We propose a simple unsupervised approach to detecting non-compositional components in multiword expressions based on Wiktionary. The approach makes use of the definitions, synonyms and translations in Wiktionary, and is applicable to any type of MWE in any language, assuming the MWE is contained in Wiktionary. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves higher F-score than state-o...

To study PP attachment disambiguation as a benchmark for empirical methods in natural language processing it has often been reduced to a binary decision problem (between verb or noun attachment) in a particular syntactic configuration. A parser, however, must solve the more general task of deciding between more than two alternatives in many different contexts. We combine the attachment predicti...

This paper describes the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed by RWTH Aachen University for the translation task of the EMNLP 2011 Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. Both phrasebased and hierarchical SMT systems were trained for the constrained German-English and French-English tasks in all directions. Experiments were conducted to compare different training d...

Empirical Methods in AI gives researchers and practitioners a good introduction to exploratory data analysis (EDA), hypothesis testing, computer-intensive methods, and statistical techniques based on linear regression. The book motivates readers to use statistical techniques, which are explained through a large number of detailed examples. The basic ideas and the formulas one should use are exp...

Most corpus-basedmethods in natural language processing (NLP)were developed toprovide an arbitrary text-understanding application with one or more general-purpose linguistic capabilities. This is evident from the articles in this issue of AI Magazine. Charniak and Ng/Zelle, for example, describe techniques for part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and word-sense disambiguation. These techniques were...

In the intellectual marketplace, different theories of language compete among themselves vying for their niche. One effective way of achieving such a goal is by offering some distinctive feature that makes them stand out from the rest. Such a ’difference’ can rest on several grounds: for example, a specific methodology specially suited to the study of a particular linguistic level (e.g. morphol...

We introduce estimation and test procedures through divergence minimization for models satisfying linear constraints with unknown parameter. These procedures extend the empirical likelihood (EL) method and share common features with generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) approach. We treat the problems of existence and characterization of the divergence projections of probability measures on se...

Compounded words are a challenge for NLP applications such as machine translation (MT). We introduce methods to learn splitting rules from monolingual and parallel corpora. We evaluate them against a gold standard and measure their impact on performance of statistical MT systems. Results show accuracy of 99.1% and performance gains for MT of 0.039 BLEU on a German-English noun phrase translatio...

In recent years, the use of, interest in, and controversy about Agile methodologies have realized dramatic growth. Anecdotal evidence is rising regarding the effectiveness of agile methodologies in certain environments and for specified projects. However, collection and analysis of empirical evidence of this effectiveness and classification of appropriate environments for Agile projects has not...