In TREC 2003, the Database and Information System Lab (DBIS) at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) participate in the robust track, which is a traditional ad hoc retrieval task. The emphasis is based on average effectiveness as well as individual topic effectiveness. Noun phrases in the query are identified and classified into 4 types: proper names, dictionary phrases, simple phrases and c...

This paper presents a supervised approach for identifying generic noun phrases in context. Generic statements express rulelike knowledge about kinds or events. Therefore, their identification is important for the automatic construction of knowledge bases. In particular, the distinction between generic and non-generic statements is crucial for the correct encoding of generic and instance-level i...

We describe an eye-tracking experiment that tested the effect of syntactic predictability on skipping rates during reading. We found that plural noun phrases were skipped more often than singular noun phrases, in syntactic contexts which induced a high expectation for a plural. We interpret this effect as evidence that the plural noun phrase has been predicted ahead of time. The results indicat...

We use reinforcement learning to learn tree-structured neural networks for computing representations of natural language sentences. In contrast with prior work on tree-structured models, in which the trees are either provided as input or predicted using supervision from explicit treebank annotations, the tree structures in this work are optimized to improve performance on a downstream task. Exp...

This paper shows the necessity of distinguishing different referential uses of noun phrases in machine translation. We argue that differentiating between the generic, referential and ascriptive uses of noun phrases is the minimum necessary to generate articles and number correctly when translating from Japanese to English. Heuristics for determining these differences are proposed for a Japanese...

Social media contains many types of information which is useful to businesses. In this paper we discuss automatic extraction from twitter data the descriptions of problems consumer experience with products and services. We first identify the problem tweets i.e. the tweets containing descriptions of problems. We the extract the phrases that describe the problem. In our approach such descriptions...

In this paper we examine the pragmatic knowledge an utterance-planning system must have in order to produce certain kinds of definite and indefinite noun phrases. An utterance.planning system, like other planning systems, plans actions to satisfy an agent 's goals, but allows some of the actions to consist of the utterance of sentences. This approach to language generation emphasizes the view o...

Automated biomedical concept recognition is important for biomedical document retrieval and text mining research. In this paper, we describe a two-step concept extraction technique for documents in biomedical domain. Step one includes noun phrase extraction, which can automatically extract noun phrases from medical documents. Extracted noun phrases are used as concept term candidates which beco...

However, there are also many languages in which it is possible to have noun phrases in which there is no noun or pronoun, in which the only constituents of the noun phrase are words that otherwise occur as modifiers of nouns. For example, in the example in (1) from Nkore-Kiga, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda, the subject omuto ‘young’ is a word that normally functions in the language as an ad...