Showing papers on "Phrase published in 2000"

The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty

Abstract: The P600 component in Event Related Potential research has been hypothesised to be associated with syntactic reanalysis processes. We, however, propose that the P600 is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. First we discuss this integration hypothesis in terms of a sentence processing model proposed elsewhere. Next, in Experiment 1, we show that the P600 is elicited in grammatical, non-garden path sentences in which integration is more difficult (i.e., ''who'' questions) relative to a control sentence (''whether'' questions). This effect is replicated in Experiment 2. Furthermore, we directly compare the effect of difficult integration in grammatical sentences to the effect of agreement violations. The results suggest that the positivity elicited in ''who'' questions and the P600-effect elicited by agreement violations have partly overlapping neural generators. This supports the hypothesis that similar cognitive processes, i.e., in...

Phrase-based dialogue modeling with particular application to creating recognition grammars for voice-controlled user interfaces

Abstract: The invention enables creation of grammar networks that can regulate, control, and define the content and scope of human-machine interaction in natural language voice user interfaces (NLVUI). More specifically, the invention concerns a phrase-based modeling of generic structures of verbal interaction and use of these models for the purpose of automating part of the design of such grammar networks.

Influences of length and syntactic complexity on the speech motor stability of the fluent speech of adults who stutter.

Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of utterance length and syntactic complexity on the speech motor stability of adults who stutter. Lower lip movement was recorded from 8 adults who stutter and 8 normally fluent controls. They produced a target phrase in isolation (baseline condition) and the same phrase embedded in utterances of increased length and/or increased syntactic complexity. The spatiotemporal index (STI) was used to quantify the stability of lower lip movements across multiple repetitions of the target phrase. Results indicated: (a) Adults who stutter demonstrated higher overall STI values than normally fluent adults across all experimental conditions, indicating decreased speech motor stability; (b) the speech motor stability of normally fluent adults was not affected by increasing syntactic complexity, but the speech motor stability of adults who stutter decreased when the stimuli were more complex; (c) increasing the length of the target utterance (without increasing syntactic complexity) did not affect the speech motor stability of either speaker group. These results indicate that language formulation processes may affect speech production processes and that the speech motor systems of adults who stutter may be especially susceptible to the linguistic demands required to produce a more complex utterance. The present findings, therefore, support the hypothesis that linguistic complexity is one factor that contributes to the disruptions of speech motor stability characteristic of stuttering.

Music summarization using key phrases

Abstract: Systems to automatically provide a representative summary or 'key phrase' of a piece of music are described. For a 'rock' song with 'verse' and 'chorus' sections, we aim to return the chorus or in any case the most repeated and hence most memorable section. The techniques are less applicable to music with more complicated structure although possibly our general framework could still be used with different heuristics. Our process consists of three steps. First we parameterize the song into features. Next we use these features to discover the song structure, either by clustering fixed-length segments or by training a hidden Markov model (HMM) for the song. Finally, given this structure, we use heuristics to choose the key phrase. Results for summaries of 18 Beatles songs evaluated by ten users show that the technique based on clustering is superior to the HMM approach and to choosing the key phrase at random.

Investigations of covert phrase movement

Abstract: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2000.

Trainable dynamic phrase reordering for natural language generation in conversational systems

Abstract: A system and method to facilitate natural language generation in a human-to-machine conversational system that produces written or spoken output. In one aspect, a user provides a scoring function and grammar rules including words and attributes. A method according to the present invention then generates possible reorderings of the words and attributes using the grammar rules and determines an optimal ordering of the words and attributes using the scoring function, which is then returned to the user.

Method and computer system for part-of-speech tagging of incomplete sentences

Abstract: The invention relates to a method and a computer system for enhanced part-of-speech (POS-) tagging as well as grammatically disambiguating a phrase. A phrase is usually a short multiword expression that may be ambiguous. By introducing grammatical constraints the invention supports POS-tagging as well as grammatically disambiguating the phrase. According to an identifier for the phrase, the phrase is supplemented with artificial context information. The supplemented phrase is then POS-tagged or grammatically disambiguated. Important applications are POS-tagging, Automatic Term Encoding, Headword Detection and Information Retrieval.

Speech synthesizing apparatus, and recording medium that stores text-to-speech conversion program and can be read mechanically

Abstract: A text analysis section reads, from a text file, a text to be subjected to speech synthesis, and analyzes the text using a morphological analysis section, a syntactic structure analysis section, a semantic analysis section and a similarly-pronounced-word detecting section. A speech segment selecting section incorporated in a speech synthesizing section obtains the degree of intelligibility of synthetic speech for each accent phrase on the basis of the text analysis result of the text analysis section, thereby selecting a speech segment string corresponding to each accent phrase on the basis of the degree of intelligibility from one of a 0th-rank speech segment dictionary, a first-rank speech segment dictionary and a second-rank speech segment dictionary. A speech segment connecting section connects selected speech segment strings and subjects the connection result to speech synthesis performed by a synthesizing filter section.

