The pervasive ambiguity of language allows sentences that differ in just one lexical item to have rather different inference patterns. This would be no problem if the different lexical items fell into clearly definable and easy to represent classes. But this is not the case. To draw the correct inferences we need to look how the referents of the lexical items in the sentence (or broader context...

This paper describes an unsupervised approach for natural language disambiguation, applicable to ambiguity problems where classes of equivalence can be defined over the set of words in a lexicon. Lexical knowledge is induced from non-ambiguous words via classes of equivalence, and enables the automatic generation of annotated corpora. The only requirements are a lexicon and a raw textual corpus...

This paper presents a unified approach for Chinese lexical analysis using hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM), which aims to incorporate Chinese word segmentation, Part-Of-Speech tagging, disambiguation and unknown words recognition into a whole theoretical frame. A class-based HMM is applied in word segmentation, and in this level unknown words are treated in the same way as common words l...

The relations between English spellings and pronunciations have been described as a fractal pattern. Manipulations of word properties are constructed to coincide with the fractal pattern of ambiguity in these relations (sampled as random variables). New word naming and lexical decision experiments replicate previously established effects of relations between word spellings and pronunciations. T...

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements indicated facilitated recognition of repeated express...

This paper presents a statistical decision procedure for lexical ambiguity resolution. The algorithm exploits both local syntactic patterns and more distant collo-cational evidence, generating an eecient, eeective, and highly perspicuous recipe for resolving a given ambiguity. By identifying and utilizing only the single best dis-ambiguating evidence in a target context, the algorithm avoids th...

Translation ambiguity, out of vocabulary words and missing some translations in bilingual dictionaries make dictionary-based Crosslanguage Information Retrieval (CLIR) a challenging task. Moreover, in agglutinative languages which do not have reliable stemmers, missing various lexical formations in bilingual dictionaries degrades CLIR performance. This paper aims to introduce a probabilistic tr...

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively unimpaired. Experiment 2 showed that all three patients...

This paper proposes a new approach for acquiring morpho-lexical probabilities from an untagged corpus. This approach demonstrates a way to extract very useful and nontrivial information from an untagged corpus, which otherwise would require laborious tagging of large corpora. The paper describes the use of these morpho-lexical probabilities as an information source for morphological disambiguat...