We present an approach for deriving syntactic word clusters from parsed text, grouping words according to their unlexicalized syntactic contexts. We then explore the use of these syntactic clusters in leveraging a large corpus of trees generated by a high-accuracy parser to improve the accuracy of another parser based on a different formalism for representing a different level of sentence struc...

In 3 experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries were manipulated such that the recording included either no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, a boundary in a preferred location, or bou...

It is well-known that, across languages, so-called “given” information (as opposed to “new” information) systematically correlates with lack of phonetic prominence, or deaccentuation (Halliday 1967, Taglicht 1982, Ladd 1996, Selkirk 1995, Schwarzschild 1999, among many others). The primary goal of this paper is to provide a minimalist syntactic account for a sub-case of this phenomenon, namely ...

This paper proposes an efficient method of sentence retrieval based on syntactic structure. Collins proposed Tree Kernel to calculate structural similarity. However, structual retrieval based on Tree Kernel is not practicable because the size of the index table by Tree Kernel becomes impractical. We propose more efficient algorithms approximating Tree Kernel: Tree Overlapping and Subpath Set. T...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to enhance hierarchical phrase-based machine translation systems with linguistically motivated syntactic features. Rather than directly using treebank categories as in previous studies, we learn a set of linguistically-guided latent syntactic categories automatically from a source-side parsed, word-aligned parallel corpus, based on the hierarchical str...

Named entity recognition (NER) plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. This paper presents a novel approach to Chinese NER. It differentiates from most of the previous approaches mainly in three respects. First of all, while previous work is good at modeling features between observation elements, our model incorporates syntactic structure as higher level inform...

This paper proposes a new unsupervised technique for clustering a collection of documents written by distinct individuals into authorial components. We highlight the importance of utilizing syntactic structure to cluster documents by author, and demonstrate experimental results that show the method we outline performs on par with state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, we argue that this fea...

Donald Davidson’s classic argument that action sentences involve an event place in their argument structure receives important evidence from the overt syntax of Chinese genitive agent constructions, possessive object constructions, and sentences with expressions of event quantification that apparently occupy the syntactic position of objectual modifiers. These constructions present syntax-seman...

Much of the writing styles recognized in rhetorical and composition theories involve deep syntactic elements. However, most previous research for computational stylometric analysis has relied on shallow lexico-syntactic patterns. Some very recent work has shown that PCFG models can detect distributional difference in syntactic styles, but without offering much insights into exactly what constit...