CDG represents a sentence’s grammatical structure as assignments of dependency relations to functional variables associated with each word in the sentence. In this paper, we describe a statistical CDG (SCDG) parser that performs parsing incrementally and evaluate it on the Wall Street Journal Penn Treebank. Using a tight integration of multiple knowledge sources, together with distance modeling...

although the zarzian was first identified in the 1920s, it has not been until recently that detailed investigations of it have been undertaken. in contrast to the intensive research on the epipaleolithic period in the levant, the zarzian in the zagros area is less well known, although it shares some similarities (as well as differences) with the levantine epipaleolithic including trajectories o...

We investigate the problem of computing the partition function of a probabilistic context-free grammar, and consider a number of applicable methods. Particular attention is devoted to PCFGs that result from the intersection of another PCFG and a finite automaton. We report experiments involving the Wall Street Journal corpus.

Context-free grammars cannot be identified in the limit from positive examples (Gold 1967), yet natural language grammars are more powerful than context-free grammars and humans learn them with remarkable ease from positive examples (Marcus 1993). Identifiability results for formal languages ignore a potentially powerful source of information available to learners of natural languages, namely, ...

Natural languages contain regular, context-free, and contextsensitive syntactic constructions, yet none of these classes of formal languages can be identified in the limit from positive examples. Mildly context-sensitive languages are able to represent some context-sensitive constructions, those most common in natural languages, such as multiple agreement, crossed agreement, and duplication. Th...

This paper describes Grammar Learning by Partition Search, a general method for automatically constructing grammars for a range of parsing tasks. Given a base grammar, a training corpus, and a parsing task, Partition Search constructs an optimised probabilistic context-free grammar by searching a space of nonterminal set partitions, looking for a partition that maximises parsing performance and...

We consider the problem of computing the Kullback-Leibler distance, also called the relative entropy, between a probabilistic context-free grammar and a probabilistic finite automaton. We show that there is a closed-form (analytical) solution for one part of the Kullback-Leibler distance, viz. the cross-entropy. We discuss several applications of the result to the problem of distributional appr...

1. Microhabitat use and antipredator behaviour (i.e. behavioural response to a bird model and refuge microhabitat) was measured in an experimental set-up for 11 lacertid lizard species. Additionally, locomotor performance (sprint speed, climbing and clambering speed, manoeuvrability and endurance) of the same species was quantified. 2. The results showed considerable interspecific variation in ...

Stochastic context free grammars (SCFGs) are often used to represent the syntax of natural languages. Most algorithms for learning these grammars from data require a corpus of sentences to be stored and repearedly processed. We are interested in how embedded agents might learn the syntax of natural languages from exposure to utterances over long periods of time. In this context, the memory and ...

The development of computerized information retrieval dialogue systems communicating with the user in natural language requires the implementation of an effective training procedure with the aid of which the main modules of the dialogue system can be partly automatically developed. The presented paper describes an attempt to create the generating sentence templates automatically, using a specia...