26 January: DCLRS -- Friday, January 27, 2006 -- Martin Emms
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of January 2006 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2006 | Full index
The next Computational Linguistics Research Seminar will feature a
talk by Martin Emms, of TCD's Department of Computer Science.
The seminar will take place
- on Friday January 27,
- at 4pm
- in Room B1.09
- in UCD's School of Computer Science and Informatics, Belfield Campus,
( on the map at http://www.ucd.ie/maps/campusmap05.jpg we are
building "22" an inch
to the left of the topleft corner of the central lake)
All are welcome to attend.
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Martin Emms:
Title:
The potential of QATD: Question Answering by Tree Distance
Abstract:
A leading intuition in linguistics is that syntactic constituents
group items that are semantically related. "A syntactic analysis of a
sentence tells us how to determine the meaning of the sentence from
the meaning of the words" (Manning & Schuetze 2003). I will be
discussing work in which syntactic structures are more or less used as
a substitute for semantic structures, in an approach to question
answering: answers to a question are selected from a corpus of
candidates by virtue of their syntactic similarity, where syntactic
similarity is determined by tree-distance. Tree distance is a
generalisation of Levenshtein distance and measures the number of
deletions, substitutions, and insertions needed to transform one tree
into another. I will be looking at issues such as
[A] parametrisation in the definitions of tree-distance such as
whole-vs-sub tree, node weighting, wild cards and lexical emphasis
[B] whether improving parse-quality maps does map to improved
performance
on question-answering by tree-distance (QATD) tasks
[C] how things work out for a variety of parsers, variety of tasks
[D] whether performance on QATD tasks can be used a parser evaluator.
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The support for DCLRS2005 given by the School of Computer Science and
Informatics, UCD Dublin,
is gratefully acknowledged.
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of January 2006 | Index of year: 2006 | Full index