Balázs Indig

Decreasing Entropy : How Wide to Open the Window?

On the basis of the literature about human sentence processing we examined the parsing process from two aspects. With the help of a sentence-completion experiment we show that there is a strong relationship between the entropy of the words in the sentence and the look-ahead window of a two-phase sentence processing model. The result of our experiment showed that people intend to close the verbal complex and the noun phrase as soon as possible and our corpus-measurements support that it happens in a trigram window.

Manócska: A Unified Verb Frame Database for Hungarian

This paper presents Manocska, a verb frame database for Hungarian. It is called unified as it was built by merging all available verb frame resources. To be able to merge these, we had to cope with their structural and conceptual differences. After that, we transformed them into two easy to use formats: a TSV and an XML file. Manocska is open-access, the whole resource and the scripts which were used to create it are available in a github repository. This makes Manocska reproducible and easy to access, version, fix and develop in the future. During the merging process, several errors came into sight. These were corrected as systematically as possible. Thus, by integrating and harmonizing the resources, we produced a Hungarian verb frame database of a higher quality.

Gut, Besser, Chunker – Selecting the Best Models for Text Chunking with Voting

The CoNLL-2000 dataset is the de-facto standard dataset for measuring chunkers on the task of chunking base noun phrases (NP) and arbitrary phrases. The state-of-the-art tagging method is utilising TnT, an HMM-based Part-of-Speech tagger (POS), with simple majority voting on different representations and fine-grained classes created by lexcialising tags. In this paper the state-of-the-art English phrase chunking method was deeply investigated, re-implemented and evaluated with several modifications. We also investigated a less studied side of phrase chunking, i.e. the voting between different currently available taggers, the checking of invalid sequences and the way how the state-of-the-art method can be adapted to morphologically rich, agglutinative languages.

Methods of Linking Linguistic Resources for Semantic Role Labeling

This paper presents the process of enriching the verb frame database of a Hungarian natural language parser to enable the assignment of semantic roles. We accomplished this by linking the parser’s verb frame database to existing linguistic resources such as VerbNet and WordNet, and automatically transferring back semantic knowledge. We developed OWL ontologies that map the various constraint description formalisms of the linked resources and employed a logical reasoning device to facilitate the linking procedure. We present results and discuss the challenges and pitfalls that arose from this undertaking. We also compare our rule-based approach with that of using a state-of-the-art English semantic role labeler pipeline for the thematic role transferring task.