Entropy Guided Transformation Learning (ETL) is a new machine learning strategy that combines the advantages of decision trees (DT) and Transformation Based Learning (TBL). In this work, we apply the ETL framework to four phrase chunking tasks: Portuguese noun phrase chunking, English base noun phrase chunking, English text chunking and Hindi text chunking. In all four tasks, ETL shows better r...

The present research documents the American English usage frequencies for 136 verbs that occur with noun phrase and tensed sentence complements (e.g., accepted, noun phrase complement: The student knew the answer yesterday, tensed sentence complement: The student knew the answer was correct). This class of verbs has been the focus of numerous empirical studies investigating how syntactic ambigu...

We define noun phrase translation as a subtask of machine translation. This enables us to build a dedicated noun phrase translation subsystem that improves over the currently best general statistical machine translation methods by incorporating special modeling and special features. We achieved 65.5% translation accuracy in a German-English translation task vs. 53.2% with IBM Model 4.

Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects at the end of a sentence rather than in the canonical postverbal position. Three experiments using several task variations confirmed that length of the noun phrase influenced the ordering of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase during production. We also found that heavy-NP shift was strongly con...

In this paper we investigate a hypothesized cognitive bias for isomorphic mappings between conceptual structure and linear order in the noun phrase. This bias has been proposed as a possible explanation for a striking asymmetry in the typology of the noun phrase–linear orders which place the adjective closest to the noun, then the numeral, then the demonstrative, are over-represented in the wor...

In TREC 2003, the Database and Information System Lab (DBIS) at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) participate in the robust track, which is a traditional ad hoc retrieval task. The emphasis is based on average effectiveness as well as individual topic effectiveness. Noun phrases in the query are identified and classified into 4 types: proper names, dictionary phrases, simple phrases and c...

In this paper we revisit the classical NLP problem of prepositional phrase attachment (PPattachment). Given the pattern V −NP1−P−NP2 in the text, where V is verb,NP1 is a noun phrase, P is the preposition and NP2 is the other noun phrase, the question asked is where does P −NP2 attach: V or NP1? This question is typically answered using both the word and the world knowledge. Word Sense Disambig...

This paper tests the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) (Fodor 1998, 2002) based on production and perception experiments on Korean data. IPH states that attachment of a relative clause (RC) in a sentence with a complex noun phrase is influenced by a default prosodic contour of the structure projected in silent reading. It predicts that speakers of a language who prefer high atta...

Query segmentation is the process of taking a user’s search-engine query and dividing the tokens into individual phrases or semantic units. Identification of these query segments can potentially improve both document-retrieval precision, by first returning pages which contain the exact query segments, and document-retrieval recall, by allowing query expansion or substitution via the segmented u...