This paper reports on the state-of-the-art in application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques to create semantic maps in linguistic research. MDS refers to a statistical technique that represents objects (lexical items, linguistic contexts, languages, etc.) as points in a space so that close similarity between the objects corresponds to close distances between the corresponding points in the representation. We focus on the use of MDS in combination with parallel corpus data as used in research on cross-linguistic variation.
We first introduce the mathematical foundations of MDS and then give an exhaustive overview of past research that employs MDS techniques in combination with parallel corpus data. We propose a set of terminology to succinctly describe the key parameters of a particular MDS application. We then show that this computational methodology is theory-neutral, i.e. it can be employed to answer research questions in a variety of linguistic theoretical frameworks. Finally, we show how this leads to two lines of future developments for MDS research in linguistics.
In recent work we have presented a formal framework for linguistic annotation based on labeled acyclic digraphs. These `annotation graphs' offer a simple yet powerful method for representing complex annotation structures incorporating hierarchy and overlap. Here, we motivate and illustrate our approach using discourse-level annotations of text and speech data drawn from the CALLHOME, COCONUT, MUC-7, DAMSL and TRAINS annotation schemes. With the help of domain specialists, we have constructed a hybrid multi-level annotation for a fragment of the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus which inclu…
Worthwhile Research & Consulting（Worthwhile研究与咨询公司）；USC ISI（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
Contemporary research on computational processing of linguistic metaphors is divided into two main branches: metaphor recognition and metaphor interpretation. We take a different line of research and present an automated method for generating conceptual metaphors from linguistic data. Given the generated conceptual metaphors, we find corresponding linguistic metaphors in corpora. In this paper, we describe our approach and its evaluation using English and Russian data.
Factored neural machine translation (FNMT) is founded on the idea of using the morphological and grammatical decomposition of the words (factors) at the output side of the neural network. This architecture addresses two well-known problems occurring in MT, namely the size of target language vocabulary and the number of unknown tokens produced in the translation. FNMT system is designed to manage larger vocabulary and reduce the training time (for systems with equivalent target language vocabulary size). Moreover, we can produce grammatically correct words that are not part of the vocabulary. F…
In this paper, we describe a system for generating three-dimensional visual simulations of natural language motion expressions. We use a rich formal model of events and their participants to generate simulations that satisfy the minimal constraints entailed by the associated utterance, relying on semantic knowledge of physical objects and motion events. This paper outlines technical considerations and discusses implementing the aforementioned semantic models into such a system.
In this paper, we describe a computational model for motion events in natural language that maps from linguistic expressions, through a dynamic event interpretation, into three-dimensional temporal simulations in a model. Starting with the model from (Pustejovsky and Moszkowicz, 2011), we analyze motion events using temporally-traced Labelled Transition Systems. We model the distinction between path- and manner-motion in an operational semantics, and further distinguish different types of manner-of-motion verbs in terms of the mereo-topological relations that hold throughout the process of mov…
Language Weaver (RWS Group)（Language Weaver（RWS集团））
Creating an abridged version of a text involves shortening it while maintaining its linguistic qualities. In this paper, we examine this task from an NLP perspective for the first time. We present a new resource, AbLit, which is derived from abridged versions of English literature books. The dataset captures passage-level alignments between the original and abridged texts. We characterize the linguistic relations of these alignments, and create automated models to predict these relations as well as to generate abridgements for new texts. Our findings establish abridgement as a challenging task…
Generating synthetic languages aids in the testing and validation of future computational linguistic models and methods. This thesis extends the BEAST2 phylogenetic framework to add linguistic sequence generation under multiple models. The new plugin is then used to test the effects of the phenomena of word borrowing on the inference process under two widely used phylolinguistic models.
Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In order to produce a coherent flow of text, we explore two forms of intersentential relations in a paragraph: one is a human-created linguistical relation that forms a structure (e.g., discourse tree) and the other is a relation from latent representation learned from the sentences themselves. Our two proposed models incorporate each form of relations into doc…
Statistical laws and linguistics differ in naturalistic video and fictional conversations
Computational Story Lab（计算故事实验室）；Vermont Advanced Computing Center（佛蒙特高级计算中心）；University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学）；Vermont Complex Systems Institute（佛蒙特复杂系统研究所）；MassMutual Center of Excellence for Complex Systems and Data Science（MassMutual复杂系统与数据科学卓越中心）；Computational Ethics Lab（计算伦理实验室）；Glass Brain Lab（玻璃脑实验室）；Department of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程系）；Vermont Conversation Lab（佛蒙特对话实验室）；Larner College of Medicine（拉纳尔医学院）；Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems IFISC (UIB-CSIC)（跨学科物理与复杂系统研究所IFISC（UIB-CSIC））；Department of Mathematics & Statistics（数学与统计学系）
The understanding of the human language is quantified by identifying intents and entities. Even though classification methods that rely on labeled information are often used for the comprehension of language understanding, it is incredibly time consuming and tedious process to generate high propensity supervised datasets. In this paper, we present the generation of accurate intents for the corresponding Roman Urdu unstructured data and integrate this corpus in RASA NLU module for intent classification. We embed knowledge graph with RASA Framework to maintain the dialog history for semantic bas…
