Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1999. / "January 25, 1999." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-209). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-110). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-110). Also available on the Internet.

Temporal relation classification is one of the most challenging areas of natural language processing. Advances in this area have direct relevance to improving practical applications, such as question-answering and summarization systems, as well as informing theoretical understanding of temporal meaning realization in language. With the development of annotated textual materials, this domain is now accessible to empirical machine-learning oriented approaches, where systems treat temporal relation processing as a classification problem: i.e. a decision as per which label (before, after, identity, etc) to assign to a pair (i, j) of event indices in a text. Most reported systems in this new research domain utilize classifiers that make decisions effectively in isolation, without explicitly utilizing the decisions made about other indices in a document. In this work, we present a new strategy for temporal relation classification that utilizes global models of temporal relations in a document, choosing the optimal classification for all pairs of indices in a document subject to global constraints which may be linguistically motivated. We propose and evaluate two applications of global models to temporal semantic processing: joint prediction of situation entities with temporal relations, and temporal relations prediction guided by global coherence constraints. / text

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Information Extraction, the task of locating textual mentions of specific types of entities and their relationships, aims at representing the information contained in text documents in a structured format that is more amenable to applications in data mining, question answering, or the semantic web. The goal of our research is to design information extraction models that obtain improved performance by exploiting types of evidence that have not been explored in previous approaches. Since designing an extraction system through introspection by a domain expert is a laborious and time consuming process, the focus of this thesis will be on methods that automatically induce an extraction model by training on a dataset of manually labeled examples. Named Entity Recognition is an information extraction task that is concerned with finding textual mentions of entities that belong to a predefined set of categories. We approach this task as a phrase classification problem, in which candidate phrases from the same document are collectively classified. Global correlations between candidate entities are captured in a model built using the expressive framework of Relational Markov Networks. Additionally, we propose a novel tractable approach to phrase classification for named entity recognition based on a special Junction Tree representation. Classifying entity mentions into a predefined set of categories achieves only a partial disambiguation of the names. This is further refined in the task of Named Entity Disambiguation, where names need to be linked to their actual denotations. In our research, we use Wikipedia as a repository of named entities and propose a ranking approach to disambiguation that exploits learned correlations between words from the name context and categories from the Wikipedia taxonomy. Relation Extraction refers to finding relevant relationships between entities mentioned in text documents. Our approaches to this information extraction task differ in the type and the amount of supervision required. We first propose two relation extraction methods that are trained on documents in which sentences are manually annotated for the required relationships. In the first method, the extraction patterns correspond to sequences of words and word classes anchored at two entity names occurring in the same sentence. These are used as implicit features in a generalized subsequence kernel, with weights computed through training of Support Vector Machines. In the second approach, the implicit extraction features are focused on the shortest path between the two entities in the word-word dependency graph of the sentence. Finally, in a significant departure from previous learning approaches to relation extraction, we propose reducing the amount of required supervision to only a handful of pairs of entities known to exhibit or not exhibit the desired relationship. Each pair is associated with a bag of sentences extracted automatically from a very large corpus. We extend the subsequence kernel to handle this weaker form of supervision, and describe a method for weighting features in order to focus on those correlated with the target relation rather than with the individual entities. The resulting Multiple Instance Learning approach offers a competitive alternative to previous relation extraction methods, at a significantly reduced cost in human supervision. / text

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No current laboratory test can reliably identify patients with schizophrenia. Instead, key symptoms are observed via language, including derailment, where patients cannot follow a coherent storyline, and delusions, where false beliefs are repeated as fact. Brain processes underlying these and other symptoms remain unclear, and characterizing them would greatly enhance our understanding of schizophrenia. In this situation, computational models can be valuable tools to formulate testable hypotheses and to complement clinical research. This dissertation aims to capture the link between biology and schizophrenic symptoms using DISCERN, a connectionist model of human story processing. Competing illness mechanisms proposed to underlie schizophrenia are simulated in DISCERN, and are evaluated at the level of narrative language, the same level used to diagnose patients. The result is the first simulation of a speaker with schizophrenia. Of all illness models, hyperlearning, a model of overly intense memory consolidation, produced the best fit to patient data, as well as compelling models of delusions and derailments. If validated experimentally, the hyperlearning hypothesis could advance the current understanding of schizophrenia, and provide a platform for simulating the effects of future treatments. / text

The subject matter of this thesis is the problem of learning to discover grammatical structure from raw text alone, without access to explicit instruction or annotation -- in particular, by a computer or computational process -- in other words, unsupervised parser induction, or simply, unsupervised parsing. This work presents a method for raw text unsupervised parsing that is simple, but nevertheless achieves state-of-the-art results on treebank-based direct evaluation. The approach to unsupervised parsing presented in this dissertation adopts a different way to constrain learned models than has been deployed in previous work. Specifically, I focus on a sub-task of full unsupervised partial parsing called unsupervised partial parsing. In essence, the strategy is to learn to segment a string of tokens into a set of non-overlapping constituents or chunks which may be one or more tokens in length. This strategy has a number of advantages: it is fast and scalable, based on well-understood and extensible natural language processing techniques, and it produces predictions about human language structure which are useful for human language technologies. The models developed for unsupervised partial parsing recover base noun phrases and local constituent structure with high accuracy compared to strong baselines. Finally, these models may be applied in a cascaded fashion for the prediction of full constituent trees: first segmenting a string of tokens into local phrases, then re-segmenting to predict higher-level constituent structure. This simple strategy leads to an unsupervised parsing model which produces state-of-the-art results for constituent parsing of English, German and Chinese. This thesis presents, evaluates and explores these models and strategies. / text