Veronika Lux

TSNLP: Test Suites for Natural Language Processing

The growing language technology industry needs measurement tools to allow researchers, engineers, managers, and customers to track development, evaluate and assure quality, and assess suitability for a variety of applications.The TSNLP (Test Suites for Natural Language Processing) project has investigated various aspects of the construction, maintenance and application of systematic test suites as diagnostic and evaluation tools for NLP applications. The paper summarizes the motivation and main results of TSNLP: besides the solid methodological foundation of the project, TSNLP has produced substantial (i.e. larger than any existing general test suites) multi-purpose and multi-user test suites for three European languages together with a set of specialized tools that facilitate the construction, extension, maintenance, retrieval, and customization of the test data.The publicly available results of TSNLP represent a valuable linguistic resource that has the potential of providing a wide-spread pre-standard diagnostic and evaluation tool for both developers and users of NLP applications.

XML and multilingual document authoring: convergent trends

Typical approaches to XML authoring view a XML document as a mixture of structure (the tags) and surface (text between the tags). We advocate a radical approach where the surface disappears from the XML document altogether to be handled exclusively by rendering mechanisms. This move is based on the view that the authors choices when authoring XML documents are best seen as language-neutral semantic decisions, that the structure can then be viewed as interlingual content, and that the textual output should be derived from this content by language-specific realization mechanisms, thus assimilating XML authoring to Multilingual Document Authoring. However, standard XML tools have important limitations when used for such a purpose: (1) they are weak at propagating semantic dependencies between different parts of the structure, and, (2) current XML rendering tools are ill-suited for handling the grammatical combination of textual units. We present two related proposals for overcoming these limitations: one (GF) originating in the tradition of mathematical proof editors and constructive type theory, the other (IG), a specialization of Definite Clause Grammars strongly inspired by GF.

Document structure and multilingual authoring

The use of XML-based authoring tools is swiftly becoming a standard in the world of technical documentation. An XML document is a mixture of structure (the tags) and surface (text between the tags). The structure reflects the choices made by the author during the top-down stepwise refinement of the document under control of a DTD grammar. These choices are typically choices of meaning which are independent of the language in which the document is rendered, and can be seen as a kind of interlingua for the class of documents which is modeled by the DTD. Based on this remark, we advocate a radicalization of XML authoring, where the semantic content of the document is accounted for exclusively in terms of choice structures, and where appropriate rendering/realization mechanisms are responsible for producing the surface, possibly in several languages simultaneously. In this view, XML authoring has strong connections to natural language generation and text authoring. We describe the IG (Interaction Grammar) formalism, an extension of DTDs which permits powerful linguistic manipulations, and show its application to the production of multilingual versions of a certain class of pharmaceutical documents.

Generating a controlled language

This paper argues for looking at Controlled Languages (CL) from a Natural Language Generation (NLG) perspective. We show that CLs are used in a normative environment in which different textual modules can be identified, each having its own set of rules constraining the text. These rules can be used as a basis for natural language generation. These ideas were tested in a proof of concept generator for the domain of aircraft maintenance manuals.

Dictionary-Driven Semantic Look-up

1. IntroductionThe French Semantic Dictionary Look-up (SDL) uses dictionary information aboutsubcategorization and collocates to perform Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD).The SDL is fully integrated in a multilingual comprehension system which uses theOxford Hachette French-English bilingual dictionary (OUP-H). Although the SDLworks on all words both for French and English, Romanseval results are relevantfor French verbs only because subcategorisation and collocate information is richerfor this part of speech in the OUP-H. The SDL uses dictionaries as semanticallytagged corpora of different languages, making the methodology reusable for anylanguage with existing on-line dictionaries.This paper first describes the system architecture as well as its components andresources. Second, it presents the work we did within Romanseval, namely sensemapping and results analysis.2. Semantic Dictionary Look-Up: Goal, Architecture and ComponentsThe SDL selects the most appropriate translation of a word appearing in a givencontext. It reorders dictionary entries making use of dictionary information. It isbuilt on top of Locolex,

Experimenting with the circus language for XML modeling and transformation

After a brief introduction to the Circus programming language, we present a simple type set to model XML structures. We then describe a transformation that takes a mail as input and produces a reply, showing how subtyping is used in order to refine the type control and specialize the transformation. Conclusions are drawn both on our (easy to use but clearly limited) XML data model and on Circus itself ; expected qualities of the language are verified ; the need for some new features is expressed. Finally, we sketch some language extensions, a richer model for XML structures, and explain our choices and expectations.

Corpus-based annotated test set for machine translation evaluation by an industrial user

This article is concerned with the building of a test data set for assisting the industrial user in machine translation evaluation. The emphasis is laid on the interest of an approach based on the study of bilingual corpus pragmatic characteristics. The study of one chapter of the maintenance manual of the Super Puma helicopter made it possible to identify the pragmatic characteristics relevant in the choice of the morpho-syntactic structures and translation processes actually used. The textual test set consists in a SGML file including the source text sequences aligned with the reference translation sequences and also including the pragmatic, formal and translational characteristics in the form of annotations (labels and formal descriptions).