Complex noun phrases are pervasive in biomedical texts, but are largely underexplored in entity discovery and information extraction. Such expressions often contain a mix of highly specific names (diseases, drugs, etc.) and common words such as “condition”, “degree”, “process”, etc. These words can have different semantic types depending on their context in noun phrases. In this paper, we addre...

Specific indefinite noun phrases are prototypically referential expressions, show wide scope, are presuppositional, and indicate discourse prominence or “noteworthiness”. However, not all specific indefinites show these properties. The existence of so-called “narrow scope specific” or “relative specific” indefinites demonstrates that specificity cannot be explained by the wide scope of specific...

This paper explores the impact of light filtering on automatic key phrase extraction (AKE) applied to Broadcast News (BN). Key phrases are words and expressions that best characterize the content of a document. Key phrases are often used to index the document or as features in further processing. This makes improvements in AKE accuracy particularly important. We hypothesized that filtering out ...

This paper investigates the notion of definiteness from a psycholinguistic perspective and addresses Löbner’s (1987) distinction between semantic and pragmatic definites. To this end inherently definite noun phrases, proper names, and indexicals are investigated as instances of (relatively) rigid designators (i.e. semantic definites) and contrasted with definite noun phrases and third person pr...

We tested the hypothesis that more frequent exposure to multiword phrases results in deeper entrenchment of their representations, by examining the performance of subjects of different religiosity in the recognition of briefly presented liturgical and secular phrases drawn from several frequency classes. Three of the sources were prayer texts that religious Jews are required to recite on a dail...

In this paper, we present a method to employ target-side syntactic contextual information in a Hierarchical Phrase-Based system. Our method uses Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) to annotate training data with labels that represent the left and right syntactic context of target-side phrases. These labels are then used to assign labels to nonterminals in hierarchical rules. CCG-based contextu...

Preprocessing of the parallel corpus plays an important role in improving the performance of a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT). In this paper, we propose a frame work in which predefined information of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) can boost the performance of PB-SMT. We preprocess the parallel corpus to identify Noun-noun MWEs, reduplicated phrases, complex predicates and ...

Most programming languages have certain phrases (like expressions) which only read information from the state and certain others (like commands) which write information to the state. These are called passive and active phrases respectively. Semantic models which make these distinctions have been hard to find. For instance, most semantic models have expression denotations that (temporarily) chan...

We present in this article a hybrid approach to automatically tokenize Vietnamese text. The approach combines both finite-state automata technique, regular expression parsing and the maximal-matching strategy which is augmented by statistical methods to resolve ambiguities of segmentation. The Vietnamese lexicon in use is compactly represented by a minimal finite-state automaton. A text to be t...

Chinese semantic units fall into a continuum of connection tightness, ranging from very tight, non-compositional expressions, tight compositional words, phrases, and then to loose more or less arbitrary combinations of words. We propose an approach to measure tightness connection within this continuum, based on document frequency of segmentation patterns in a reference corpus. A variety of corp...