Yael Netzer

We present an authoring system for logical forms encoded as conceptual graphs (CG). The system belongs to the family of WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) text generation systems: logical forms are entered interactively and the corresponding linguistic realization of the expressions is generated in several languages. The system maintains a model of the discourse context corresponding to the authored documents. The system helps users author documents formulated in the CG format. In a first stage, a domainspecific ontology is acquired by learning from example texts in the domain. The ontology acquisition module builds a typed hierarchy of concepts and relations derived from the WordNet and Verbnet. The user can then edit a specific document, by entering utterances in sequence, and maintaining a representation of the context. While the user enters data, the system performs the standard steps of text generation on the basis of the authored logical forms: reference planning, aggrega...

@Book{CASL2007:2007, editor = {Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Imed Zitouni}, title = {Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources}, month = {June}, year = {2007}, address = {Prague, Czech Republic}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W07/W07- 08} } @InProceedings{smrz:2007:CASL2007, author = {Smrz, Otakar}, title = {ElixirFM -- Implementation of Functional Arabic Morphology}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ...

Syntactic realization grammars have traditionally attempted to accept inputs with the highest possible level of abstraction, in or- der to facilitate the work of the compo- nents (sentence planner) preparing the in- put. Recently, the search for higher abstraction has been, however, challenged (E1hadad and Robin, 1996)(Lavoie and Rambow, 1997) (Busemann and Horacek, 1998). In this paper, we contribute to the issue of selecting the "ideal" abstraction level in the input to syntactic realization grammar by considering the case of partitives and possessives in a bilingual Hebrew-English generation grammar. In the case of bilingual generation, the ultimate goal is to provide a single input structure, where only the open- class lexical entries are specific to the language. In that case, the minimal abstraction required must cover the different syntactic constraints of the two languages.

Computational linguistics methods are typically first developed and tested in English. When applied to other languages, assumptions from English data are often applied to the target language. One of the most common such assumptions is that a “standard” part-of-speech (POS) tagset can be used across languages with only slight variations. We discuss in this paper a specific issue related to the definition of a POS tagset for Modern Hebrew, as an example to clarify the method through which such variations can be defined. It is widely assumed

Natural language generation (NLG) refers to the process of producing text in a spoken language, starting from an internal knowledge representation structure. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) deals with the development of devices and tools to enable basic conversation for language-impaired people. We present an applied prototype of an AAC-NLG system generating written output in English and Hebrew from a sequence of Bliss symbols. The system does not “translate ” the symbols sequence, but instead, it dynamically changes the communication board as the choice of symbols proceeds according to the syntactic and semantic content of selected symbols, generating utterances in natural language through a process of semantic authoring. 1

creativeness / a pleasing field / of bloom Word associations are an important element of linguistic creativity. Traditional lexical knowledge bases such as WordNet formalize a limited set of systematic relations among words, such as synonymy, polysemy and hypernymy. Such relations maintain their systematicity when composed into lexical chains. We claim that such relations cannot explain the type of lexical associations common in poetic text. We explore in this paper the usage of Word Association Norms (WANs) as an alternative lexical knowledge source to analyze linguistic computational creativity. We specifically investigate the Haiku poetic genre, which is characterized by heavy reliance on lexical associations. We first compare the density of WAN-based word associations in a corpus of English Haiku poems to that of WordNet-based associations as well as in other non-poetic genres. These experiments confirm our hypothesis that the non-systematic lexical associations captured in WANs...

We present a new method to evaluate a search ontology, which relies on mapping ontology instances to textual documents. On the basis of this mapping, we evaluate the adequacy of ontology relations by measuring their classification potential over the textual documents. This data-driven method provides concrete feedback to ontology maintainers and a quantitative estimation of the functional adequacy of the ontology relations towards search experience improvement. We specifically evaluate whether an ontology relation can help a semantic search engine support exploratory search. We test this ontology evaluation method on an ontology in the Movies domain, that has been acquired semi-automatically from the integration of multiple semi-structured and textual data sources (e.g., IMDb and Wikipedia). We automatically construct a domain corpus from a set of movie instances by crawling the Web for movie reviews (both professional and user reviews). The 1-1 relation between textual documents (reviews) and movie instances in the ontology enables us to translate ontology relations into text classes. We verify that the text classifiers induced by key ontology relations (genre, keywords, actors) achieve high performance and exploit the properties of the learned text classifiers to provide concrete feedback on the ontology. The proposed ontology evaluation method is general and relies on the possibility to automatically align textual documents to ontology instances.