This paper presents a relation-based schema for treebank annotation, and its application in the development of a corpus of Italian sentences. The annotation schema keeps arguments and modifiers distinct and allows for an accurate representation of predicate-argument structure and subcategorization. The accuracy strongly depends on methods adopted for defining the relations which are tripartite ...

Determining the semantic intent of web queries not only involves identifying their semantic class, which is a primary focus of previous works, but also understanding their semantic structure. In this work, we formally define the semantic structure of noun phrase queries as comprised of intent heads and intent modifiers. We present methods that automatically identify these constituents as well a...

Sublanguages represent an important application area for NLU (Grishman and Kittredge,1986). Their syntactic simplicity and reduced semantic variability provide clear computational advantages. In the present paper we consider a sublanguage currently used for official publication of business activities which is characterized by a telegraphic style typical of commercial ads. Morphological and synt...

In most research on concept acquisition from corpora, concepts are modeled as vectors of relations extracted from syntactic structures. In the case of modifiers, these relations often specify values of attributes, as in (attr red); this is unlike what typically proposed in theories of knowledge representation, where concepts are typically defined in terms of their attributes (e.g., color). We c...

Both the domain and sublanguage specific approach to text analysis and information extraction is proposed. Texts under consideration are weather forecast telegrams written in Russian. Telegrams are an example of deviant text type, with lack of text segmentation means, a lot of abbreviations, syntactic and spelling mistakes. The presented work pursues the problem of text segmentation: a procedur...

In this paper, we contend that interpersonal circumplex theories and politeness strategies may be combined to inform the generation of social behaviours for virtual agents. We show how stances from the interpersonal circumplex correspond to certain politeness strategies and present the results of a small pilot study that partially supports our approach. Our goal is to implement this model in a ...

In this study, we investigate politeness and frustration behavior of children during their spoken interaction with computer characters in a game. We focus on automatically detecting frustrated, polite and neutral attitudes from the child’s speech (acoustic and language) communication cues and study their differences as a function of age and gender. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog co...

This paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness which is addressed is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) which is triggered by an im/politeness mismatch. In the first phase of the study, two se...