Syntactic Simplicity Research Articles

A Theory of Evidence-based method for assessing frequent patterns

Frequent itemset (or frequent pattern) mining is a very important issue within the data mining field. Both, syntactic simplicity and descriptive potential, are the key features of the itemset-based pattern which have led to its widespread use in a growing number of real-life domains. Some of the most representative algorithms for mining this kind of pattern are Apriori-like algorithms and, therefore, the number of patterns obtained under normal conditions is very large, making the process of evaluation and interpretation quite difficult. This problem is compounded if we consider that knowledge discovery is an iterative process, and the change in the parameters of the preprocessing techniques or the mining algorithm can lead to significant changes in the result. In this paper, we propose a method based on Shafer's Theory of Evidence which uses two information measures for the quality evaluation of the set of frequent patterns. From a practical point of view, the main goal is to select, for a given database, the best preprocessing technique that lead to the discovery of useful knowledge. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is to propose a formal method to assess, objectively, sets of frequent patterns, seen as belief structures, in terms of certainty in the information they represent.

Comparing methods for the syntactic simplification of sentences in information extraction

Comparing methods for the syntactic simplification of sentences in information extraction

Coh-Metrix

Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.

A computer’s understanding of literature

Everyone agrees that a computer could never understand and appreciate literature, but the fields of computational linguistics and discourse processing have made important advances in automatic detection of language and discourse characteristics. We have analyzed literary texts and political speeches with two computer tools, namely Coh-Metrix and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC). Coh-Metrix provides hundreds of measures that funnel into 5 principal components: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, deep cohesion, and narrativity. LIWC classifies words on 80 categories, such as first person pronouns, negative emotions, and social words. This paper illustrates how computer tools can unveil new insights about literature and can empirically test claims by literary scholars and social scientists. Our approach offers a computational science of literature.

A linguistic rule-based approach to extract drug-drug interactions from pharmacological documents

BackgroundA drug-drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. The increasing volume of the scientific literature overwhelms health care professionals trying to be kept up-to-date with all published studies on DDI.MethodsThis paper describes a hybrid linguistic approach to DDI extraction that combines shallow parsing and syntactic simplification with pattern matching. Appositions and coordinate structures are interpreted based on shallow syntactic parsing provided by the UMLS MetaMap tool (MMTx). Subsequently, complex and compound sentences are broken down into clauses from which simple sentences are generated by a set of simplification rules. A pharmacist defined a set of domain-specific lexical patterns to capture the most common expressions of DDI in texts. These lexical patterns are matched with the generated sentences in order to extract DDIs.ResultsWe have performed different experiments to analyze the performance of the different processes. The lexical patterns achieve a reasonable precision (67.30%), but very low recall (14.07%). The inclusion of appositions and coordinate structures helps to improve the recall (25.70%), however, precision is lower (48.69%). The detection of clauses does not improve the performance.ConclusionsInformation Extraction (IE) techniques can provide an interesting way of reducing the time spent by health care professionals on reviewing the literature. Nevertheless, no approach has been carried out to extract DDI from texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first integral solution for the automatic extraction of DDI from biomedical texts.

Use of Syntactic Elaboration Techniques to Enhance Comprehensibility of EST Texts

The current study examined differential effects of two pre-modification types, syntactic elaboration and syntactic simplification (at the level of syntax and irrespective of problematic lexis), on EST students’ reading comprehension. The purpose was to see whether a priori syntactic elaborative adjustment, given its advantages over simplification, can augment comprehensibility of scientific texts in order to replace simplification adjustment. To carry out the study, three versions of 5 passages including Baseline, syntactically simplified, and syntactically elaborated were provided. All the five passages were relevant to civil engineering and they were modified using two above-mentioned techniques. The subjects of the study were composed of 185 homogenous civil engineering students who participated in different phases. The results revealed that syntactic simplification and syntactic elaboration procedures operated nearly in the same way in orienting the EST texts toward comprehensibility. The results of the study even indicated that students benefited more from elaborated than simplified texts although it was not statistically significant. Therefore, the study supports the view that syntactic elaborative adjustment can be exercised in advance on EST materials for pedagogical purposes since it increases the reading comprehension at the same time keeps unfamiliar syntactic units intact to be learned by EST readers

