Empirical Methods in Natural Language Generation


Book Description

Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that is often characterized as the study of automatically converting non-linguistic representations (e.g., from databases or other knowledge sources) into coherent natural language text. In recent years the field has evolved substantially. Perhaps the most important new development is the current emphasis on data-oriented methods and empirical evaluation. Progress in related areas such as machine translation, dialogue system design and automatic text summarization and the resulting awareness of the importance of language generation, the increasing availability of suitable corpora in recent years, and the organization of shared tasks for NLG, where different teams of researchers develop and evaluate their algorithms on a shared, held out data set have had a considerable impact on the field, and this book offers the first comprehensive overview of recent empirically oriented NLG research.




New Methods In Language Processing


Book Description

Studies in Computational Linguistics presents authoritative texts from an international team of leading computational linguists. The books range from the senior undergraduate textbook to the research level monograph and provide a showcase for a broad range of recent developments in the field. The series should be interesting reading for researchers and students alike involved at this interface of linguistics and computing.




Spoken Dialogue Systems


Book Description

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies




Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems


Book Description

A comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in natural language generation for interactive systems, with links to resources for further research.




Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings


Book Description

The majority of natural language processing (NLP) is English language processing, and while there is good language technology support for (standard varieties of) English, support for Albanian, Burmese, or Cebuano--and most other languages--remains limited. Being able to bridge this digital divide is important for scientific and democratic reasons but also represents an enormous growth potential. A key challenge for this to happen is learning to align basic meaning-bearing units of different languages. In this book, the authors survey and discuss recent and historical work on supervised and unsupervised learning of such alignments. Specifically, the book focuses on so-called cross-lingual word embeddings. The survey is intended to be systematic, using consistent notation and putting the available methods on comparable form, making it easy to compare wildly different approaches. In so doing, the authors establish previously unreported relations between these methods and are able to present a fast-growing literature in a very compact way. Furthermore, the authors discuss how best to evaluate cross-lingual word embedding methods and survey the resources available for students and researchers interested in this topic.




Natural Language Generation Systems


Book Description

Natural language generation is a field within artificial intelligence which looks ahead to the future when machines will communicate complex thoughts to their human users in a natural way. Generation systems supply the sophisticated knowledge about natural languages that must come into play when one needs to use wordings that will overpower techniques based only on symbolic string manipulation techniques. Topics covered in this volume include discourse theory, mechanical translation, deliberate writing, and revision. Natural Language Generation Systems contains contributions by leading researchers in the field. Chapters contain details of grammatical treatments and processing seldom reported on outside of full length monographs.




Introduction to Natural Language Processing


Book Description

A survey of computational methods for understanding, generating, and manipulating human language, which offers a synthesis of classical representations and algorithms with contemporary machine learning techniques. This textbook provides a technical perspective on natural language processing—methods for building computer software that understands, generates, and manipulates human language. It emphasizes contemporary data-driven approaches, focusing on techniques from supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The first section establishes a foundation in machine learning by building a set of tools that will be used throughout the book and applying them to word-based textual analysis. The second section introduces structured representations of language, including sequences, trees, and graphs. The third section explores different approaches to the representation and analysis of linguistic meaning, ranging from formal logic to neural word embeddings. The final section offers chapter-length treatments of three transformative applications of natural language processing: information extraction, machine translation, and text generation. End-of-chapter exercises include both paper-and-pencil analysis and software implementation. The text synthesizes and distills a broad and diverse research literature, linking contemporary machine learning techniques with the field's linguistic and computational foundations. It is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses and as a reference for software engineers and data scientists. Readers should have a background in computer programming and college-level mathematics. After mastering the material presented, students will have the technical skill to build and analyze novel natural language processing systems and to understand the latest research in the field.




Dependency Parsing


Book Description

Dependency-based methods for syntactic parsing have become increasingly popular in natural language processing in recent years. This book gives a thorough introduction to the methods that are most widely used today. After an introduction to dependency grammar and dependency parsing, followed by a formal characterization of the dependency parsing problem, the book surveys the three major classes of parsing models that are in current use: transition-based, graph-based, and grammar-based models. It continues with a chapter on evaluation and one on the comparison of different methods, and it closes with a few words on current trends and future prospects of dependency parsing. The book presupposes a knowledge of basic concepts in linguistics and computer science, as well as some knowledge of parsing methods for constituency-based representations. Table of Contents: Introduction / Dependency Parsing / Transition-Based Parsing / Graph-Based Parsing / Grammar-Based Parsing / Evaluation / Comparison / Final Thoughts




Natural Language Generation


Book Description

The Third International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2004) was held from 14th to 16th July 2004 at Careys Manor, Brockenhurst, UK. Supported by the Association for Computational Linguistics Special - terest Group on Generation, the conference continued a twenty-year tradition of biennial international meetings on research into natural language generation. Recent conference venues have included Mitzpe Ramon, Israel (INLG 2000) and New York, USA (INLG 2002). It was our pleasure to invite the thriving and friendly NLG research community to the beautiful New Forest in the south of England for INLG 2004. INLG is the leading international conference in the ?eld of natural language generation. It provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of the generation of language, including psychological modelling of human language production as well as computational approaches to the automatic generation of language. This volume includes a paper by the keynote speaker, Ardi Roelofs of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingu- tics and the F. C. Donders Centre for CognitiveNeuroimaging,18 regular papers reportingthelatestresearchresultsanddirections,and4studentpapersdescr- ing doctoral work in progress. These papers reveal a particular concentration of current research e?ort on statistical and machine learning methods, on referring expressions, and on variation in surface realisation. The papers were selected from 46 submissions from all over the world (27 from Europe, 13 from North America, 6 from elsewhere), which were subjected to a rigorous double-blind reviewing process undertaken by our hard-working programme committee.




Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: Research Track


Book Description

The multi-volume set LNAI 14169 until 14175 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2023, which took place in Turin, Italy, in September 2023. The 196 papers were selected from the 829 submissions for the Research Track, and 58 papers were selected from the 239 submissions for the Applied Data Science Track. The volumes are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Active Learning; Adversarial Machine Learning; Anomaly Detection; Applications; Bayesian Methods; Causality; Clustering. Part II: ​Computer Vision; Deep Learning; Fairness; Federated Learning; Few-shot learning; Generative Models; Graph Contrastive Learning. Part III: ​Graph Neural Networks; Graphs; Interpretability; Knowledge Graphs; Large-scale Learning. Part IV: ​Natural Language Processing; Neuro/Symbolic Learning; Optimization; Recommender Systems; Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning. Part V: ​Robustness; Time Series; Transfer and Multitask Learning. Part VI: ​Applied Machine Learning; Computational Social Sciences; Finance; Hardware and Systems; Healthcare & Bioinformatics; Human-Computer Interaction; Recommendation and Information Retrieval. ​Part VII: Sustainability, Climate, and Environment.- Transportation & Urban Planning.- Demo.




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