We present a probabilistic generative model used to classify unknown Proper Noun Phrases into semantic categories. The core of the classifier is an n-gram character model, which is enhanced with an n-gram word-length model and a common word model. While most work has depended largely on context or domain-specific rules for semantic disambiguation of unknown names, we demonstrate that there is s...

In this talk, I discuss the ability of compositional distributional semantics to model adjective modification. I present three studies that explore the degree to which semantic intuitions are grounded in the distributional representations of adjective-noun phrases, as well as provide insight into various linguistic phenomena by extracting unsupervised cues from these distributional representati...

Research on early word learning reveals that verbs present a unique challenge. While English-acquiring 24-month-olds can learn novel verbs and extend them to new scenes, they perform better in rich linguistic contexts (when novel verbs appear with lexicalized noun phrases naming the event participants) than in sparser linguistic contexts (Arunachalam & Waxman 2011). However, in languages like K...

This paper presents a noun phrase driven two-level statistical machine translation system. Noun phrases (NPs) are used as the unit of decomposition to build a two level hierarchy of phrases. English noun phrases are identified using a parser. The corresponding translations are induced using a statistical word alignment model. Identified noun phrase pairs in the training corpus are replaced with...

In order to identify variations between two or several versions of Clinical Practice Guidelines, we propose a method based on the detection of noun phrases. Currently, we are developing a comparison approach to extract similar and different elements between medical documents in French in order to identify any significant changes such as new medical terms or concepts, new treatments etc. In this...

This paper investigates factors that can be used in discourse analysis, specifically, cohesive devices. The paper shows that cohesive devices such as cue phrases can provide information about the linkages inside a text. We propose three types of cue phrases (the ordinary cue phrases, noun-phrase cues, and verb-phrase cues). An algorithm to compute rhetorical relations between two elementary dis...

Welsh noun phrases have had much less attention than clauses, and there are unresolved issues about the nature of possessors, attributive adjectives, definite article agreement clitics. There is evidence, especially from agreement, that possessors complements, evidence adjectives adjoined to a preceding [LEX+] nominal constituent, clitics specifiers. The last these positions makes it fairly sim...