Word order in zero-marking languages

It has often been argued that languages with no morphological marking of core arguments (referred to here as zero-marking languages) should prefer SVO word order. This correlation is tested here by studying the effects of word order, genealogical relatedness, and areal diffusion on the distribution of zero marking with multiple logistic regression. The possible confounding areal and genealogical factors are studied in multiple ways. The results, based on data from 848 languages, suggest that zero marking (morphological simplicity) correlates with SVO (syntactic simplicity), regardless of its areally and genealogically biased distribution. It is argued that this word order preference is affected by functional motivations and language contact.

Conceptions of Language Input in Second Language Acquisition: A Case of Vietnamese EFL Teachers

Conceptions of Language Input in Second Language Acquisition: A Case of Vietnamese EFL Teachers

Processing Coordination Ambiguity

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel. Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase the pan will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based theories assume that interpretations are the result of a constraint-satisfaction process, which predicts that frequency or context can bias the parser to initially pursue a more complex interpretation.The results showed an initial preference for noun-phrase coordination, despite the fact that sentential coordination is more frequent in imperative structures. These data suggest that the parser uses a syntactic simplicity heuristic for building initial structural analyses.

A Modern Tower of Babel

The author discusses his theory on the reason behind the existence of many programming languages. He discusses that this has to do witha character that has beleaguered the computer-using community almost from its beginning. A classic case of religious warfare is the Mac/PC struggle, which seized the entire community and has raged for years, but there are minor struggles as well.Many software engineers favor C for systems programming because of its transportability and its precise control of hardware and processes. Similarly, many computational scientists persist in using Fortran because of its legendary efficiency and target code execution speed. Their persistence, despite the emergence of newer languages, is partly practical, but it's also because, as if to avoid extinction, C and Fortran have both spawned new, improved versions that incorporate emerging programming models, such as object orientation. Many science educators, as well as practitioners, value suitability. They've turned to Matlab, Maple, and Mathematica because of their source codes' syntactic simplicity, their target codes' platform independence, or both. The programming community's Tower of Babel can therefore be viewed not only as an outcome of religious factionalism but also as a sign of healthy evolution. The existing multiplicity of languages might be a benefit and not, as the book of Genesis warns, a punishment for trying to build a path to heaven.

Simplifying Text in Medical Literature

A text simplification system is developed that accepts as input a document written for college reading level, and converts it to high school reading level text using techniques in natural language processing. The achieved level of lexical and syntactic simplifications is dependent on the lexical and syntactic information stored in the system's knowledge sources. These knowledge sources can be updated when necessary, thus allowing the system to support varying input and output reading levels. Test results show that simplification can increase the reading ease score from as low 2.5% to a high 296%. Results also show that only 70% of the generated easier-to-read text will have a reading ease score higher than the original input sentence.

Using grouping variables to express complex decision support queries

Performing complex analysis on top of massive data stores is essential to most modern enterprises and organizations and requires simple, flexible and powerful syntactic constructs to express naturally and succinctly complex decision support queries. In addition, these linguistic features have to be coupled by appropriate evaluation and optimization techniques in order to efficiently compute these queries. In this article we review the concept of grouping variable and describe a simple SQL extension to match it. We show that this extension enables the facile expression of a large class of practical data analysis queries. Besides syntactic simplicity, grouping variables can be neatly modeled in relational algebra via a relational operator, called MD-join. MD-join combines joins and group-bys (a frequent case in decision support queries) into one operator, allowing novel evaluation and optimization techniques. By making explicit how joins interact with group bys, we provide the optimizer with enough information to use specific algorithms and employ appropriate optimization plans, not easily detectable previously. Several experiments demonstrate substantial performance improvements, in some cases of one or two orders of magnitude. The work on grouping variables have influenced at least one commercial system and the standardization of ANSI SQL and implementations of it have been studied in the context of telecom applications, medical and bio-informatics, finance and others. Finally, current work studies the potential of grouping variables in formulating decision support queries over streams of data, one of the latest research trends in database community.

Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion

Syntactic simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical complexity of a text, while retaining its information content and meaning. The aim of syntactic simplification is to make text easier to comprehend for human readers, or process by programs. In this paper, we formalise the interactions that take place between syntax and discourse during the simplification process. This is important because the usefulness of syntactic simplification in making a text accessible to a wider audience can be undermined if the rewritten text lacks cohesion. We describe how various generation issues like sentence ordering, cue-word selection, referring-expression generation, determiner choice and pronominal use can be resolved so as to preserve conjunctive and anaphoric cohesive relations during syntactic simplification and present the results of an evaluation of our syntactic simplification system.

Z 0 - a tiny experimental language

Z 0 is a tiny experimental class-based pure object-oriented programming language. Its key features include syntactic simplicity, similarity with Java [8], strong static typing, pure object abstraction, and some dynamic mechanism which are normally only found in dynamic languages. Z 0 provides a unified, object-oriented treatment of all values, primitive, user-defined, and even control structures. In a nutshell, everything is an object. As far as object "purity" is concerned, Z 0 looks to Smalltalk [6] and Self [20,17]. Z 0 uses a clean and strict method-based model. There are no explicit instance variables, only methods. A dynamic, compile-time checkable method update mechanism is provided to make methods manipulable at run time. Inheritance model is simple and straightforward. Variant type system and dynamic typing with Self enable a high degree of typing flexibility that is statically safe and can be efficiently implemented. Because Z 0 is compiled for a virtual machine (JVM-like [13]), it is much more efficient in execution than interpreted languages.

THE PROCESSING OF TENSE: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDIES ON THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE AND TEMPORAL RELATIONS. Michael Walsh Dickey. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. xiii + 310. $148.00 cloth, $58.00 paper.

This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing ( John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left ), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora ( Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk ), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena ( John said that Mary was sick )—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.

Structural properties of syntactically reduced speech: A comparison of normal speakers and Broca’s aphasics

We carried out a study in which we elicited spatial expressions from agrammatic and normal speakers by means of a picture description test. The purpose of our study was to investigate structural properties of Dutch agrammatic speech. We focussed on syntactic simplification phenomena that show up in addition to finiteness omission. We therefore invited the normal speakers to use sentences no longer than three or two words each and compared the picture descriptions of aphasic and normal speakers. In the picture descriptions two types of structures emerged that are relatively infrequent in free conversation: verbless predicative constructions with an adjectival head and intransitive prepositions as predicates. We have been able to show that the use of these construction types is directly related to syntactic reduction in both agrammatic and normal speech: it is present primarily in the speech of Broca’s aphasics who produce one- and two-word utterances and of control speakers with a word limitation by instruction in the same range. The choice of reduced construction types is determined by the syntactic complexity of the phrases involved. A compensation strategy was observed both in control and aphasic speech: if utterances are shorter, the number of utterances increases.

Syntactic reductions for efficient deadlock analysis

AbstractA well‐known problem in the verification of concurrent systems based on model checking is state explosion: concurrent systems are often represented by automata with a prohibitive number of states. A reduction technique to reduce state explosion in deadlock checking is presented. The method is based on an automatic syntactic simplification of a calculus of communicating systems (CCS) specification, which keeps the parts of the program structure that may lead to a deadlock and deletes the other parts. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High‐frequency verbs and verb diversity in the spontaneous speech of school‐age children with specific language impairment

