Understanding a complex sentence requires the processing of information at different (e.g., phonological, semantic, and syntactic) levels, the intermediate storage of this information and the unification of this information to compute the meaning of the sentence information. The present investigation homed in on two aspects of sentence processing: working memory and reanalysis. Event-related fu...

Sentences encode hierarchical structural relations among words. Several neuroimaging experiments aiming to localize combinatory operations responsible for creating this structure during sentence comprehension have contrasted short, simple phrases and sentences to unstructured controls. Some of these experiments have revealed activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and posterior supe...

This paper applies parsing technology to the task of syntactic simplification of English sentences, focusing on the identification of text spans that can be removed from a complex sentence. We report the most comprehensive evaluation to-date on this task, using a dataset of sentences that exhibit simplification based on coordination, subordination, punctuation/parataxis, adjectival clauses, par...

In our entry to the new HARD track, we have investigated two methods of interactively refining user search formulations. One method consists of asking the user to select a number of sentences that may represent relevant documents, and then using the documents, whose sentences were selected for query expansion. The second method is to show to the user a list of noun phrases, extracted from the i...

We propose to automatically summarize student responses to reflection prompts and introduce a novel summarization algorithm that differs from traditional methods in several ways. First, since the linguistic units of student inputs range from single words to multiple sentences, our summaries are created from extracted phrases rather than from sentences. Second, the phrase summarization algorithm...

Recognizing polarity requires a list of polar words and phrases. For the purpose of building such lexicon automatically, a lot of studies have investigated (semi-) unsupervised method of learning polarity of words and phrases. In this paper, we explore to use structural clues that can extract polar sentences from Japanese HTML documents, and build lexicon from the extracted polar sentences. The...

The paper presents two approaches to interactively refining user search formulations and their evaluation in the new High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track of TREC-12. One method consists of asking the user to select a number of sentences that may represent relevant documents, and then using the documents, whose sentences were selected for query expansion. The second method consist...

Aiming at automatic extraction of F0 control parameters based on a generation model, we proposed an automatic extraction method using utterance information. In the proposed method, constituent phrase information is used for the prediction of initial value of F0 control parameters in the optimal value search. Extraction experiments using short and long sentence sets showed higher extraction accu...

I present a computationally-based representation for inde nite noun phrases and anaphora that models their use in natural language. To this end, three goals for knowledge representation for natural language processing: natural form, conceptual completeness, and structure sharing are described. In addressing these goals, an augmentation to the representation of variables (corresponding to inde n...

We propose a method of revising lead sentences in a news broadcast. Unlike many other methods proposed so far, this method does not use the coreference relation of noun phrases (NPs) but rather, insertion and substitution of the phrases modifying the same head chunk in lead and other sentences. The method borrows an idea from the sentence fusion methods and is more general than those using NP c...