arXiv subjects

Regina Barzilay

Publications and source records attributed to Regina Barzilay.

111 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2004

Catching the Drift: Probabilistic Content Models, with Applications to Generation and Summarization

We consider the problem of modeling the content structure of texts within a specific domain, in terms of the topics the texts address and the order in which these topics appear. We first present an effective knowledge-lean method for learning content models from un-annotated documents, utilizing a novel adaptation of algorithms for Hidden Markov Models. We then apply our method to two complementary tasks: information ordering and extractive summarization. Our experiments show that incorporating content models in these applications yields substantial improvement over previously-proposed methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2003

Learning to Paraphrase: An Unsupervised Approach Using Multiple-Sequence Alignment

We address the text-to-text generation problem of sentence-level paraphrasing -- a phenomenon distinct from and more difficult than word- or phrase-level paraphrasing. Our approach applies multiple-sequence alignment to sentences gathered from unannotated comparable corpora: it learns a set of paraphrasing patterns represented by word lattice pairs and automatically determines how to apply these patterns to rewrite new sentences. The results of our evaluation experiments show that the system derives accurate paraphrases, outperforming baseline systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2002

Bootstrapping Lexical Choice via Multiple-Sequence Alignment

An important component of any generation system is the mapping dictionary, a lexicon of elementary semantic expressions and corresponding natural language realizations. Typically, labor-intensive knowledge-based methods are used to construct the dictionary. We instead propose to acquire it automatically via a novel multiple-pass algorithm employing multiple-sequence alignment, a technique commonly used in bioinformatics. Crucially, our method leverages latent information contained in multi-parallel corpora -- datasets that supply several verbalizations of the corresponding semantics rather than just one. We used our techniques to generate natural language versions of computer-generated mathematical proofs, with good results on both a per-component and overall-output basis. For example, in evaluations involving a dozen human judges, our system produced output whose readability and faithfulness to the semantic input rivaled that of a traditional generation system.

cs.CL↗