Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach

325 Pages·1993·8.104 MB·

by  Karen Jensen, George Heidorn (auth.), Karen Jensen, George E. Heidorn, Stephen D. Richardson (eds.)

NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING:
The PLNLP Approach
THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES IN
ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
AND MACHINE TRANSLATION
Consulting Editor
Jaime Carbonell
Other books in the series:
EFFICIENT PARSING FOR NATIJRAL LANGUAGE: A FAST ALGORITIIM FOR
PRACTICAL SYSTEMS, M. Tomita
ISBN 0-89838-202-5
A NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE FOR COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN, T. Samad
ISBN 0-89838-222-X
INTEGRATED NATIJRAL LANGUAGE DIALOGUE: A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL,
R.E. Frederking
ISBN 0-89838-255-6
NAIVE SEMANTICS FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING, K. Dahlgren
ISBN 0-89838-287-4
UNDERSTANDING EDITORIAL TEXT: A Computer Model of Argument Comprehension,
S.l. Alvarado
ISBN: 0-7923-9123-3
NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION IN ARTIFICIAL INTELUGENCE AND
COMPUTATIONAL UNGUISTICS, Paris/Swartout/Mann
ISBN: 0-7923-9098-9
CURRENT ISSUES IN PARSING TECHNOLOGY, M. Tomita
ISBN: 0-7923-9131-4
CONCEPTUAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL: A Case Study in Adaptive Partial Parsing,
M.LMauldin
ISBN: 0-7923-9214-0
GENERALIZED L R. PARSING, M Tomita
ISBN: 0-7923-9201-9
ADAPTIVE PARSING: Self-Extending Natural Language Interfaces, 1. F.l..ehman
ISBN: 0-7923-9183-7
NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING:
The PLNLP Approach
edited
by
Karen Jensen
George E. Heidorn
Stephen D. Richardson
Microsoft Corporation
~.
"
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
Boston/Dordrecht/London
Distributors for North America:
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Assinippi Park
Norwell, Massachusetts 02061 USA
Distributors for all other countries:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Natural language processing : the PLNLP approach / edited by Karen
Jensen, George E. Heidorn, Stephen D. Richardson.
p. cm. -- (The Kluwer international series in engineering and
computer science; 196. Natural language processing and machine
translation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-7923-9279-5 (acid free paper)
1. Natural language processing (Computer science)
2. Computational linguistics. 3. PLNLP (Computer program language)
I. Jensen, Karen. II. Heidorn, George E. (George Emil), 1938-
III. Richardson, Stephen D. IV. Series: Kluwer international series
in engineering and computer science; SECS 196. V. Series: Kluwer
international series in engineering and computer science. Natural
language processing and machine translation.
QA76 . 9 . N38N385 1993
006 . 3 ' 5--dc20 92-30803
elP
Copyright © 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo-copying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, Massachusetts 02061.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Authors ................................................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................... xv
1. Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Karen Jensen, George Heidorn, and Stephen Richardson
1.1 The starting point ................................................................................ 2
1.2 System components ............................................................................. 3
1.3 PLNLP (the Programming Language for Natural Language
Processing) .......................................................................................... 5
1.4 A guide to the chapters of this book ................ ,. .................................. 7
2. Towards Transductive Linguistics ............................................................... 13
Alexis Manaster Ramer
2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 14
2.2 Computational issues ........................................................................ 17
2.3 Theoretical issues: What's ungrammatical? .................................... 18
2.4 Theoretical issues: E-language and I-language ................................ 19
2.5 Introduction to transducers ................................................................ 21
2.6 What else we can do with transducers .............................................. 25
2.7 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 27
3. PEG: The PLNLP English Grammar ........................................................... 29
Karen Jensen
3.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 30
3.2 Binary rules and computed trees ....................................................... 33
3.3 Issues in parsing ................................................................................ 35
3.4 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 44
4. Experience with an Easily Computed Metric for Ranking
Alternative Parses ........................................................................................ 47
George Heidorn
4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 48
4.2 The Epistle system ............................................................................ 48
4.3 The metric and its computation ......................................................... 49
4.4 Performance of the metric ................................................................. 51
4.5 Related work ..................................................................................... 52
Vi
5. Parse Fitting and Prose Fixing ..................................................................... 53
Karen Jensen, George Heidorn, Lance Miller, and Yael Ravin
5.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 54
5.2 The fitting procedure ......................................................................... 54
5.3 Further examples ............................................................................... 56
5.4 Correcting syntactic errors in a fitted parse ...................................... 61
5.5 Related work ..................................................................................... 63
6. Grammar Errors and Style Weaknesses in a Text-Critiquing
System .......................................................................................................... 65
