Semantic inference is an important component in many natural language understanding applications. Classical approaches to semantic inference rely on complex logical representations. However, practical applications usually adopt shallower lexical or lexical-syntactic representations, but lack a principled inference framework. We propose a generic semantic inference framework that operates direct...

Cross-document coreference occurs when the same person, place, event, or concept is discussed in more than one text source. Computer recognition of this phenomenon is important because it helps break \the document boundary" by allowing a user to examine information about a particular entity from multiple text sources at the same time. Cross-document coref-erence was identiied as one of the pote...

Machine Reading: from Wikipedia to the Web

Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including s...

In this paper we investigate the effect of downsampling negative training instances on a multilingual memory-based coreference resolution approach. We report results on the SemEval-2010 task 1 data sets for six different languages (Catalan, Dutch, English, German, Italian and Spanish) and for four evaluation metrics (MUC, B, CEAF, BLANC). Our experiments show that downsampling negative training...

Based on an ongoing attempt to integrate Natural Language instructions with human figure animation, we demonstrate that agents' understanding and use of instructions can complement what they can derive from the environment in which they act. We focus on two attitudes that contribute to agents' behavior their intentions and their expectations and shown how Natural Language instructions contribut...

We describe in this paper a syntactic parser for spontaneous speech geared towards the identification of verbal subcategorization frames. The parser proceeds in two stages. The first stage is based on generic syntactic resources for French. The second stage is a reranker which is specially trained for a given application. The parser is evaluated on the MEDIA corpus.

In this paper, we exploit non-local features as an estimate of long-distance dependencies to improve performance on the statistical spoken language understanding (SLU) problem. The statistical natural language parsers trained on text perform unreliably to encode non-local information on spoken language. An alternative method we propose is to use trigger pairs that are automatically extracted by...

This paper describes the Question Answering for Machine Reading (QA4MRE) Main Task at the 2013 Cross Language Evaluation Forum. In the main task, systems answered multiple-choice questions on documents concerned with four different topics. There were also two pilot tasks, Machine Reading on Biomedical Texts about Alzheimer's disease, and Japanese Entrance Exams. This paper describes the prepara...

Recently, conversational robots are widely used in mobile terminals as the virtual assistant or companion. The goals of prevalent conversational robots mainly focus on four categories, namely chitchat, task completion, question answering and recommendation. In this paper, we present a Chinese intelligent conversational robot, Benben, which is designed to achieve these goals in a unified archite...