This paper describes a system for extracting typed dependency parses of English sentences from phrase structure parses. In order to capture inherent relations occurring in corpus texts that can be critical in real-world applications, many NP relations are included in the set of grammatical relations used. We provide a comparison of our system with Minipar and the Link parser. The typed dependency extraction facility described here is integrated in the Stanford Parser, available for download.

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Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses

Recommender Systems (RSs) are software tools and techniques providing suggestions for items to be of use to a user. In this introductory chapter we briefly discuss basic RS ideas and concepts. Our main goal is to delineate, in a coherent and structured way, the chapters included in this handbook and to help the reader navigate the extremely rich and detailed content that the handbook offers.

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Introduction to Recommender Systems Handbook

Conditional random fields for sequence labeling offer advantages over both generative models like HMMs and classifiers applied at each sequence position. Among sequence labeling tasks in language processing, shallow parsing has received much attention, with the development of standard evaluation datasets and extensive comparison among methods. We show here how to train a conditional random field to achieve performance as good as any reported base noun-phrase chunking method on the CoNLL task, and better than any reported single model. Improved training methods based on modern optimization algorithms were critical in achieving these results. We present extensive comparisons between models and training methods that confirm and strengthen previous results on shallow parsing and training methods for maximum-entropy models.

Shallow parsing with conditional random fields

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

We present a stochastic parsing system consisting of a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a constraint-based parser and a stochastic disambiguation model. We report on the results of applying this system to parsing the UPenn Wall Street Journal (WSJ) treebank. The model combines full and partial parsing techniques to reach full grammar coverage on unseen data. The treebank annotations are used to provide partially labeled data for discriminative statistical estimation using exponential models. Disambiguation performance is evaluated by measuring matches of predicate-argument relations on two distinct test sets. On a gold standard of manually annotated f-structures for a subset of the WSJ treebank, this evaluation reaches 79% F-score. An evaluation on a gold standard of dependency relations for Brown corpus data achieves 76% F-score.

/pdf/parsing-the-wall-street-journal-using-a-lexical-functional-3z5e30sckn.pdf

Parsing the Wall Street Journal using a Lexical-Functional Grammar and Discriminative Estimation Techniques

We report on the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project which uses the XLE parser and grammar development platform for six languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, and Urdu.

https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/grammar_workbench/doc/w06-03.pdf

The Parallel Grammar project

This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.

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Activity-based serendipitous recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide

Introduction Background assumptions Evidence for configurationality Linearly ordered topic and focus S-Structure and encoding discourse functions Focus in yes-no questions An overview of LFG Case assignment and the genitive of negation In a theory without movement Capturing head-movement Conclusion.

Configuring topic and focus in Russian

Clitics are grammatical elements that are treated as independent words in syntax but form a phonological unit with the word that precedes or follows it This volume brings together the facts about clitics in the Slavic languages, where they have become a focal points of recent research The authors draw relevant generalizations across the Slavic languages and highlight the importance of these phenomena for linguistic theory

Tracy Holloway King

Papers

Parsing the Wall Street Journal using a Lexical-Functional Grammar and Discriminative Estimation Techniques

The Parallel Grammar project

Activity-based serendipitous recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide

Configuring topic and focus in Russian

A handbook of Slavic clitics