This paper proposes a method for assigning gestures to text based on lexical and syntactic information. First, our empirical study identified lexical and syntactic information strongly correlated with gesture occurrence and suggested that syntactic structure is more useful for judging gesture occurrence than local syntactic cues. Based on the empirical results, we have implemented a system that...

We study the global topology of the syntactic and semantic distributional similarity networks for English through the technique of spectral analysis. We observe that while the syntactic network has a hierarchical structure with strong communities and their mixtures, the semantic network has several tightly knit communities along with a large core without any such welldefined community structure.

In previous functional neuroimaging studies, left anterior temporal and temporal-parietal areas responded more strongly to sentences than to randomly ordered lists of words. The smaller response for word lists could be explained by either (1) less activation of syntactic processes due to the absence of syntactic structure in the random word lists or (2) less activation of semantic processes res...

We study how the use of syntactic information can improve the performance of Information Retrieval systems based on single-word terms. We consider two different approaches. The first one identifies the syntactic structure of the text by means of a shallow parser in order to extract the head-modifier pairs of the most relevant syntactic dependencies, which are used as complex

The paper proposes an information-theorybased method for feature types analysis in probabilistic evaluation modelling for statistical parsing. The basic idea is that we use entropy and conditional entropy to measure whether a feature type grasps some of the information for syntactic structure prediction. Our experiment quantitatively analyzes several feature types’ power for syntactic structure...

Multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-w...

“Deep-syntactic” dependency structures bridge the gap between the surface-syntactic structures as produced by state-of-the-art dependency parsers and semantic logical forms in that they abstract away from surfacesyntactic idiosyncrasies, but still keep the linguistic structure of a sentence. They have thus a great potential for such downstream applications as machine translation and summarizati...

This paper presents a robust system for deep syntactic parsing of unrestricted French. This system uses techniques from Part-of-Speech tagging in order to build a constituent structure and uses other techniques from dependency grammar in an original framework of memories in order to build a functional structure. The two structures are build simultaneously by two interacting processes. The proce...

Syntactic persistence (Bock, 1986; Pickering and Branigan, 1998) is the tendency for speakers to repeat a syntactic structure that they have processed previously. In the following example (1) from the Switchboard corpus (Godfrey et al., 1992), the speaker produces the double object ditransitive structure, or NPNP (1-a), as opposed to the prepositional object structure, or NPPP (1-b), after havi...

We report a syntactic priming experiment that examined whether children's acquisition of the passive is a staged process, with acquisition of constituent structure preceding acquisition of thematic role mappings. Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds described transitive actions after hearing active and passive prime descriptions involving the same or different thematic roles. Both groups showed a s...