656295
Word Sense Disambiguation Using Sense Examples Automatically Acquired from a Second Language
We present a novel almost-unsupervised approach to the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). We build sense examples automatically, using large quantities of Chinese text, and English-Chinese and Chinese-English bilingual dictionaries, taking advantage of the observation that mappings between words and meanings are often different in typologically distant languages. We train a classifier on the sense examples and test it on a gold standard English WSD dataset. The evaluation gives results that exceed previous state-of-the-art results for comparable systems. We also demonstrate that a little manual effort can improve the quality of sense examples, as measured by WSD accuracy. The performance of the classifier on WSD also improves as the number of training sense examples increases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3113915
Learning by doing with simulated intelligent help
Intelligent advisory interfaces will afford new approaches to help and training problems, however little is known about the usability of such facilities. This recent study indicates that although intelligent help can support users, there are also specific potential problems.
58199435
Usability engineering - scenario-based development of human-computer interaction
Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction is a radical departure from traditional books that emphasize theory and address experts. This book focuses on the realities of product development, showing how user interaction scenarios can make usability practices an integral part of interactive system development. As you'll learn, usability engineering is not the application of inflexible rules; it's a process of analysis, prototyping, and problem solving in which you evaluate tradeoffs, make reasoned decisions, and maximize the overall value of your product.
35980035
Developing the Blacksburg electronic village
facilitate interaction among individuals who are physically remote—in distributed work groups and interest groups. Why would anyone want a network connection to their next-door neighbor? In fact, community networks are a big idea. Over the past 20 years, since the Community Memory project in Developing the Almost half the population of Blacksburg, Virginia are Internet veterans, having spent the past three years at the core of one of the most advanced community network projects in the U.S. Berkeley, Calif., the idea has caught on in hundreds of community networks across North America and the world. They provide forums for community discussion and access to government, public health information, economic development , and public education. In most cases, they started as outreach or service projects of universities , as initiatives of local governments, and as public interest projects of energetic citizens. They offer a unique vision of grassroots technology development [1–3, 5, 11]. In January 1994, we became professors at Vir-ginia Tech, residents of Blacksburg, Virginia, and participant-observers in the Blacksburg Electronic Village. This article is an overview of our observations, discussions, and projects within the local community network. The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), in operation since October 1993, is a technologically advanced community network. The project was originally constituted as a partnership among the town of Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, and Bell Atlantic to improve community networking service to the level available on the Vir-ginia Tech campus. Bell Atlantic agreed to install a Number 5 ESS digital electronic switch and to run T1 ethernet to the public library as well as to several hundred apartments and some
8531327
Towards automatic shaping in robot navigation
Shaping is a potentially powerful tool in reinforcement learning applications. Shaping often fails to function effectively because of a lack of understanding about its effects when applied in reinforcement learning settings and the use of inadequate algorithms in its implementation. Due to these difficulties current shaping techniques require some form of manual intervention. We examine some of the principles involved in shaping and present a new algorithm for automatic transferral of knowledge, which uses the Q-values established in a previous task to guide exploration in the learning of a new task. This algorithm is applied to two different but related robot navigation tasks.
11155402
The effect of failure and repair distributions on consistency protocols for replicated data objects
The accessibility of vital information can be enhanced by replicating the data on several sites, and employing a consistency control protocol to manage the copies.
Various protocols have been proposed to ensure that only current copies of the data can be accessed. The effect these protocols have on the accessibility of the replicated data is investigated by simulating the operation of the network and measuring the performance. Several strategies for replica maintenance are considered, and the benefits of each are analyzed. The details of the simulations are discussed. Measurements of the reliability and the availability of the replicated data are compared and contrasted.
The sensitivity of the Available Copy and Dynamic-linear Voting protocols to common patterns of site failures and repairs is studied in detail. Exponential, Erlang, uniform, and hyperexponential distributions are considered, and the effect the second moments have on the results is analyzed. The relative performance of competing protocols is shown to be only marginally affected by non-exponential distributions, validating the robustness of the exponential approximations.