3131824
From RAGS to RICHES: Exploiting the Potential of a Flexible Generation Architecture
The RAGS proposals for generic specification of NLG systems includes a detailed account of data representation, but only an outline view of processing aspects. In this paper we introduce a modular processing architecture with a concrete implementation which aims to meet the RAGS goals of transparency and reusability. We illustrate the model with the RICHES system -- a generation system built from simple linguistically-motivated modules.
45352
A Practical Approach to Multiple Default Inheritance for Unification-Based Lexicons
This paper describes a unification-based lexicon system for NLP applications that incorporates mechanisms for multiple default inheritance. Such systems are intractable in the general case---the approach adopted here places a number of restrictions on the inheritance hierarchy in order to remove some of the sources of complexity while retaining more desirable properties. Implications of the design choices are discussed, comparisons are drawn with related work in computational linguistics and AI, and illustrative examples from the lexicons of German and English are given.
1627677
High Precision Extraction of Grammatical Relations
A parsing system returning analyses in the form of sets of grammatical relations can obtain high precision if it hypothesises a particular grammatical relation only when it is certain that the relation is correct. We operationalise this technique -in a statistical parser using a manually-developed wide-coverage grammar of English - by only returning relations that form part of all analyses licensed by the grammar. We observe an increase in precision from 75% to over 90% (at the cost of a reduction in recall) on a test corpus of naturally-occurring text.
12738746
Software support for practical grammar development
Even though progress in theoretical linguistics does not necessarily rely on the construction of working programs, a large proportion of current research in syntactic theory is facilitated by suitable computational tools. However, when natural language processing applications seek to draw on the results from new developments in theories of grammar, not only the nature of the tools has to change, but they face the challenge of reconciling the seemingly contradictory requirements of notational perspicuity and efficiency of performance. In this paper, we present a comparison and an evaluation of a number of software systems for grammar development, and argue that they are inadequate as practical tools for building wide-coverage grammars. We discuss a number of factors characteristic of this task, demonstrate how they influence the design of a suitable software environment, and describe the implementation of a system which has supported efficient development of a large computational grammar of English.
1954
Corpus Annotation for Parser Evaluation
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 publicdomain 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.
9629533
The Automatic Acquisition of Verb Subcategorisations and Their Impact on the Performance of an HPSG Parser
We describe the automatic acquisition of a lexicon of verb subcategorisations from a domain-specific corpus, and an evaluation of the impact this lexicon has on the performance of a “deep”, HPSG parser of English. We conducted two experiments to determine whether the empirically extracted verb stems would enhance the lexical coverage of the grammar and to see whether the automatically extracted verb subcategorisations would result in enhanced parser coverage. In our experiments, the empirically extracted verbs enhance lexical coverage by 8.5%. The automatically extracted verb subcategorisations enhance the parse success rate by 15% in theoretical terms and by 4.5% in practice. This is a promising approach for improving the robustness of deep parsing.
148806746
Human-computer interaction: psychology as a science of design.
131770741
Structured Case: A Methodological Framework for Building Theory in Information Systems Research
This paper presents a methodological framework, structured-case, that assists IS researchers to undertake and assess theory building research within the interpretive paradigm, and explains its value in achieving convincing explanations that are strongly linked to both the research themes and data collected in the field.
10894513
Block-Level Consistency of Replicated Files
1566611
Managing evaluation goals for training
goals and are characteristically underresourced. In this article, we describe a framework for managing training evaluation in such contexts. We illustrate by example the feasibility of taking a broad approach toward training evaluation. Scriven [21] introduced the terms formative and summative in his classic work on the objectives and processes of instructional evaluation. Formative evaluation seeks to identify aspects of a design that can be improved. A typical implementation would be having users think aloud as they work through a tutorial to produce a real-time commentary on the nature of the learning experience. Each comment is tightly coupled to a specific design feature, facilitating the identification of problems and reasoning about design solutions. Summative evaluation seeks to gauge a design product. A typical implementation would be measuring time-on-task and error rate to guide decision-making about whether a training system (or the software it supports) should be produced and marketed, or purchased. Formative evaluation work succeeds to the extent that it identifies priorities for redesign and refinement, and all the more to the extent that it provides concrete guidance as to how that redesign and refinement should be executed. Summative evaluation work succeeds to the extent that it allows a design product to be located on various measurement scales with respect to other design products; the stronger the scale (i.e., ratio scale versus interval scale versus ordinal scale versus nominal scale), the better the summative evaluation. Scriven [21] also distinguished two basic types of evaluation method, intrinsic and pay-off :
14401913
Community design of community simulations
We report on a participatory design workshop in which residents of a community collaborated in learning about and designing projects for a visual simulation environment. Nine participants (five middle school teachers, four senior citizens) first conducted a participatory evaluation of a tutorial developed for the Stagecast Creator simulation tool. They then worked in pairs to brainstorm ideas for Creator simulation projects that would help raise and promote discussion of issues relevant to their community. After sharing these ideas, each pair chose 2--3 simulation ideas to refine as a specification for subsequent implementation. We discuss the participants' learning and design activities, as well as their contributions to our long term goal of supporting cross-generational collaboration and learning through community simulation projects.