Reasoning about natural language most prominently requires combining semantically rich lexical resources with world knowledge, provided by ontologies. Therefore, we are building bindings from FrameNet – a lexical resource for English – to various ontologies depending on the application at hand. In this paper we show the first step toward such bindings: We translate FrameNet to the Web Ontology ...

The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it should help refine existing compound classificatio...

Recent work in end-to-end generation has reduced the need for knowledgeengineering, but is insufficiently sensitive to discourse structure. We present a method for inducing clause-combining rules for use in a traditional natural language generation architecture to address this gap. Our algorithm is able to learn all of the clause-combining rules present in the SPaRKy restaurant corpus from exem...

We present a concept-based approach to the problem of lexical selection which allows us to deal precisely with lexicalization gaps or mismatches in mapping from a source language into a target language. We adopt a linguistically motivated scheme that makes use of a decompositional representation which can be classified in terms of a KR ontology. A main contribution of our representation scheme ...

In this article, we give an overview of Natural Language Generation (nlg) from an applied system-building perspective. The article includes a discussion of when nlg techniques should be used; suggestions for carrying out requirements analyses; and a description of the basic nlg tasks of content determination, discourse planning, sentence aggregation, lexicalization, referring expression generat...

In this paper, we show how a constraint-based approach influences the modelling of preposition lexicalization in natural language generation. We concentrate on the linguistic description, which is the most challenging. The CSP procedures themselves are then rather straightforward. Preposition choice depends on the verb and its requirements, on the one hand, and the characteristics of the NP the...

This paper presents a case study of a seizure-induced transient dyslexic episode experienced by a radio presenter while reading a script live on air. An analysis of the recording of the episode in conjunction with the script being read yields a number of interesting observations. There is, for example, a distinct temporal pattern of breakdown from what can be characterized as orthographic error...

This paper examines the status of so-called ‘pleonastic’ determiners, focusing on the plural definite generic common in Romance languages. It is noted that every language has generic or kind-denoting terms but such terms vary between bare and definite (rather than indefinite) forms across languages. Canonical and non-canonical uses of definite determiners are distinguished and language variatio...

Phrasal verbs have some structural and semantic characteristics in common with morphologically complex words, even though they originate from phrasal constructions. Focusing on the role played by lexicalization and grammaticalization processes in the gradual shift from syntactic to morphological structures, this paper deals with semantic and morphotactic characteristics of Italian phrasal verbs...

German has a productive morphology and allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. This paper reports on the development of a head-lexicalized PCFG for the disambiguation of German morphological analyses. The grammar is trained on unlabeled data using the Inside-Outside algorithm. The parser achieves a precision of more than 68% on difficult test data, which is 23% mo...