Koenraad De Smedt

Architectures for Natural Language Generation: Problems and Perspectives

Current research in natural language generation is situated in a computational linguistics tradition that was founded several decades ago. We critically analyse some of the architectural assumptions underlying existing systems and point out some problems in the domains of text planning and lexicalization. Guided by the identification of major generation challenges viewed from the angles of knowledge-based systems and cognitive psychology, we sketch some new directions for future research.

Markedness effects in Norwegian-English bilinguals: Task-dependent use of language-specific letters and bigrams

This study investigates how bilinguals use sublexical language membership information to speed up their word recognition process in different task situations. Norwegian–English bilinguals performed a Norwegian–English language decision task, a mixed English lexical decision task, or a mixed Norwegian lexical decision task. The mixed lexical decision experiments included words from the nontarget language that required a “no” response. The language specificity of the Bokmål (a Norwegian written norm) and English (non)words was varied by including language-specific letters (“smør”, “hawk”) or bigrams (“dusj”, “veal”). Bilinguals were found to use both types of sublexical markedness to facilitate their decisions, language-specific letters leading to larger effects than language-specific bigrams. A cross-experimental comparison indicates that the use of sublexical language information was strategically dependent on the task at hand and that decisions were based on language membership information derived directly from sublexical (bigram) stimulus characteristics instead of indirectly via their lexical representations. Available models for bilingual word recognition fail to handle the observed marker effects, because all consider language membership as a lexical property only.

Some Reflections on Studies in Humanities Computing

In any academic field, research advances tend to percolate naturally to higher education in that field. In recent years, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of courses and degree programmes in humanities computing. This paper presents some reflections on the status of humanities computing in higher education, in terms of curricula, degrees, and international student and staff mobility. The most important issue is the question of what a humanities computing degree should offer, in view of the wide interdisciplinarity of the field. Different institutions have coped with this question in very different ways. With potentially far-reaching consequences on methodology in the various relevant disciplines, humanities computing is bound to change both what and how humanities students learn. Curriculum innovation that aims to integrate computing in the humanities is a difficult process that requires reflection, cooperation, teacher training, and other supporting actions.

What role does dialect knowledge play in the perception of linguistic distances

The present paper investigates to what extent subjects base their judgments of linguistic distances on actual dialect data presented in a listening experiment and to what extent they make use of previous knowledge of the dialects when making their judgments. The point of departure for our investigation were distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as perceived by Norwegian listeners. We correlated these perceptual distances with objective phonetic distances measured on the basis of the transcriptions of the recordings used in the perception experiment. In addition, we correlated the perceptual distances with objective distances based on other datasets. On the basis of the correlation results and multiple regression analyses we conclude that the listeners did not base their judgments solely on information that they heard during the experiments but also on their general knowledge of the dialects. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the effect is stronger for the group of listeners who recognised th...

The very model of a modern linguist — in honor of Helge Dyvik

The topic of this paper is Old English and Old Norwegian noun phrases containing two attributive adjectives. An overview of the frequency of various word order constellations will be given, before we zoom in on one of them, namely the construction Adjective – Adjective – Noun, i.e. noun phrases in which two prenominal adjectives occur next to each other without a coordinating conjunction. Old English and Old Norwegian will be compared with respect to which adjectives occur in this position. The paper also includes an intermezzo, during which we investigate what happens to adjective position when a text is translated from present-day English into Old English.

The enrichment of lexical resources through incremental parsebanking

Automatic syntactic analysis of a corpus requires detailed lexical and morphological information that cannot always be harvested from traditional dictionaries. Therefore the development of a treebank presents an opportunity to simultaneously enrich the lexicon. In building NorGramBank, we use an incremental parsebanking approach, in which a corpus is parsed and disambiguated, and after improvements to the grammar and the lexicon, reparsed. In this context we have implemented a text preprocessing interface where annotators can enter unknown words or missing lexical information either before parsing or during disambiguation. The information added to the lexicon in this way may be of great interest both to lexicographers and to other language technology efforts.

The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation

The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation was held from 21 to 24 June 1994 in Kennebunkport, Maine. Sixty-seven people from 13 countries attended this 4-day meeting on the study of natural language generation in computational linguistics and AI. The goal of the workshop was to introduce new, cutting-edge work to the community and provide an atmosphere in which discussion and exchange would flourish.