from closed domains, producing full and accurate parsing, semantics and anaphora resolution for all sentences
VENSES++: Adapting a deep semantic processing system to the identification of null instantiations
No full textDesperately seeking Implicit arguments in text
Full text linkIn this paper, we address the issue of automatically
identifying null instantiated arguments
in text. We refer to Fillmore’s theory of pragmatically
controlled zero anaphora (Fillmore,
1986), which accounts for the phenomenon of
omissible arguments using a lexically-based
approach, and we propose a strategy for identifying
implicit arguments in a text and finding
their antecedents, given the overtly expressed
semantic roles in the form of frame elements.
To this purpose, we primarily rely on linguistic
knowledge enriched with role frequency
information collected from a training corpus.
We evaluate our approach using the test set
developed for the SemEval task 10 and we
highlight some issues of our approach. Besides,
we also point out some open problems
related to the task definition and to the general
phenomenon of null instantiated arguments,
which needs to be better investigated and described
in order to be captured from a computational
point of view
How to Create SLIM courseware
No full textThe book is a collection of excerpts and examples of linguistic materials produced in SLIM project in the academic year 1994-1995. The project has come into life thanks to the initiative of the current Chancellor of the University Ca' Foscari, Prof. Paolo Costa, on the basis of a proposal that I officially presented to the University Board, who approved and financed it.
The aim of the project is that of creating and organizing software tools for self-learning of foreign languages, and adapting commercially available audiovideo materials. The peculiarity of these software tools is their interactivity, which in our case is based on the ability of the computer to realize recognition tasks and other similar comparison tasks on the oral production of the student. These tasks are possible nowadays in so far as speech recognition has become a reality available on small PCs.
Another important feature is the automatization of exercises and their complete adequacy with the actual learning materials used in the course. To realize this important point, all texts have been manually transcribed and linguistically classified at various levels of complexity: at word level, phrase level, sentence level, utterance level and finally at communicative unit level. These classifications constitute the linguistic backbone of the courseware and ar4e recorded in a database which is always activated while the student is working. They may be phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, functional, communicative classifications; else they may encode the level of difficulty due to contrastive, phonetic, graphemic distance registered between the two languages L1 and L2
A Logical Form Parser for Correction and Consistency Checking of LF resources
Full text linkIn this paper we present ongoing work for the correction of Extended
WordNet (XWN), the most extended freely downloadable resource of Logical
Forms (LFs) – by the Human Language Technology Research Institute
(HLTRI) of University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). In a previous paper we reported
on type and number of errors detected in the 140,000 entries of the resource,
which amounted to some 30%. This didn’t include problems related to
inconsistencies from disconnected variables which were not computable at the
time. We now created an LF parser that parses each entry after appropriate
transformations. The parser has been created to count the number of disconnected
variables, be they object variables or predicate event variables: the result
is 56% of LFs containing some disconnected variable. We devised two procedures
for correction: one lexical and the other structural which eventually allowed
a dramatic reduction: the final count is now 24%. Additional work has
been carried out to improve the general consistency by manual intervention on
"inconsistent" outputs signaled by the parser and has reduce the number of errors
to a reasonable percentage for such a resource, that is less that 15%
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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