Many useful planning tasks are handled by plan execution tools, such as PRS, that expand procedure definitions and keep track of several interacting goals and tasks. Learning by instruction is a promising approach to help users modify the definitions of the procedures. However, the impact of the set of possible instructions on the performance of such systems is not well understood. We develop a...

Lexical ambiguity is a fundamental problem in Information Retrieval (IR), especially in the medical domain. Many systems use a subset of the words contained in the document to represent the content, but they are faced with the problem of ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a method for disambiguation based on existing medical terminological resources on the one hand, and statistical tools for ...

Large-scale grammars are a prerequisite for parsing a great variety of sentences, but it is difficult to build such grammars by hand. Yet, it is possible to derive a context-free grammar(CFG) automatically from an existing large-scale, syntactically annotated corpus. While being seemingly a simple task at first sight, CFGs derived in such a fashion have hardly ever been applied to an existing s...

The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. Minimal Attachment Frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain & Steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution proce...

A number of regions of the temporal and frontal lobes are known to be important for spoken language comprehension, yet we do not have a clear understanding of their functional role(s). In particular, there is considerable disagreement about which brain regions are involved in the semantic aspects of comprehension. Two functional magnetic resonance studies use the phenomenon of semantic ambiguit...

Supervised methods for ambiguity resolution learn in "sterile" environments, in absence of syntactic noise. However, in many language engineering applications manually tagged corpora are not available nor easily implemented. On the other side, the "exportability" of disambiguation cues acquired from a given, noise-free, domain (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) to other domains is not obvious. Unsu...

Speakers only sometimes include the that in sentence complement structures like The coach knew (that) you missed practice. Six experiments tested the predictions concerning optional word mention of two general approaches to language production. One approach claims that language production processes choose syntactic structures that ease the task of creating sentences, so that words are spoken op...

This paper discusses a case of syntax/semantics interaction of a characteristically optimality-theoretic kind. Finnish partitive constructions exhibit a case alternation that is partly semantically, partly syntactically driven. The crucial semantic condition that plays a role in case selection is quantitative determinacy, which replaces the de niteness condition familiar from the Partitive Cons...

IN THE VARIOUS PROPOSALS for word-forword machine translation of Russian scientific literature into English, each word in the sentence is considered as a separate entity. If a word has more than one English equivalent, or more than one possible syntactic value, the alternatives must be listed. The chief difficulty with the resulting translation is its prolixity: the reader finds himself confron...