Yael Ravin
6.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 66
6.2 Linguistic differences between grammar and style ........................... 67
6.3 Grammar errors detected by Critique ................................................ 68
6.4 Style weaknesses detected by Critique ............................................. 69
6.5 Errors and weaknesses displayed to the user .................................... 70
6.6 Identifying grammar errors and style weaknesses ............................ 72
6.7 Computational differences between grammar and style ................... 74
6.8 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 75
7. The Experience of Developing a Large-Scale Natural Language
Processing System: Critique ....................................................................... 77
Stephen Richardson and Lisa Braden-Harder
7.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 78
7.2 Processing in Critique ....................................................................... 78
7.3 Application areas for Critique ........................................................... 79
7.4 Performance ...................................................................................... 80
7.5 Robustness ......................................................................................... 82
7.6 Flexibility .......................................................................................... 83
7.7 Presentation ....................................................................................... 84
7.8 Accuracy ........................................................................................... 86
7.9 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 89
8. A Prototype English-Japanese Machine Translation System ...................... 91
Taijiro Tsutsumi
8.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 92
8.2 Overview of the system ..................................................................... 92
8.3 English analysis ................................................................................. 93
8.4 English-Japanese transfer .................................................................. 94
8.5 Japanese generation ........................................................................... 98
8.6 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 99
VB
9. Broad-Coverage Machine Translation ....................................................... 101
Diana Santos
9.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 102
9.2 General overview ............................................................................ 104
9.3 Lexical transfer ................................................................................ 108
9.4 Structural transfer. ........................................................................... 111
9.5 Compromise between lexical and structural transfer ...................... 112
9.6 Evaluation ....................................................................................... 113
9.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 113
Appendix: Use of PORTUGA for the two Norwegian written
standards ................................................................................. 115
Diana Santos and Jan Engh
10. Building a Knowledge Base from Parsed Definitions ............................... 119
Judith Klavans, Martin Chodorow, and Nina Wacholder
10.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 120
10.2 Description of the problem .............................................................. 120
10.3 Previous research ............................................................................ 122
10.4 Preliminary analysis: the use of string-matching techniques ......... 124
10.5 Using syntactic patterns to disambiguate relations and find
their arguments ................................................................................ 126
10.6 Tools and procedures ...................................................................... 127
10.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 131
Appendix: Definitions of "unit" in W7 and LDOCE ............................... 133
11. A Semantic Expert Using an Online Standard Dictionary ......................... 135
Jean-Louis Rinot and Karen Jensen
11.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 136
11.2 Prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities .................................. 137
11.3 Establishing semantic connections .................................................. 138
11.4 Using inferences .............................................................................. 142
11.5 Implementation of the dictionary semantic expert .......................... 144
11.6 Learning useful facts ....................................................................... 146
11.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 147
Vlll
12. Structural Patterns versus String Patterns for Extracting Semantic
Information from Dictionaries ................................................................... 149
Simonetta Montemagni and Lucy Vanderwende
12.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 150
12.2 Semantic relations ........................................................................... 151
12.3 Structural patterns ........................................................................... 152
12.4 Inadequacy of string patterns .......................................................... 154
12.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 159
13. SENS: The System for Evaluating Noun Sequences ................................. 161
Lucy Vanderwende
13.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 162
13.2 Classification of noun sequences .................................................... 163
13.3 How does SENS decide? ................................................................. 165
13.4 An example: football field .............................................................. 168
13.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 172
14. Disambiguating and Interpreting Verb Definitions ................................... 175
Yael Ravin
14.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 176
14.2 Disambiguating definitions ............................................................. 176