Trainable methods for surface natural language generation

Abstract: We present three systems for surface natural language generation that are trainable from annotated corpora. The first two systems, called NLG1 and NLG2, require a corpus marked only with domainspecific semantic attributes, while the last system, called NLG3, requires a corpus marked with both semantic attributes and syntactic dependency information. All systems attempt to produce a grammatical natural language phrase from a domain-specific semantic representation. NLG1 serves a baseline system and uses phrase frequencies to generate a whole phrase in one step, while NLG2 and NLG3 use maximum entropy probability models to individually generate each word in the phrase. The systems NLG2 and NLG3 learn to determine both the word choice and the word order of the phrase. We present experiments in which we generate phrases to describe flights in the air travel domain.

Trainable Methods for Surface Natural Language Generation

Abstract: We present three systems for surface natural language generation that are trainable from annotated corpora. The first two systems, called NLG1 and NLG2, require a corpus marked only with domain-specific semantic attributes, while the last system, called NLG3, requires a corpus marked with both semantic attributes and syntactic dependency information. All systems attempt to produce a grammatical natural language phrase from a domain-specific semantic representation. NLG1 serves a baseline system and uses phrase frequencies to generate a whole phrase in one step, while NLG2 and NLG3 use maximum entropy probability models to individually generate each word in the phrase. The systems NLG2 and NLG3 learn to determine both the word choice and the word order of the phrase. We present experiments in which we generate phrases to describe flights in the air travel domain.

Processing Coordinate Structures

Abstract: Coordination often involves syntactically like categories. Based on the results of four reading time studies, it is argued here that the syntactic like-category restriction is not grammatical. Coordination of unlike categories can be just as acceptable as coordination of like categories. However, syntactically like category coordination is processed faster than coordination of unlike categories even when the two sentence types are judged to be fully acceptable. Further, parallelism of conjuncts facilitates processing regardless of whether it is parallelism in the category of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar might regulate) or parallelism in the internal structure of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar does not regulate, on anyone's view). Parallelism did not facilitate processing when the structure of a subject and object were manipulated, implying that parallelism effects are largely limited to the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and not due simply to the repetition of a phrase with a particular shape.

Obligatory Processing of the Literal Meaning of Ironic Utterances: Further Evidence

Abstract: We tested the hypotheses that the literal meaning of an ironic utterance is activated during comprehension and (a) slows the processing of the key ironic portion of the utterance (literal activation hypothesis) and (b) slows the processing of the literal portion of the utterance that follows (the spillover hypothesis). Forty-eight stories, each ending in an ironic comment, were constructed. Half of the ironic comments were ironic criticism (positive literal meaning, negative ironic meaning); half were ironic praise (negative literal meaning, positive ironic meaning). Final utterances were divided into 3 phrases: Phrase 1 gave no indication of irony, Phrase 2 contained the key word that made the utterance ironic, and Phrase 3 gave no indication of irony. Each story was then altered by 1 phrase so that the final comment became literal. One version of each of the stories was presented to each of 48 college undergraduates. Stories were presented 1 sentence at a time, but the final utterances were presented in...

Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences

Abstract: Children aged 8 through 11 (N = 250) were given a word-by-word sentence task in both the visual and auditory modes. The sentences included an object relative clause, a subject relative clause, or a conjoined verb phrase. Each sentence was followed by a true-false question, testing the subject of either the first or second verb. Participants were also given two memory span measures: digit span and reading span. High digit span children slowed down more at the transition from the main to the relative clause than did the low digit span children. The findings suggest the presence of a U-shaped learning pattern for on-line processing of restrictive relative clauses. Off-line accuracy scores showed different patterns for good comprehenders and poor comprehenders. Poor comprehenders answered the second verb questions at levels that were consistently below chance. Their answers were based on an incorrect local attachment strategy that treated the second noun as the subject of the second verb. For example, they often answered yes to the question "The girl chases the policeman" after the object relative sentence "The boy that the girl sees chases the policeman." Interestingly, low memory span poor comprehenders used the local attachment strategy less consistently than high memory span poor comprehenders, and all poor comprehenders used this strategy less consistently for harder than for easier sentences.

