Natural Language Processing Using Very Large Corpora

ABOUT THIS BOOK This book is intended for researchers who want to keep abreast of cur­ rent developments in corpus-based natural language processing. It is not meant as an introduction to this field; for readers who need one, several entry-level texts are available, including those of (Church and Mercer, 1993; Charniak, 1993; Jelinek, 1997). This book captures the essence of a series of highly successful work­ shops held in the last few years. The response in 1993 to the initial Workshop on Very Large Corpora (Columbus, Ohio) was so enthusias­ tic that we were encouraged to make it an annual event. The following year, we staged the Second Workshop on Very Large Corpora in Ky­ oto. As a way of managing these annual workshops, we then decided to register a special interest group called SIGDAT with the Association for Computational Linguistics. The demand for international forums on corpus-based NLP has been expanding so rapidly that in 1995 SIGDAT was led to organize not only the Third Workshop on Very Large Corpora (Cambridge, Mass. ) but also a complementary workshop entitled From Texts to Tags (Dublin). Obviously, the success of these workshops was in some measure a re­ flection of the growing popularity of corpus-based methods in the NLP community. But first and foremost, it was due to the fact that the work­ shops attracted so many high-quality papers.

Implementation and Evaluation of a German HMM for POS Disambiguation.- Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging with an Application To German.- Unsupervised Learning of Disambiguation Rules for Part-of-Speech Tagging.- Tagging French without Lexical Probabilities — Combining Linguistic Knowledge and Statistical Learning.- Example-Based Sense Tagging of Running Chinese Text.- Disambiguating Noun Groupings with Respect to WordNet Senses.- A Comparison of Corpus-based Techniques for Restoring Accents in Spanish and French Text.- Beyond Word N-Grams.- Statistical Augmentation of a Chinese Machine-Readable Dictionary.- Text Chunking Using Transformation-based Learning.- Prepositional Phrase Attachment through a Backed-off Model.- On the Unsupervised Induction of Phrase-Structure Grammars.- Robust Bilingual Word Alignment for Machine Aided Translation.- Iterative Alignment of Syntactic Structures for a Bilingual Corpus.- Trainable Coarse Bilingual Grammars for Parallel Text Bracketing.- Comparative Discourse Analysis of Parallel Texts.- Comparing the Retrieval Performance of English and Japanese Text Databases.- Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): A Measure of Deviations from Poisson.- List of Authors.