Hana Skoumalová

Identifying topic and focus by an automatic procedure

An algorithm for automatic identification of topic and focus of the sentence is presented, based on dependency syntax and using written input, which is much more ambiguous than spoken utterance.

Multilinguality in a text generation system for three Slavic languages

This paper describes a multilingual text generation system in the domain of CAD/CAM software instructions for Bulgarian, Czech and Russian. Starting from a language-independent semantic representation, the system drafts natural, continuous text as typically found in software manuals. The core modules for strategic and tactical generation are implemented using the KPML platform for linguistic resource development and generation. Prominent characteristics of the approach implemented are a treatment of multilinguality that makes maximal use of the commonalities between languages while also accounting for their differences and a common representational strategy for both text planning and sentence generation.

Enhancing the Valency Dictionary of Czech Verbs: Tectogrammatical Annotation

A syntactic lexicon of verbs with the subcategorization information is crucial for NLP. Two phases of creating such lexicon are presented. The first phase consists of the automatic preprocessing of source data-particular valency frames are proposed. Where it is possible, the functors are assigned, otherwise the set of possible functors is proposed. In the second phase the proposed valency frames are manually refined.

Eye of a Needle in a Haystack

We propose a multidimensional taxonomy of multiword expressions (MWEs) as a pattern applicable to entries in a representative lexicon of Czech MWEs. The taxonomy and the lexicon are useful for many reasons concerning lexicography, teaching Czech as a foreign language, and theoretical issues of MWEs as entities standing between lexicon and grammar, as well as for NLP tasks such as tagging and parsing, identification and search of MWEs, or word sense and semantic disambiguation. In addition to the description of various types of idiomaticity, the taxonomy and the lexicon are designed to account for flexibility in morphology and word order, syntactic and lexical variants and even creatively used fragments.