The focus of this article is on the creation of a collection of sentences manually annotated with respect to their sentence structure. We show that the concept of linear segments—linguistically motivated units, which may be easily detected automatically—serves as a good basis for the identification of clauses in Czech. The segment annotation captures such relationships as subordination, coordin...

We introduce the notion of a multi-vector sentence representation based on a “one vector per proposition” philosophy, which we term skip-prop vectors. By representing each predicate-argument structure in a complex sentence as an individual vector, skip-prop is (1) a response to empirical evidence that single-vector sentence representations degrade with sentence length, and (2) a representation ...

This project shows that focus and information structure, as indicated by the particle “only” pitch accents, influence syntactic attachment, in contrast to well-known effects of prosodic boundaries on attachment. One written questionnaire, one completion study, several auditory questionnaires show position strongly affects attachment preferences ambiguous sentences, while contrastive accents hav...

In this paper we describe an automatic sentence boundary detector, which inserts a period (sentence boundary marker) to a word sequence output by a speech recognizer. The state-ofthe-art automatic sentence boundary detectors insert a period at a position selected by a word tri-gram model from among candidates (long pauses) offered by an accoustic model. In contrast, the automatic sentence bound...

According to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, language learners use structural cues in the linguistic context to infer the meaning of novel words. Many studies support this hypothesis by showing that structure knowledge facilitates learning new words in a familiar language, but few have investigated the concurrent acquisition of word meaning and syntactic structure in a new language. In ...

Much of the literature studying on-line sentence comprehension focuses on the contributions of individual lexical items, with specific interest in verbs. One aspect of sentence meaning that has been claimed to be rooted in verb representation is event structure. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that the verb is not the sole contributor of event structure, but the syntact...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test competing claims about the role of executive resources during the disambiguation of a sentence featuring a temporary structural ambiguity. Written sentences with a direct object (DO) structure or a sentential complement (SC) structure were shown to 19 healthy, right-handed, young adults in a phrase-by-phrase manner. These sentences co...

This paper presents a pilot study of opinion summarization on conversations. We create a corpus containing extractive and abstractive summaries of speaker’s opinion towards a given topic using 88 telephone conversations. We adopt two methods to perform extractive summarization. The first one is a sentence-ranking method that linearly combines scores measured from different aspects including top...

A dependency parsing method based on sentence segmentation into clauses has been proposed and confirmed to be effective. In this method, dependency parsing is executed in two stages: at the clause level and the sentence level. However, since a sentence can not be segmented into complete clauses, in the past research, a unit sandwiched between two clause-end boundaries (clause boundary unit) was...