Message 1: Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation: CreswellDate: 22-Sep-2004From: Dylan Maiden <dylan.maidentaylorandfrancis.com> Subject: Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation: Creswell Title: Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation Series Title: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Publication Year: 2004 Publisher: Routledge (Taylor and Francis) http://www.routledge.com/ Author: Cassandre Yvonne Creswell Hardback: ISBN: 0415971047 Pages: 240 Price: 80.00 (U.S. $) Abstract: Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts, fail-either by overgenerating these statistically rare forms or by undergenerating. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. The theoretical model is then used as a basis for building a probabilistic classifier that can select the most human-like word order based on the surrounding discourse context. The model of discourse context used is a methodological advance both from a theoretical and an engineering perspective. It is built up from individual linguistic features, ones more easily and reliably annotated than the direct annotation of a discourse or rhetorical structure for a text. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model. Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Syntax Written In: English (Language Code: ENG) See this book announcement on our website: http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=11594
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