Ontologies provide a common understanding of a specific domain of interest that can be communicated between people and used as background knowledge for automated reasoning in a wide range of applications. In this paper we address the design of multilingual ontologies following well-defined knowledge engineering methodologies with the support of novel collaborative development approaches. In par...

In word retrieval, speakers need to select a lexical entry among several co-activated candidates for lexicalization. How a target entry is selected is a matter of ongoing debate. Semantic context effects on naming times, as seen in the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm, are of specific interest to this debate. In the standard version of this paradigm, participants name lists of objects compiled fr...

A lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar is a tree-adjoining grammar where each elementary tree contains some overt lexical item. Such grammars are being used to give lexical accounts of syntactic phenomena, where an elementary tree defines the domain of locality of the syntactic and semantic dependencies of its lexical items. It has been claimed in the literature that for every tree-adjoining gram...

We present current work dealing with the integration of a multilingual thesaurus for social sciences in a NLP framework for supporting Knowledge-Driven Information Extraction in the field of social sciences. We describe the various steps that lead to a running IE system: lexicalization of the labels of the thesaurus and semi-automatic generation of domain specific IE grammars, with their subseq...

This article presents the linguistic bases of Persian light verb constructions and shows the corpus based construction of lists of collocates for some common Persian verbs. The proposed methods of corpus construction are language independent and the good results on a relatively small corpus of 20 million words confirms the power of association measures based on the hypergeometric distribution. ...

We use a Dynamic Bayesian Network (dbn) to represent compactly a variety of sublexical and contextual features relevant to Part-ofSpeech (PoS) tagging. The outcome is a flexible tagger (LegoTag) with state-of-the-art performance (3.6% error on a benchmark corpus). We explore the effect of eliminating redundancy and radically reducing the size of feature vocabularies. We find that a small but li...

Dogon languages lexicalize action verbs with obligatory reference to manner and/or process. This contrasts with English and “Standard Average European,” which (in neutral contexts) profile result and/or function. Many common English verbs like carry and eat correspond to sets of Dogon verbs with senses like ‘carry on back’ and ‘munch’. The pattern cuts across many semantic domains and constitut...

The centralization of the low upgliding diphthong (typically called Canadian Raising, here just Raising), is frequently cited as an example of phonological opacity. Conditioned by a following voiceless segment, Raising continues to apply when an underlying unstressed /t/ is flapped on the surface. Dialects which have both Raising and Flapping, then, maintain the distinction between "writer" and...

This paper explores the role of lexicalization and pruning of grammars for base noun phrase identification. We modify our original framework (Cardie & Pierce 1998) to extract lexicalized treebank grammars that assign a score to each potential noun phrase based upon both the part-of-speech tag sequence and the word sequence of the phrase. We evaluate the modified framework on the “simple” and “c...