Adverb placement - convergence of structure and licensing

Abstract: This contribution addresses the following issues: i) the structural identification of adverb positions (adjoined, embedded or in Spec-positions); ii) interface conditions for adverbs (syntax-semantic interface); iii) serialization patterns of adverbs (post- vs. pre-head order). First, it is argued that important empirical generalizations are missed if adverbials are assigned to spec-positions of functional heads. This paper defends the claim that non-selected adverbials are either adjoined or embedded, depending on the relation to the head of the containing phrase: They are adjoined if they precede the head of the containing phrase. They are embedded if they follow the head of the containing phrase. Second, the relative order of adverbials is characterized as an interface effect of the mapping of syntactic domains on type domains in the structure of the semantic representation. Third, the differences in the pre- and post-head serialization patterns of adverbials that apparently support an adjunction analysis are reconciled with an embedding analysis.

Call centre agent automated assistance

Abstract: This invention relates to the automated assistance of a telephony call center agent comprising a method and system for providing dialogue suggestions to an agent during an agent caller interaction. A prior art solution provides data based on analyzed text from one or other of the conversations but does not offer any useful information based on the performance of the agent or on the state of the interaction. A method of interaction in a voice response application comprising: receiving a voice signal in a call center; identifying whether the caller or a call center agent is the originator of the voice signal; converting the voice signal into computer readable text; identifying a key word such as a confrontational phrase e.g. ‘what are you talking about’ in the converted computer readable text; and providing a different suggestion depending on whether the originator is the call agent or the caller. For instance, a suggestion if the agent made the confrontational phrase would be to use a less confrontational phrase next time such as ‘can you explain that again’. A suggestion if the caller made the confrontational phrase would be to counter with a ‘I'll try to explain that better’.

Method for producing summaries of text document

Abstract: A computer method for preparing a summary string (19) from a source document of encoded text (17). The method comprises comparing a training set of encoded text documents (10) with manually generated summary strings (11) associated therewith to learn probabilities (13) that a given summary word or phrase will appear in summary strings (19) given a source word or phrase appears in encoded text documents (17) and constructing from the source document a summary string containing summary words or phrases (19) having the highest probabilities of appearing in a summary string (19) based on the learned probabilities established in the previous step.

Chunking with maximum entropy models

Abstract: In this paper I discuss a first attempt to create a text chunker using a Maximum Entropy model. The first experiments, implementing classifiers that tag every word in a sentence with a phrase-tag using very local lexical information, part-of-speech tags and phrase tags of surrounding words, give encouraging results.

Effects of picture and even-a-penny-will-help appeals on anonymous donations to charity.

Abstract: Szrmmary.-The present research explored the effectiveness of a picture and the phrase "even a penny will help" on contributions to charity. Two experiments were conducted, one in the laboratory and one in the field. In both experiments he manipulation of a pleasant picture and the phrase created four rypes of signs: (1) picture-no phrase, (2) phrase-no picture, (3) picture-phrase, and (4) no picture-no phrase. In the field experiment patrons of local business anonymously put money in a donation box that displayed one of the four signs. In the Laboratory experiment, 129 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to view one of the four signs placed on a donation box for a local charity. Analyses for both studies showed chat more money was donated when the boxes displayed picrures. The phrase "even a penny will help" had no significant effect on donations. Organizations that rely on charity use a variety of techniques to encourage people to donate money. Appeals for donations can be roughly categorized into either personal or impersonal requests. The important aspect of a personal request is that the action taken by the target of the solicitation is witnessed by the person who made the request. One example of a personal request is door-to-door solicitation. On the other hand, when an impersonal request is made the action of the target typically is not witnessed by the requester. One example of an impersonal request is a donation box in which people may place money anonymously. Previous research on donating behavior using personal requests has indicated the uthty of techniques of mahg vivid appeals and adding the phrase "even a penny can help." The purpose of the present research was to explore the influence of these two techniques in a situation where an impersonal request is made. Specifically, we added vivid appeals or the phrase "even a penny will help" to informational signs placed on donation boxes for the local humane society. Information is said to be vivid to the extent that it is emotionally interesting or provokes concrete images or mental pictures (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). In previous research on persuasion vividness has been operationalized as the addition of either pictures or words to standard appeals. For example, Frey and Eagly (1993) increased vividness by adding words and phrases that evoked mental images. They found that vivid messages were no more per

Tonal Elements and Their Alignment

Abstract: In English, many different melodies are possible on any given word or phrase. Even a monosyllabic word, such as Anne can be produced with many qualitatively different melodic patterns, as illustrated in Figure 1. This situation provides a contrast with languages such as Mandarin, in which the tonal pattern is an intrinsic part of the lexical representation. In English, the choice of the melody is not entailed by the choice of words, but rather functions independently to convey pragmatic information. Specifically, it conveys information about how the utterance is related to the discourse and to the mutual beliefs which interlocutors build up during the course of the discourse, as discussed in Ward and Hirschberg (1985) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990).

