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Dans ce mémoire, nous nous penchons sur les expressions polylexicales (EP) et leurs relations avec l’analyse syntaxique, la tâche qui consiste à déterminer les relations syntaxiques entre les mots dans une phrase donnée. Le défi que posent les EP dans ce contexte, par rapport aux expressions linguistiques régulières, provient de leurs propriétés parfois inattendues qui les rendent difficiles à gérer dans te traitement automatique des langues. Dans nos travaux, nous montrons qu’il est pourtant possible de profiter de ce cette caractéristique des EP afin d’améliorer les résultats d’analyse syntaxique. Notamment, avec les grammaires d’arbres adjoints (TAGs), qui fournissent un cadre naturel et puissant pour la modélisation des EP, ainsi qu’avec des stratégies de recherche basées sur l’algorithme A* , il est possible d’obtenir des gains importants au niveau de la vitesse sans pour autant détériorer la qualité de l’analyse syntaxique. Cela contraste avec des méthodes purement statistiques qui, malgré l’efficacité, ne fournissent pas de solutions satisfaisantes en ce qui concerne les EP. Nous proposons un analyseur syntaxique novateur qui combine les grammaires TAG avec La technique A*, axé sur la prédiction des EP, dont les fonctionnalités permettent des applications à grande échelle, facilement extensible au contexte probabiliste. / In this thesis, we focus on multiword expressions (MWEs) and their relationships with syntactic parsing. The latter task consists in retrieving the syntactic relations holding between the words in a given sentence. The challenge of MWEs in this respect is that, in contrast to regular linguistic expressions, they exhibit various irregular properties which make them harder to deal with in natural language processing. In our work, we show that the challenge of the MWE-related irregularities can be turned into an advantage in practical symbolic parsing. Namely, with tree adjoining grammars (TAGs), which provide first-cLass support for MWEs, and A* search strategies, considerable speed-up gains can be achieved by promoting MWE-based analyses with virtually no loss in syntactic parsing accuracy. This is in contrast to purely statistical state-of-the-art parsers, which, despite efficiency, provide no satisfactory support for MWEs. We contribute a TAG-A* -MWE-aware parsing architecture with facilities (grammar compression and feature structures) enabling real-world applications, easily extensible to a probabilistic framework.

