In his recent article (Shlonsky, U., 2004. The form of Semitic noun phrases. Lingua 114, 1465–1526), Shlonsky proposes a phrasal-movement analysis of word order in Hebrew (and Arabic) noun phrases and argues that the positioning of nominal modifiers with respect to the head-noun cannot be adequately handled by an N-raising derivation. In the present article I argue that in fact the head movemen...

Producing a fluent ordering for a set of prenominal modifiers in a noun phrase (NP) is a problematic task for natural language generation and machine translation systems. We present a novel approach to this issue, adapting multiple sequence alignment techniques used in computational biology to the alignment of modifiers. We describe two training techniques to create such alignments based on raw...

We implement and evaluate systems for automatically distinguishing habitual and episodic sentences. Using features such as tense, aspect, noun phrase characteristics, temporal modifiers, specific adverb modifiers, and specific verb auxiliaries on genericity we built and evaluated a supervised machine learning classifier that provides 86.3% precision in disambiguating habitual and episodic sente...

This paper aims to highlight the fundamental elements of syntactic structure that underlies prosodic phrasing of utterances in Romanian. The present study investigates the relation betwen the syntactic structure of the text, especialy the noun phrases structure, and the prosodic hierarchy of the uttered text. The analysis covers aspects of prosodic phrasing for short and long noun phrases, with...

This paper shows that linguistic techniques along with machine learning can extract high quality noun phrases for the purpose of providing the gist or summary of email messages. We describe a set of comparative experiments using several machine learning algorithms for the task of salient noun phrase extraction. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study: (i) the modifiers of a noun phr...

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of gr...

However, there are also many languages in which it is possible to have noun phrases in which there is no noun or pronoun, in which the only constituents of the noun phrase are words that otherwise occur as modifiers of nouns. For example, in the example in (1) from Nkore-Kiga, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda, the subject omuto ‘young’ is a word that normally functions in the language as an ad...

Two methods of evaluation of semantic similarity/dissimilarity of English nouns are proposed based on their modifier sets taken from Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Student of English. The first method measures similarity by the portion of modifiers commonly applicable to both nouns under evaluation. The second method measures dissimilarity by the change of the mean value of cohesion between ...

In three experiments, participants received nouns or noun phrases for objects and verbally generated their properties ("feature listing"). Several sources of evidence indicated that participants constructed perceptual simulations to generate properties for the noun phrases during conceptual combination. First, the production of object properties for noun phrases depended on occlusion, with unoc...