Exploring Time, Tense and Aspect in Natural Language Database Interfaces PDF Download

Author: Ion Androutsopoulos
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027297479
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Advances in temporal databases make it increasingly easier to store time-dependent information, creating a need for facilities that will help end-users access this information. In the context of natural language interaction, significant effort has been devoted to interfaces that allow database queries to be formulated in natural language. Most of the existing interfaces, however, do not support adequately the notion of time. Drawing upon tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases, this cross-discipline book examines relevant issues from the three areas, developing a unified theoretical framework that can be used to build natural language interfaces to temporal databases. The framework features an HPSG mapping from English to a formally defined meaning representation language, and a corresponding mapping to a temporal extension of the SQL database language. The book is accompanied by a freely available prototype interface, built according to the framework, and implemented using Prolog and ALE. This is the first in-depth exploration of the notion of time in natural language database interfaces. It will be particularly interesting to researchers working on natural language interaction, tense and aspect, HPSG, temporal logics, and temporal databases, especially those who wish to learn about time-related issues in other disciplines.

Author: Ion Androutsopoulos
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027249903
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Advances in temporal databases make it increasingly easier to store time-dependent information, creating a need for facilities that will help end-users access this information. In the context of natural language interaction, significant effort has been devoted to interfaces that allow database queries to be formulated in natural language. Most of the existing interfaces, however, do not support adequately the notion of time. Drawing upon tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases, this cross-discipline book examines relevant issues from the three areas, developing a unified theoretical framework that can be used to build natural language interfaces to temporal databases. The framework features an HPSG mapping from English to a formally defined meaning representation language, and a corresponding mapping to a temporal extension of the SQL database language. The book is accompanied by a freely available prototype interface, built according to the framework, and implemented using Prolog and ALE. This is the first in-depth exploration of the notion of time in natural language database interfaces. It will be particularly interesting to researchers working on natural language interaction, tense and aspect, HPSG, temporal logics, and temporal databases, especially those who wish to learn about time-related issues in other disciplines.

Author: I. Androutsopoulos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computer interfaces
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Abstract: "Most existing natural language database interfaces (NLDBs) were designed to be used with database systems that provide very limited facilities for manipulating time-dependent data, and they do not support adequately temporal linguistic mechanisms (verb tenses, temporal adverbials, temporal subordinate clauses, etc.). The database community is becoming increasingly interested in temporal database systems, that are intended to store and manipulate in a principled manner information not only about the present, but also about the past and future. When interfacing to temporal databases, supporting temporal linguistic mechanisms become crucial. We present a framework for constructing natural language interfaces for temporal databases (NLTDBs), that draws on research in tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases. The framework consists of a temporal intermediate representation language, called TOP, an HPSG grammar that maps a wide range of questions involving temporal mechanisms to appropriate TOP expressions, and a provably correct method for translating from TOP to TSQL2, TSQL2 being a recently proposed temporal extension of the SQL database language. This framework was employed to implement a prototype NLTDB."

Author: Inderjeet Mani
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533300
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
This reader collects and introduces important work in linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics on the use of linguistic devices in natural languages to situate events in time: whether they are past, present, or future; whether they are real or hypothetical; when an event might have occurred, and how long it could have lasted. In focussing on the treatment and retrieval of time-based information it seeks to lay the foundation for temporally-aware natural language computer processing systems, for example those that process documents on the worldwide web to answer questions or produce summaries. The development of such systems requires the application of technical knowledge from many different disciplines. The book is the first to bring these disciplines together, by means of classic and contemporary papers in four areas: tense, aspect, and event structure; temporal reasoning; the temporal structure of natural language discourse; and temporal annotation. Clear, self-contained editorial introductions to each area provide the necessary technical background for the non-specialist, explaining the underlying connections across disciplines. A wide range of students and professionals in academia and industry will value this book as an introduction and guide to a new and vital technology. The former include researchers, students, and teachers of natural language processing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science, information retrieval (including the growing speciality of question-answering), library sciences, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Those in industry include corporate managers and researchers, software product developers, and engineers in information-intensive companies, such as on-line database and web-service providers.

Author: Nicolas Nicolov
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294682
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the 2003 International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing”. A wide range of topics is covered in the volume: semantics, dialogue, summarization, anaphora resolution, shallow parsing, morphology, part-of-speech tagging, named entity, question answering, word sense disambiguation, information extraction. Various ‘state-of-the-art’ techniques are explored: finite state processing, machine learning (support vector machines, maximum entropy, decision trees, memory-based learning, inductive logic programming, transformation-based learning, perceptions), latent semantic analysis, constraint programming. The papers address different languages (Arabic, English, German, Slavic languages) and use different linguistic frameworks (HPSG, LFG, constraint-based DCG). This book will be of interest to those who work in computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, human language technology, translation studies, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and informatics.

Author: Peter Jackson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027249920
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.

Author: Toshikazu Foley
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047441001
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This study integrates three independent subjects—translation theory, Mandarin aspect, and Greek aspect—for the purpose of formulating a theory applicable to translating the Bible. Two passages from John 18–19 and 1 Corinthians 15 are provided as test cases.

Author: Ruslan Mitkov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019927634X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
This handbook of computational linguistics, written for academics, graduate students and researchers, provides a state-of-the-art reference to one of the most active and productive fields in linguistics.

Author: Yorick Wilks
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027249946
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants not robots but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization."

Author: Paola Merlo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027297487
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Lexical effects on language processing are currently a major focus of attention in studies of sentence comprehension. This thematic collection provides a uniquely multi-faceted and integrated viewpoint on key aspects of lexicalist theories, drawing from the fields of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The focus of this stimulating volume is on a number of central topics: The discussion of foundational issues concerning the nature of the lexicon and its relationship to sentence understanding; the exploration of the relationship between syntactic and lexical processing; and the investigation of the specific content of lexical entries, especially for verbs. The authors draw on a range of methodologies, from computational modeling to corpus studies to behavioral and neuro-imaging experimental techniques. The breadth of topics and methodologies is brought together by the articulated, critical analysis of the field provided in the introduction. The research reported here elaborates both the structure and the probabilistic content of lexical representations, and meets up with work in computer science, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy on the relation between conceptual, grammatical, and statistical knowledge.