Statistical parsing research can be described as being anglo-centric: new models are first proposed for English parsing, and only then tested in other languages. Indeed, a standard approach to parsing with new treebanks is to adapt fully developed English parsing models to the other language. In this dissertation, however, we claim that many assumptions of English parsing do not generalize to o...

We present a new approach to stochastic modeling of constraint-based grammars that is based on log-linear models and uses EM for estimation from unannotated data. The techniques are applied to an LFG grammar for German. Evaluation on an exact match task yields 86% precision for an ambiguity rate of 5.4, and 90% precision on a subcat frame match for an ambiguity rate of 25. Experimental comparis...

In this paper, we address two questions concerning negative imperatives in Korean: . (i) what is the morpho-syntactic nature of mal in negative imperatives?; and (ii) why is it impossible to form negative imperatives with short negation an? We will argue that the clause structure of imperatives include a projection of deontic modality and a projection of imperative operator encoding illocutiona...

The third instalment of the open challenge on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD-3) has been conducted as a half-day lab at CLEF2013. Di↵erently from previous editions of the challenge, QALD-3 put a strong emphasis on multilinguality, o↵ering two tasks: one on multilingual question answering and one on ontology lexicalization. While no submissions were received for the latter, the former...

This article offers a conception of semantics, and of what makes the human language faculty distinctive, based on five theses: Meanings are instructions to build concepts; concatenation calls for conjunction of monadic concepts; grammatical relations invoke certain thematic relations and a kind of existential closure; lexicalization is a partly creative process of abstraction; and meanings are ...

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, wh...

among factors that might manipulate translators’ mind while producing a text is the notion of ideology transmission through text or talk. adopting critical discourse analysis (cda) with particular emphasis on the framework of van dijk (1999), the present investigation is an attempt to shed light on the relationship between language and ideology involved in translation in general, and more speci...