In this paper, the problem of fast model adaptation for nonnative speakers is addressed from a perspective of model complexity selection. The key challenge lies in reliable complexity selection when only a small amount of adaptation data is available. A novel maximum expected likelihood (MEL) based technique is proposed to enable model complexity selection from using as little as one adaptation...

The purpose of this work is to build something like the hypernym-labeled noun hierarchy of WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) automatically from t e x t using no other lexical resources. WordNet has been an important research tool, but it is insufficient for domainspecific text, such as that encountered in the MUCs (Message Understanding Conferences). Our work develops a labeled hierarchy based on a text...

This paper presents an on-going effort which aims to annotate the Wall Street Journal sections of the Penn Treebank with the help of a hand-written large-scale and wide-coverage grammar of English. In doing so, we are not only focusing on the various stages of the semi-automated annotation process we have adopted, but we are also showing that rich linguistic annotations, which can apart from sy...

What determines success on Wall Street? This study examined if genes affecting dopamine levels of professional traders were associated with their career tenure. Sixty professional Wall Street traders were genotyped and compared to a control group who did not trade stocks. We found that distinct alleles of the dopamine receptor 4 promoter (DRD4P) and catecholamine-O-methyltransferase (COMT) that...

In this paper we examine the market reaction—price and volume—to the appearance of a firm in the Who’s News column of The Wall Street Journal. We differentiate between those firms whose articles are accompanied by a picture of an executive and a control set of firms whose articles on the same day are not accompanied by a picture. The results show a more pronounced market reaction to the “cum pi...

We present PCRISP, a sentence generation system for probabilistic TAG grammars which performs sentence planning and surface realization in an integrated fashion, in the style of the SPUD system. PCRISP operates by converting the generation problem into a metric planning problem and solving it using an offthe-shelf planner. We evaluate PCRISP on the WSJ corpus and identify trade-offs between cov...

Efficient and precise comparison of parser results across frameworks will require a negotiated agreement on a target representation which embodies a good balance of three competing dimensions: consistency, clarity, and flexibility. The various annotations provided in the COLING-08 shared task for the ten ’required’ Wall Street Journal sentences can serve as a useful basis for these negotations....

Based on 17 in-depth interviews with people involved in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, we present a typology of how Twitter is used in the service of protest that draws attention to its utilization in conjunction with face-to-face actions. The OWS case study demonstrates how the rapid digital circulation of texts allows protestors to quickly build a geographically dispersed, networked c...

The ability to detect similarity in conjunct heads is potentially a useful tool in helping to disambiguate coordination structures a difficult task for parsers. We propose a distributional measure of similarity designed for such a task. We then compare several different measures of word similarity by testing whether they can empirically detect similarity in the head nouns of noun phrase conjunc...