Let's Phrase It! Focus, Word Order, and Prosodic Phrasing in German Double Object Constructions *

Abstract: This paper presents a case study in the interaction of word order, prosody and focus. The construction under consideration is the double object construction in German. The analysis proposed is in line with the following more general hypotheses: First, focus and word order do not interact directly. There are no grammatical rules that relate focus to specific phrase structural positions. Rather, focus interacts with prosodic phrasing, which in turn may interact with word order. Second, the kind of word order variation under investigation here is governed by two potentially conflicting types of constraints. Morphosyntactic constraints that express ordering preferences relating to case, definiteness and possibly other categories, and prosodic constraints that define what a prosodic structure should look like. In case these constraint families call incompatible demands, languages may allow only the morphosyntactically perfect structure, or only the prosodically perfect structure, or, as is arguably the case in German, both. Third, violable ranked constraints provide a well-suited framework to account for these kinds of phenomena. Both the morphosyntactic and the prosodic constraints, as well as those governing the relation between prosody and focus, are implemented as markedness

Fullerene data mining using bibliometrics and database tomography

Abstract: Database tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting of two major components: (1) algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technical phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment (2) interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a fullerenes database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequency analysis by the technical domain experts provided the pervasive technical themes of the fullerenes database, and phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the fullerenes literature supplemented the DT results with author/journal/institution publication and citation data. Comparisons of fullerenes results with past analyses of similarly structured near-earth space, chemistry, hypersonic/supersonic flow, aircraft, and ship hydrodynam...

Scalable browsing for large collections: a case study

Abstract: Phrase browsing techniques use phrases extracted automatically from a large information collection as a basis for browsing and accessing it. This paper describes a case study that uses an automatically constructed phrase hierarchy to facilitate browsing of an ordinary large Web site. Phrases are extracted from the full text using a novel combination of rudimentary syntactic processing and sequential grammar induction techniques. The interface is simple, robust and easy to use.To convey a feeling for the quality of the phrases that are generated automatically, a thesaurus used by the organization responsible for the Web site is studied and its degree of overlap with the phrases in the hierarchy is analyzed. Our ultimate goal is to amalgamate hierarchical phrase browsing and hierarchical thesaurus browsing: the latter provides an authoritative domain vocabulary and the former augments coverage in areas the thesaurus does not reach.

Acquisition of phrase-level bilingual correspondence using dependency structure

Abstract: This paper describes a method to find phrase-level translation patterns from parallel corpora by applying dependency structure analysis. We use statistical dependency parsers to determine dependency relations between base phrases in a sentence. Our method is tested with a business expression corpus containing 10000 English-Japanese sentence pairs and achieved approximately 90% accuracy in extracting bilingual correspondences. The result shows that the use of dependency relation helps to acquire interesting translation patterns.

Improving intonational phrasing with syntactic information

Abstract: The prediction of intonational phrase boundaries from raw text is an important step for a text-to-speech system: locating where to place short pauses enables more natural sounding speech, that can be more easily understood. We improved upon earlier work [Hirschberg and Prieto, 1996] by adding syntactic information gained from a high-accuracy parser [Collins, 1999]. We report significant improvement using various experimental setups. We also show that our improved method comes close to interannotator agreement.

English Sentence Analysis: An introductory course

Abstract: English Sentence Analysis: An introductory course is designed as a 10-week course for students of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, or other language related fields. In 10 weeks the student will be proficient in English analysis at sentence, clause and phrase level and have a solid understanding of the traditional terms and concepts of English syntax. This introduction prepares for practical courses in grammar and writing skills and for theoretical courses in syntactic argumentation. The Course Book provides • sentence structures in clear graphics; • logically structured chapters with Introductions and Summaries; • exercises with quotations and excerpts from English, American and Australian literature and pop songs. English Sentence Analysis: An introductory course has been classroom tested at various universities. The students seem to enjoy the ‘dreaded’ syntax course and pass rates have gone up significantly from 50 to 70%. Originally, this book was accompanied by a CD-rom with a Practice Program for Windows. The Practice Program on CD-rom is not updated anymore by its creators and as a result is no longer compatible with current Windows versions. For this reason, we have ceased to include it with the book.

Music summarization system and method

Abstract: The invention provides a method and apparatus for automatically generating a summary or key phrase for a song. The song, or a portion thereof, is digitized and converted into a sequence of feature vectors, such mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). The feature vectors are then processed in order decipher the song's structure. Those sections that correspond to different structural elements are then marked with corresponding labels. Once the song is labeled, various heuristics are applied to select a key phrase corresponding to the song's summary. For example, the system may identify the label that appears most frequently within the song, and then select the longest duration of that label as the summary.