14.3 The meaning of "with" .................................................................... 178
14.4 The disambiguation process ............................................................ 181
14.5 Results ............................................................................................. 183
14.6 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 189
15. Tailoring a Broad-Coverage System for the Analysis of Dictionary
Definitions .................................................................................................. 191
Simonetta Montemagni
15.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 192
15.2 Syntactic parsing ............................................................................. 193
15.3 Parsing dictionary definitions with a broad-coverage Italian
grammar .......................................................................................... 193
15.4 Disambiguating and reshaping the syntactic analysis of the
definitions ........................................................................................ 196
15.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 201
ix
16. PEGASUS: Deriving Argument Structures after Syntax .......................... 203
Karen Jensen
16.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 204
16.2 Arguments and adjuncts .................................................................. 204
16.3 Anaphora ......................................................................................... 208
16.4 Comparison with other approaches ................................................. 212
16.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 214
17. A Two-Stage Algorithm to Parse Multi-Lingual Argument
Structures ................................................................................................... 215
Jean-Pierre Chanod, Bettina Harriehausen, and Simonetta
Montemagni
17.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 216
17.2 Post-processing argument structures ............................................... 217
17.3 Exampies/lllustrations ..................................................................... 219
17.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 226
18. C-SHALT: English-to-Chinese Machine Translation Using
Argument Structures .................................................................................. 227
Ee Ah Choo, Koh Mui Koong, Low Hwee Boon, Tong Loong
Cheong, Wan Kwee Ngim, Wee Li Kwang
18.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 228
18.2 Objectives and approach ................................................................. 229
18.3 Architecture ..................................................................................... 230
18.4 Analysis ........................................................................................... 235
18.5 Transfer ........................................................................................... 235
18.6 Lexical transfer ................................................................................ 236
18.7 Structural transfer ............................................................................ 238
18.8 Generation ....................................................................................... 239
18.9 The dictionary system ..................................................................... 241
18.10 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 243
Appendix: Sample translation by C-SHALT ........................................... 244
19. Sense Disambiguation Using Online Dictionaries ..................................... 247
Lisa Braden-Harder
19.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 248
19.2 Sense disambiguation using online resources ................................. 249
19.3 MAST: Disambiguation using linguistic structure and
multiple sources of information ...................................................... 253
19.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 261
x
20. Word-Sense Disambiguation by Examples ................................................ 263
Taijiro Tsutsumi
20.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 264
20.2 Background of our approach ........................................................... 264
20.3 Closeness between words and between sentences .......................... 266
20.4 Evaluation of the plausibility and selection of a word-sense .......... 268
20.5 Experiments ..................................................................................... 268
20.6 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 272
21. Normalization of Semantic Graphs ............................................................ 273
Frederique Segond
21.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 274
21.2 Normalizing the "block" sentences ................................................. 275
21.3 Locative prepositional phrases ........................................................ 277
21.4 Relative clauses ............................................................................... 279
21.5 Toward the discourse model ........................................................... 280
21.6 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 281
Appendix: Some sentences handled by the concept grammar ................. 283
22. The Paragraph as a Semantic Unit ............................................................. 285
Wlodek Zadrozny and Karen Jensen
22.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 286
22.2 The paragraph as a discourse unit ................................................... 287
22.3 The logic of reference ..................................................................... 291
22.4 Coherence of paragraphs ................................................................. 294
22.5 Models of paragraphs ...................................................................... 296
22.6 On the role of the metalevel ............................................................ 299
22.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 300
References ......................................................................................................... 303
Index .................................................................................................................. 321