Syntactic irregularities, which often occur in sourcecode undergoing maintenance, prevent the application of analysis and comprehension tools that employ traditional parsing techniques. As an alternative to parsing, we have developed an iterative lexical technique that is based on the repetitive application of regular expressions using a shortest-match strategy. The approach recognizes syntacti...

In this paper we introduce a semantic role labeling system constructed on top of the full syntactic analysis of text. The labeling problem is modeled using a rich set of lexical, syntactic, and semantic attributes and learned using one-versus-all AdaBoost classifiers. Our results indicate that even a simple approach that assumes that each semantic argument maps into exactly one syntactic phrase...

This paper discusses algorithms for topic selection queries, designed to query a database containing metadata about web information resources. The metadata database contains topics and relationships, called metalinks, about topics. Topics in the database contain associated importance scores. The topic selection operator TSelection selects, within time T, topics that satisfy a given selection fo...

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results across many language processing tasks, however they have been shown to be susceptible to overfitting and highly sensitive to noise, including adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a linguistically-motivated approach for training robust models based on exposing the model to corrupted text examples at training time. We consider several...

This paper discusses how pluractionality is expressed in Macuxi (Cariban), a South American Indigenous language spoken Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela. Cross-linguistically, the multiplicity of an action can be by means specialized pluractional morphemes affixed on verbs, via adverbs, or reduplication. Previous work claimed that iterative suffix -pîtî indicates actions, whereas verbal reduplicatio...

Syntactic databases are increasingly available and are put to a variety of uses, including serving as organized reference material for descriptive and theoretical syntacticians. Dense databases recording fine variation within a single language area, so-called “microvariation”, play a prominent role with respect to this use. In addition the large collections allow syntactic variation to be studi...

We show how the use of syntactic structure enables the resolution of hedge scope in a hybrid, two-stage approach to uncertainty analysis. In the first stage, a Maximum Entropy classifier, combining surface-oriented and syntactic features, identifies cue words. With a small set of hand-crafted rules operating over dependency representations in stage two, we attain the best overall result (in ter...