In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval2016 task71: Determining Sentiment Intensity of English and Arabic Phrases, where we use web search engines for English and Arabic unsupervised sentiment intensity prediction. Our work is based, first, on a group of classic sentiment lexicons (e.g. Sentiment140 Lexicon, SentiWordNet). Second, on web search engines’ ability to find the cooccur...

In this paper we discuss particular choices we made during the development of a rule-based syntactic text simplification system. Such choices concern 1) how to deal with adverbial phrases in order to simplify sentences, and 2) the order in which to apply our set of simplification rules. Adverbial phrases have not been considered by previous work on text simplification, but have a considerable i...

For Interactive Patient II, a multimedia case simulation designed to improve history-taking skills, we created a new natural language interface called GRASP (General Recognition and Analysis of Sentences and Phrases) that allows students to interact with the program at a higher level of realism. Requirements included the ability to handle ambiguous word senses and to match user questions/querie...

This paper studies the impact that difficult-totranslate source-language phrases might have on the machine translation process. We formulate the notion of difficulty as a measurable quantity; we show that a classifier can be trained to predict whether a phrase might be difficult to translate; and we develop a framework that makes use of the classifier and external resources (such as human trans...

The field of compositional distributional semantics has proposed very interesting and reliable models for accounting the distributional meaning of simple phrases. These models however tend to disregard the syntactic structures when they are applied to larger sentences. In this paper we propose the chunk-based smoothed tree kernels (CSTKs) as a way to exploit the syntactic structures as well as ...

A system that can produce informative summaries, highlighting common information found in many online documents, will help Web users to pinpoint information that they need without extensive reading. In this article, we introduce sentence fusion, a novel text-to-text generation technique for synthesizing common information across documents. Sentence fusion involves bottom-up local multisequence ...

Sentiment analysis is an important step towards comprehension in natural language processing. Movie reviews are a convenient source of highly polarized sentences for use in sentiment analysis. Achieving a high level of accuracy in the sign of nonneutral sentiment is a challenge. When the problem is expanded to choosing one of 5 sentiment levels the problem becomes significantly harder. Among th...

We proposed an automatic method for determining the boundaries of prosodic phrases in real speech waves. In this method, the dynamic programming ( DP ) and the least mean square error ( LMSE ) methods were implemented based on the F0 generation model. In order to evaluate the accuracy and validity of this proposed method, a set of 973 standard Chinese speech sentences was selected. The cumulati...

Early work on quantification in natural languages showed that sentences like Every ape picked different berries, on the reading that the sets of berries picked by any two apes are not the same, can be logically represented with a single polyadic quantifier for the two nominal phrases. However, since that quantifier cannot be decomposed into two quantifiers for the two nominal phrases, a composi...

An adequate account of the nature of the so called 'propositional attitudes' has long been sought by philosophers of mind, and most theories which have been proposed have suffered from certain logical or epistemological defects or have been limited in scope. The issues centering around the nature of beliefs, desires, and the other attitudes pertain to two principal areas of investigation: the e...