This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory -- the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT) -- has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is

The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the `relations' that hold between its component spans currently forms the basis for an active research programme in discourse linguistics. Coherence relations feature prominently in many theories of discourse structure, and have recently been used with considerable success in text generation systems. However, while the concept of coherence relations is now common currency for discourse theorists, there remains much confusion about them, and no standard set of relations has yet emerged. The aim of this thesis is to contribute towards the development of a standard set of relations. We begin from an explicitly empirical conception of relations: they are taken to model a collection of psychological mechanisms operative during the tasks of reading and writing. This conception is fleshed out with reference to psychological theories of skilled task performance, and to Rosch's notion of the basic level of categorisation. A methodology for investi...

Cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as now and well that function as explicit indicators of the structure of a discourse. For example, now may signal the beginning of a subtopic or a return to a previous topic, while well may mark subsequent material as a response to prior material, or as an explanatory comment. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each also has one or more alternate uses. While incidentally may be used sententially as an adverbial, for example, the discourse use initiates a digression. Although distinguishing discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases is critical to the interpretation and generation of discourse, the question of how speakers and hearers accomplish this disambiguation is rarely addressed. This paper reports results of empirical studies on discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases, in which both text-based and prosodic features were examined for disambiguating power. Based on these studies, it is proposed that discourse versus sentential usage may be distinguished by intonational features, specifically, pitch accent and prosodic phrasing. A prosodic model that characterizes these distinctions is identified. This model is associated with features identifiable from text analysis, including orthography and part of speech, to permit the application of the results of the prosodic analysis to the generation of appropriate intonational features for discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases in synthetic speech. 1.

Identifying the occurrences of proper names in text and the entities they refer to can be a difficult task because of the manyto -many mapping between names and their referents. We analyze the types of ambiguity --- structural and semantic --- that make the discovery of proper names difficult in text, and describe the heuristics used to disambiguate names in Nominator, a fully-implemented module for proper name recognition developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. NOTE: This is a preprint of a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the 5th Applied Natural Language Processing Conference, March 31 to April 3, 1997, Washington, D.C. 1 Proper Name Identification in Natural Language Processing Text processing applications, such as machine translation systems, information retrieval systems or natural-language understanding systems, need to identify multi-word expressions that refer to proper names of people, organizations, places, laws and other entities. When encountering Mrs...

Large amounts of low- to medium-quality English texts are now being produced by machine translation (MT) systems, optical character readers (OCR), and non-native speakers of English. Most of this text must be postedited by hand before it sees the light of day. Improving text quality is tedious work, but its automation has not received much research attention. Anyone who has postedited a technical report or thesis written by a non-native speaker of English knows the potential of an automated postediting system. For the case of MT-generated text, we argue for the construction of postediting modules that are portable across MT systems, as

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in the knowledge base by querying it in English. The system analyzes the query and decides through a matching process what information in the knowledge base is relevant to the question. Then it retrieves this information and formulates its response also in English.

Our goal is to identify the features that predict cue selectlob and placement in order to devise strategies for automatic text generation.

We present an implemented procedure to select an appropriate connective to link two propositions, which is part of a large text generation system. Each connec- tive is defined as a set of constraints between features of fire propositions it connects. Our focus has been to identify pragmatic features that can be produced by a deep generator to provide a simple representation of connectives. Using these features, we can account for a variety of connective usages, and we can distinguish between similar connectives. We describe how a surface generator can produce complex sentences when given these features in input. The selection procedure is implemented as part of a large functional unification grammar.

This thesis develops a new approach to automatic language generation that focuses on the need to produce a range of different paraphrases from the same input representation. One novelty of the system is its solidly grounding representations of word meaning in a background knowledge base, which enables the production of paraphrases stemming from certain inferences, rather than from purely lexical relationships alone. The system is designed in such a way that the paraphrasing mechanism extends naturally to a multilingual generator; specifically, we will be concerned with producing English and German sentences. The focus of the system is on lexical paraphrases, and one of the contributions of the thesis is in identifying, analyzing and extending relevant linguistic research so that it can be used to handle...

this dissertation. I single out for special thanks first a few of the Ventura Hall crowd, including Mfirvet Eng, Nancy Wiegand, Susan Stucky (the other Mennonite formal linguist), and Kathie Carpenter, Suzanne Kemmer and Michael Barlow, with whom I have happily shared every step of the Stanford graduate pilgrimage. Next, I warmly thank Gina Wein for her competent administrative support and for her friendship. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the strong shaping influences of the members of the Stanford linguistics faculty, who teach and also model a vibrant and professional approach to linguistic research. Representative of these scholars are the three members of my reading committee, whose work and counsel have had a profound effect on my work; I thank Joan Bresnan, Ivan Sag, and my principal advisor, Thomas Wasow, whose patience, cheerful persistence, unstinting support, solid critique, creative ideas, and common sense made the writing of this thesis possible and enjoyable. Every student should have such an advisor