The spontaneous gestures that accompany spoken language are particularly suited to conveying spatial information, yet their briefness, individuality, and lack of conventional linguistic structure impede their integration into NLU systems. The current work characterizes spontaneous size gestures in a manual task corpus, clarifying their form, discourse role and representation as a first step tow...

This paper describes ongoing research on robust spoken language understanding in the context of the Verbmobil speech-to-speech machine translation project. We focus on recent developments in the processing steps which map a word lattice to a semantic representations. The approach described firstly applies speech repair correction to word lattices. Four analysis methods of varying depth are then...

In conversational language, references to people (especially to the conversation participants, e.g., I, you, and we) are an essential part of many expressed meanings. In most conversational settings, however, many such expressions have numerous potential meanings, are frequently vague, and are highly dependent on social and situational context. This is a significant challenge to conversational ...

Most machine learning solutions to noun phrase coreference resolution recast the problem as a classification task. We examine three potential problems with this reformulation, namely, skewed class distributions, the inclusion of “hard” training instances, and the loss of transitivity inherent in the original coreference relation. We show how these problems can be handled via intelligent sample ...

Several natural language annotation schemas have been proposed for different natural language understanding tasks. In this paper we present a hierarchical and recursive tagset for annotating natural language recipes. Our recipe annotation tagset is developed to capture both syntactic and semantic information in the text. First, we propose our hierarchical recursive tagset that captures cooking ...

In this paper, we present a learning approach to coreference resolution of noun phrases in unrestricted text. The approach learns from a small, annotated corpus and the task includes resolving not just a certain type of noun phrase (e.g., pronouns) but rather general noun phrases. It also does not restrict the entity types of the noun phrases; that is, coreference is assigned whether they are o...

The Trains project is an eeort to build a conversationally proocient planning assistant. A key part of the project is the construction of the Trains system, which provides the research platform for a wide range of issues in natural language understanding, mixed-initiative planning systems, and representing and reasoning about time, actions and events. Four years have now passed since the beginn...

The intricate and complex structure of existing advanced database applications results in part from poor integration of existing models and languages. This complexity is a barrier to e ectively understanding and developing advanced applications. We can signi cantly reduce the complexity of advanced-application speci cation and implementation by using a model-equivalent language (a language with...

http://bjo.bmj.com/content/94/7/956.full.html Updated information and services can be found at: These include: References http://bjo.bmj.com/content/94/7/956.full.html#ref-list-1 This article cites 6 articles, 3 of which can be accessed free at: service Email alerting box at the top right corner of the online article. Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the...

Corpus annotation plays an important role in linguistic analysis and computational processing of both written and spoken language. Syntactic annotation of spoken texts becomes clearly a topic of considerable interest nowadays, driven by the desire to improve automatic speech recognition systems by incorporating syntax in the language models, or to build language understanding applications. Synt...