AbstractLow verb diversity and heavy reliance on a small set of high‐frequency ‘general all purpose (GAP)’ verbs have been reported to characterize specific language impairment (SLI) in preschool children. However, discrepancies exist about the severity of this deficit, particularly in whether these children's verb diversity is commensurate with their MLU level and whether verb diversity is more severely affected than general lexical diversity. Conflicting findings have been reported regarding the use of GAP verbs. This relatively large (n =100) study extended the investigation of lexical diversity and high‐frequency verb use to school‐age children with SLI and NL peers and examined a particular hypothesis concerning the role of high‐frequency verbs in language development. No differences were found between groups in general lexical diversity or verb diversity in samples of a set number of tokens. The results did not suggest that verb diversity constitutes an area of specific deficit in spontaneous production for children with SLI. SLI and NL groups were indistinguishable in high‐frequency verb use. Extensive use of high‐frequency verbs by both groups indicates that their use is part of normal development. Results are reported that support the hypothesis that high‐frequency verbs act as prototypes for major meaning categories, permitting semantic and syntactic simplification with minimal losses in information value.

High-frequency verbs and verb diversity in the spontaneous speech of school-age children with specific language impairment

Low verb diversity and heavy reliance on a small set of high-frequency 'general all purpose (GAP)' verbs have been reported to characterize specific language impairment (SLI) in preschool children. However, discrepancies exist about the severity of this deficit, particularly in whether these children's verb diversity is commensurate with their MLU level and whether verb diversity is more severely affected than general lexical diversity. Conflicting findings have been reported regarding the use of GAP verbs. This relatively large (n = 100) study extended the investigation of lexical diversity and high-frequency verb use to school-age children with SLI and NL peers and examined a particular hypothesis concerning the role of high-frequency verbs in language development. No differences were found between groups in general lexical diversity or verb diversity in samples of a set number of tokens. The results did not suggest that verb diversity constitutes an area of specific deficit in spontaneous production for children with SLI. SLI and NL groups were indistinguishable in high-frequency verb use. Extensive use of high-frequency verbs by both groups indicates that their use is part of normal development. Results are reported that support the hypothesis that high-frequency verbs act as prototypes for major meaning categories, permitting semantic and syntactic simplification with minimal losses in information value.

Judicial Summation: The Trial Judge's Version of the Facts or the Chimera of Neutrality

This paper analyses some of the rhetorical and linguistic features of two judges' summations to two different juries in a criminal case that was tried twice in the Tasmanian Criminal Court. In the first trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict upon a number of counts in the indictment. In the second trial, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts. The purpose of this paper is to cast light upon how the linguistic and rhetorical features observed in the summations lent colour or weight to a particular interpretation of the events tried. The paper argues that the judge's summing up is part of the persuasive process of the criminal trial and that judges do present a version of the facts to the jury, deploying various language strategies to construct and communicate that version. The analysis focuses solely upon the judges' summing up of the evidence and the facts. It does not deal with directions or determinations concerning the law. Three major differences between the summations are considered: their distinct thematic approaches to the factual issues, the disparate levels of assistance they provide to the jury in assessing the evidence and their relative comprehensibility. The different thematic approaches produced disparate choices concerning the evidence -- its selection for consideration and its evaluation. The approach in the first summation resulted in an analysis of the evidence that favoured the accused. In the second summation, the thematic approach facilitated a more critical appraisal of the accused's case and a more favourable assessment of the complainant's version of events. The summations also provide differential levels of assistance and achieve differential levels of comprehensibility. The first summation provides relatively little guidance to the jury in evaluating significant items of evidence. In contrast, the second trial summation gives a more directional appraisal. It also achieves a greater level of clarity in the communication of key ideas than the first summation. Both distinctions are attributed to the discourse structures of the summations and to the second summation's reliance upon such organisational and rhetorical devices as repetition, enumeration and rhetorical questions. They are also attributed in part to the comparative syntactic simplicity of the second summation's sentences. It is the conclusion of this paper that the trial judge's linguistic, discourse construction and rhetorical skills are central to the clarification or obfuscation of the facts and issues in a case. How judges say what they say is significant at two levels of sense construction -- at the level of what Bernard Jackson calls “signification” and at the level of communication.