Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications

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Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last 10 years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert labor power, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely, document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.

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Machine learning in automated text categorization

We consider the problem of using a large unlabeled sample to boost performance of a learning algorit,hrn when only a small set of labeled examples is available. In particular, we consider a problem setting motivated by the task of learning to classify web pages, in which the description of each example can be partitioned into two distinct views. For example, the description of a web page can be partitioned into the words occurring on that page, and the words occurring in hyperlinks t,hat point to that page. We assume that either view of the example would be sufficient for learning if we had enough labeled data, but our goal is to use both views together to allow inexpensive unlabeled data to augment, a much smaller set of labeled examples. Specifically, the presence of two distinct views of each example suggests strategies in which two learning algorithms are trained separately on each view, and then each algorithm’s predictions on new unlabeled examples are used to enlarge the training set of the other. Our goal in this paper is to provide a PAC-style analysis for this setting, and, more broadly, a PAC-style framework for the general problem of learning from both labeled and unlabeled data. We also provide empirical results on real web-page data indicating that this use of unlabeled examples can lead to significant improvement of hypotheses in practice. *This research was supported in part by the DARPA HPKB program under contract F30602-97-1-0215 and by NSF National Young investigator grant CCR-9357793. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. TO copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. COLT 98 Madison WI USA Copyright ACM 1998 l-58113-057--0/98/ 7...%5.00 92 Tom Mitchell School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 mitchell+@cs.cmu.edu

http://luthuli.cs.uiuc.edu/~daf/courses/learning/partiallysupervised/p92-blum.pdf

Combining labeled and unlabeled data with co-training

The key idea behind active learning is that a machine learning algorithm can achieve greater accuracy with fewer training labels if it is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. An active learner may pose queries, usually in the form of unlabeled data instances to be labeled by an oracle (e.g., a human annotator). Active learning is well-motivated in many modern machine learning problems, where unlabeled data may be abundant or easily obtained, but labels are difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to obtain. This report provides a general introduction to active learning and a survey of the literature. This includes a discussion of the scenarios in which queries can be formulated, and an overview of the query strategy frameworks proposed in the literature to date. An analysis of the empirical and theoretical evidence for successful active learning, a summary of problem setting variants and practical issues, and a discussion of related topics in machine learning research are also presented.

Active Learning Literature Survey

We present and compare various methods for computing word alignments using statistical or heuristic models. We consider the five alignment models presented in Brown, Della Pietra, Della Pietra, and Mercer (1993), the hidden Markov alignment model, smoothing techniques, and refinements. These statistical models are compared with two heuristic models based on the Dice coefficient. We present different methods for combining word alignments to perform a symmetrization of directed statistical alignment models. As evaluation criterion, we use the quality of the resulting Viterbi alignment compared to a manually produced reference alignment. We evaluate the models on the German-English Verbmobil task and the French-English Hansards task. We perform a detailed analysis of various design decisions of our statistical alignment system and evaluate these on training corpora of various sizes. An important result is that refined alignment models with a first-order dependence and a fertility model yield significantly better results than simple heuristic models. In the Appendix, we present an efficient training algorithm for the alignment models presented.

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A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models

This paper presents an unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations. The algorithm is based on two powerful constraints---that words tend to have one sense per discourse and one sense per collocation---exploited in an iterative bootstrapping procedure. Tested accuracy exceeds 96%.

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Unsupervised word sense disambiguation rivaling supervised methods

This paper describes a program that disambiguates English word senses in unrestricted text using statistical models of the major Roget's Thesaurus categories. Roget's categories serve as approximations of conceptual classes. The categories listed for a word in Roget's index tend to correspond to sense distinctions; thus selecting the most likely category provides a useful level of sense disambiguation. The selection of categories is accomplished by identifying and weighting words that are indicative of each category when seen in context, using a Bayesian theoretical framework.Other statistical approaches have required special corpora or hand-labeled training examples for much of the lexicon. Our use of class models overcomes this knowledge acquisition bottleneck, enabling training on unrestricted monolingual text without human intervention. Applied to the 10 million word Grolier's Encyclopedia, the system correctly disambiguated 92% of the instances of 12 polysemous words that have been previously studied in the literature.

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Word-sense disambiguation using statistical models of Roget's categories trained on large corpora

Social media outlets such as Twitter have become an important forum for peer interaction Thus the ability to classify latent user attributes, including gender, age, regional origin, and political orientation solely from Twitter user language or similar highly informal content has important applications in advertising, personalization, and recommendation This paper includes a novel investigation of stacked-SVM-based classification algorithms over a rich set of original features, applied to classifying these four user attributes It also includes extensive analysis of features and approaches that are effective and not effective in classifying user attributes in Twitter-style informal written genres as distinct from the other primarily spoken genres previously studied in the user-property classification literature Our models, singly and in ensemble, significantly outperform baseline models in all cases A detailed analysis of model components and features provides an often entertaining insight into distinctive language-usage variation across gender, age, regional origin and political orientation in modern informal communication

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Classifying latent user attributes in twitter

Word sense disambiguation has been recognized as a major problem in natural language processing research for over forty years. Both quantitive and qualitative methods have been tried, but much of this work has been stymied by difficulties in acquiring appropriate lexical resources. The availability of this testing and training material has enabled us to develop quantitative disambiguation methods that achieve 92% accuracy in discriminating between two very distinct senses of a noun. In the training phase, we collect a number of instances of each sense of the polysemous noun. Then in the testing phase, we are given a new instance of the noun, and are asked to assign the instance to one of the senses. We attempt to answer this question by comparing the context of the unknown instance with contexts of known instances using a Bayesian argument that has been applied successfully in related tasks such as author identification and information retrieval. The proposed method is probably most appropriate for those aspects of sense disambiguation that are closest to the information retrieval task. In particular, the proposed method was designed to disambiguate senses that are usually associated with different topics.

A method for disambiguating word senses in a large corpus

It is well-known that there are polysemous words like sentence whose "meaning" or "sense" depends on the context of use. We have recently reported on two new word-sense disambiguation systems, one trained on bilingual material (the Canadian Hansards) and the other trained on monolingual material (Roget's Thesaurus and Grolier's Encyclopedia). As this work was nearing completion, we observed a very strong discourse effect. That is, if a polysemous word such as sentence appears two or more times in a well-written discourse, it is extremely likely that they will all share the same sense. This paper describes an experiment which confirmed this hypothesis and found that the tendency to share sense in the same discourse is extremely strong (98%). This result can be used as an additional source of constraint for improving the performance of the word-sense disambiguation algorithm. In addition, it could also be used to help evaluate disambiguation algorithms that did not make use of the discourse constraint.

David Yarowsky

Papers

Unsupervised word sense disambiguation rivaling supervised methods

Word-sense disambiguation using statistical models of Roget's categories trained on large corpora

Classifying latent user attributes in twitter

A method for disambiguating word senses in a large corpus

One sense per discourse