In many cases there is a single interpretation of the verb phrase in question For instance the phrase to provide water for Texas corresponds to parse tree whereas to be the Mayor of Atlanta is an example of tree However sometimes phrases such as to scratch a note on the wall are truly ambiguous wall can be either the medium of the note or the location where the note is written For such examples...

The discovery of semantic relations in text plays an important role in many NLP applications. This paper presents a method for the automatic classification of semantic relations in nominalized noun phrases. Nominalizations represent a subclass of NP constructions in which either the head or the modifier noun is derived from a verb while the other noun is an argument of this verb. Especially des...

In recent years many scientific journals noticed an increasing number of submissions of plagiarized papers. The Editor-in-Chief of an important international journal, that receives very many submissions every year, recently privately wrote us “I had to reject on such basis over a dozen of submissions just this year”. The smaller size of our journal limits the number of such situations, but does...

Two experiments assessed the membership functions that German speakers assign to 12 adverb phrases and 17 modal verb forms that express probability assessments. These expressions fall largely into three rather homogeneous classes. The membership functions are used as part of the semantic knowledge base of the natural language dialog system PRACMA, one of whose purposes is to model pragmatic and...

Translation of discontinuous phrases is a major challenge in Machine Translation. Within METIS-II we developed a dictionary lookup strategy by mapping the items of a dictionary entry on non-adjacent words in an input text. Mapping is controlled through so-called contextual rejection, i.e. inappropriate mappings are discarded if they fail to satisfy a predefined set of constraints. We present va...

A SNoW based learning approach to shallow parsing tasks is presented and studied experimentally. The approach learns to identify syntactic patterns by combining simple predictors to produce a coherent inference. Two instantiations of this approach are studied and experimental results for Noun-Phrases (NP) and Subject-Verb (SV) phrases that compare favorably with the best published results are p...

A SNoW based learning approach to shallow parsing tasks is presented and studied experimentally. The approach learns to identify syntactic patterns by combining simple predictors to produce a coherent inference. Two instantiations of this approach are studied and experimental results for Noun-Phrases (NP) and Subject-Verb (SV) phrases that compare favorably with the best published results are p...

Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) are a good method to cluster and visualize large collections of text documents, but they are computationally expensive. In this paper, we investigate ways to use natural language parsing of the texts to remove unimportant terms from the usual bag-of-words representation, to improve efficiency. We find that reducing the document representation to just the heads of nou...

As online marketing and advertising keep growing on the Internet, a large amount of advertisements are presented to consumers. How consumers, advertisers and the authorities identify false and overstated advertisements becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we address this problem, and propose various classification models to detect illegal advertisements. Illegal advertisement lists announce...