Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Semantics
Subcategorization frames, semantic classes, ontologies, formal semantics
Pragmatics
Pronouns, reference resolution, discourse models
LING 2000 - 2006
NLP 2
Language to Logic
John went to the book store.
John store1, go(John, store1)
NLP
NLP
AGENT
SUBJ
PATIENT
OBJ
INSTRUMENT
MODIFIER PATIENT
INSTRUMENT
OBJ
NLP
Machine Translation
NLP
10
Example translation
NLP
11
Machine Translation
The Story of the Stone
=The Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin 1792)
Cultural knowledge
Curtain -> curtains of her bed
Machine Translation
Chinese gloss: Dai-yu alone on bed top think-of-with-gratitude Bao-chai again listen to window outside bamboo tip plantain leaf of on-top rain sound sigh drop clear cold penetrate curtain not feeling again fall down tears come
Hawkes translation: As she lay there alone, Dai-yus thoughts turned to Bao-chai Then she listened to the insistent rustle of the rain on the bamboos and plantains outside her window. The coldness penetrated the curtains of her bed. Almost without noticing it she had begun to cry.
Language Families
Babelfish Demo
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ Old example:
Question Answering
What does door mean? What year was Abraham Lincoln born? How many states were in the United States when Lincoln was born? Was there a military draft during the Hoover administration? What do US scientists think about whether human cloning should be legal?
Modern QA systems
Still in infancy Simple factoid questions beginning to work OK Annual government-sponsored bakeoff called TREC
QA Demo
UIUC QA Demo Qualim QA Demo
Issues in NLP
Ambiguity! World Knowledge its needed for understanding, but computers dont have it
NLP
19
Ambiguity
Computational linguists are obsessed with ambiguity Ambiguity is a fundamental problem of computational linguistics Resolving ambiguity is a crucial goal
Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:
I made her duck
Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:
I made her duck
I cooked waterfowl for her benefit (to eat) I cooked waterfowl belonging to her I created the (plaster?) duck she owns I caused her to quickly lower her head or body I waved my magic wand and turned her into undifferentiated waterfowl At least one other meaning thats inappropriate for gentle company.
Ambiguity is Pervasive
I caused her to quickly lower her head or body
Lexical category: duck can be a N or V
Ambiguity is Pervasive
Grammar: Make can be: Transitive: (verb has a noun direct object)
I cooked [waterfowl belonging to her]
Action-transitive (verb has a direct object and another verb) I caused [her] [to move her body]
Ambiguity is Pervasive
Phonetics!
I mate or duck Im eight or duck Eye maid; her duck Aye mate, her duck I maid her duck Im aid her duck I mate her duck Im ate her duck Im ate or duck I mate or duck
Headlines
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
NLP
26
Whats needed?
Dialog and pragmatic knowledge
open the door is a REQUEST (as opposed to a STATEMENT or information-question) It is polite to respond, even if youre planning to kill someone. It is polite to pretend to want to be cooperative (Im afraid I cant) What is `that in `I cant do that?
Even a system to book airline flights needs much of this kind of knowledge
In general
Now that there are commercial installations Big incentive to use linguistic or any other kind of knowledge if it actually improves performance
Entities
Named Entity Tagging: Identify all the proper names in a text Sally went to see Up in the Air at the local theater.
Coreference Resolution: Identify all references (aka mentions) of people, places and things in text, and determine which mentions are coreferential.
John stuck his foot in his mouth.
Sentiment Classification
Given a review (about a movie, hotel, Amazon product, etc.), a sentiment classification system tries to determine what opinions are expressed in the review.
Coarse-level objective: is the review positive, negative, or neutral overall? Fine-grained objective: what are the positive aspects (according to the reviewer), and what are the negative aspects?