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Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach

Part of the book series: The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science (SECS, volume 196)

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Table of contents (22 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
  2. Introduction

    • Karen Jensen, George Heidorn, Stephen Richardson
    Pages 1-11
  3. Towards Transductive Linguistics

    • Alexis Manaster Ramer
    Pages 13-27
  4. PEG: The PLNLP English Grammar

    • Karen Jensen
    Pages 29-45
  5. Parse Fitting and Prose Fixing

    • Karen Jensen, George Heidorn, Lance Miller, Yael Ravin
    Pages 53-64
  6. Broad-Coverage Machine Translation

    • Diana Santos
    Pages 101-118
  7. Building a Knowledge Base from Parsed Definitions

    • Judith Klavans, Martin Chodorow, Nina Wacholder
    Pages 119-133
  8. A Semantic Expert Using an Online Standard Dictionary

    • Jean-Louis Binot, Karen Jensen
    Pages 135-147
  9. SENS: The System for Evaluating Noun Sequences

    • Lucy Vanderwende
    Pages 161-173
  10. A Two-Stage Algorithm to Parse Multi-Lingual Argument Structures

    • Jean-Pierre Chanod, Bettina Harriehausen, Simonetta Montemagni
    Pages 215-226
  11. C-SHALT: English-to-Chinese Machine Translation Using Argument Structures

    • Ee Ah Choo, Koh Mui Koong, Low Hwee Boon, Tong Loong Cheong, Wan Kwee Ngim, Wee Li Kwang
    Pages 227-245
  12. Sense Disambiguation Using Online Dictionaries

    • Lisa Braden-Harder
    Pages 247-261

About this book

Natural language is easy for people and hard for machines. For two generations, the tantalizing goal has been to get computers to handle human languages in ways that will be compelling and useful to people. Obstacles are many and legendary.
Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach describes one group's decade of research in pursuit of that goal. A very broad coverage NLP system, including a programming language (PLNLP) development tools, and analysis and synthesis components, was developed and incorporated into a variety of well-known practical applications, ranging from text critiquing (CRITIQUE) to machine translation (e.g. SHALT). This books represents the first published collection of papers describing the system and how it has been used. Twenty-six authors from nine countries contributed to this volume.
Natural language analysis, in the PLNLP approach, is done is six stages that move smoothly from syntax through semantics into discourse. The initial syntactic sketch is provided by an Augmented Phrase Structure Grammar (APSG) that uses exclusively binary rules and aims to produce some reasonable analysis for any input string. Its `approximate' analysis passes to the reassignment component, which takes the default syntactic attachments and adjusts them, using semantic information obtained by parsing definitions and example sentences from machine-readable dictionaries. This technique is an example of one facet of the PLNLP approach: the use of natural language itself as a knowledge representation language -- an innovation that permits a wide variety of online text materials to be exploited as sources of semantic information.
The next stage computes the intrasential argument structure and resolves all references, both NP- and VP-anaphora, that can be treated at this point in the processing. Subsequently, additional components, currently not so well developed as the earlier ones, handle the further disambiguation of word senses, the normalization of paraphrases, and the construction of a paragraph (discourse) model by joining sentential semantic graphs.
Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach acquaints the reader with the theory and application of a working, real-world, domain-free NLP system, and attempts to bridge the gap between computational and theoretical models of linguistic structure. It provides a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of computational linguistics, natural processing, artificial intelligence, and information science.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA

    Karen Jensen, George E. Heidorn, Stephen D. Richardson

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access