Thesis (LLD)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / Includes bibliography / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South African law does not recognise an inherent right to the existing, unobstructed view from a property. Nevertheless, seemingly in disregard of this general principle, property owners often attempt to protect such views and courts sometimes in fact grant orders that provide such protection. This dissertation aims to establish whether South African law does indeed not acknowledge a right to a view and whether there are any exceptions to the general rule against the recognition of the right to a view. The principle that the existing view from a property is not an inherent property right is rooted in Roman and Roman-Dutch law. This principle was received in early South African case law. Inconsistency in the application of the principle in recent case law renders its development uncertain. An analysis of recent decisions shows that the view from a property is sometimes protected in terms of servitudes or similar devices, or by virtue of legislation. In other instances, property owners attempt to prevent the erection of a neighbouring building that will interfere with their existing views, based either on a substantive right or an administrative shortcoming. When the protection of view is based on a limited real right (servitudes or similar devices) or legislation, it is generally effective and permanent. Conversely, when it is founded on a substantive right to prevent building on neighbouring land or an administrative irregularity rendering a neighbouring building objectionable, the protection is indirect and temporary. A comparative study confirms that the position regarding the protection of view is similar in English and Dutch law. Constitutional analysis in terms of the methodology developed by the Constitutional Court in FNB indicates that cases where view is protected are not in conflict with section 25(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. The investigation concludes with an evaluation of policy considerations which show that the position with regard to a right to a view in South African law is rooted in legitimate policy rationales. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: 'n Inherente reg op die bestaande, onbelemmerde uitsig vanaf 'n eiendom word nie deur die Suid-Afrikaanse reg erken nie. Desnieteenstaande poog eienaars dikwels om die uitsig vanaf hul eiendomme te beskerm en soms staan die howe bevele tot dien effekte toe. Dit skep die indruk dat die Suid-Afrikaanse reg wel die bestaande uitsig vanaf 'n eiendom as 'n inherente eiendomsreg erken of dat sodanige uitsig minstens onder sekere omstandighede beskerm kan word. Hierdie verhandeling het ten doel om onsekerhede betreffende die algemene beginsel oor 'n reg op uitsig uit die weg te ruim en om lig te werp op gevalle waar 'n onbelemmerde uitsig wel beskerm word. Die Romeinse en Romeins-Hollandse reg het nie 'n reg op uitsig erken nie. Hierdie posisie is deur vroeë regspraak in die Suid-Afrikaanse regstelsel opgeneem. 'n Ondersoek na latere Suid-Afrikaanse regspraak toon egter aan dat howe wel onder sekere omstandighede, skynbaar strydig met die gemeenregtelike beginsel, beskerming aan die onbelemmerde uitsig vanaf eiendomme verleen. 'n Eerste kategorie sake behels gevalle waar die uitsig vanaf 'n eiendom deur 'n beperkte saaklike reg, in die vorm van 'n serwituut of 'n soortgelyke maatreël, of ingevolge wetgewing beskerm word. In 'n tweede kategorie sake word die beskerming van 'n uitsig deur middel van 'n aanval op die goedkeuring van 'n buureienaar se bouplanne bewerkstellig. Sodanige aanval kan óf op 'n substantiewe reg óf op 'n administratiewe tekortkoming berus. Die onderskeie kategorieë verskil wat betref die doelmatigheid en omvang van die beskerming wat verleen word. 'n Saaklike reg of wetgewing verleen meestal effektiewe en permanente beskerming. Hierteenoor het 'n aanval op die goedkeuring van 'n buureienaar se bouplanne hoogstens indirekte en tydelike beskerming van die uitsig tot gevolg. Regsvergelyking bevestig dat die Engelse en Nederlandse reg die Suid-Afrikaanse posisie ten opsigte van'n reg op uitsig tot 'n groot mate eggo. Grondwetlike analise aan die hand van die FNB-metodologie dui daarop dat die gevalle waar uitsig wel beskerming geniet nie strydig is met artikel 25(1) van die Grondwet van die Republiek van Suid-Afrika, 1996 nie. Bowendien regverdig beleidsgronde die behoud van die huidige beginsel in die Suid-Afrikaanse reg.

This thesis was inspired by the difficulties of artificial evolutionary systems in finding elegant and well structured, regular solutions. That is that the solutions found are usually highly disorganized, poorly structured and exhibit limited re-use, resulting in bloat and other problems. This is also true of previous developmental evolutionary systems, where structural regularity emerges only by chance. We hypothesise that these problems might be ameliorated by incorporating repeated evaluations on increasingly difficult problems in the course of a developmental process. This thesis introduces a new technique for learning complex problems from a family of structured increasingly difficult problems, Evolutionary Developmental Evaluation (EDE). This approach appears to give more structured, scalable and regular solutions to such families of problems than previous methods. In addition, the thesis proposes some bio-inspired components that are required by developmental evolutionary systems to take full advantage of this approach. The key part of this is the developmental process, in combination with a varying fitness function evaluated at multiple stages of development, generates selective pressure toward generalisation. This also means that parsimony in structure is selected for without any direct parsimony pressure. As a result, the system encourages the emergence of modularity and structural regularity in solutions. In this thesis, a new genetic developmental system called Developmental Tree Adjoining Grammar Guided Genetic Programming (DTAG3P), is implemented, embodying the requirements above. It is tested on a range of benchmark problems. The results indicate that the method generates more regularly-structured solutions than the competing methods. As a result, the system is able to scale, at least on the problem classes tested, to very complex instances the system encourages the emergence of modularity and structural regularity in solutions. In this thesis, a new genetic developmental system called Developmental Tree Adjoining Grammar Guided Genetic Programming (DTAG3P), is implemented, embodying the requirements above. It is tested on a range of benchmark problems. The results indicate that the method generates more regularly-structured solutions than competing methods. As a result, the system is able to scale, at least on the problem classes tested, to very complex problem instances.

本論文提供了一個句子重組試題編製的環境，協助教師編製句子重組試題，同時學生也能夠在此編製環境中練習句子重組試題。 句子重組試題即是要求學生把試題給的一組詞彙組合成特定詞序的正確語句之題型，該試題類型可以檢驗學生對於句型和文法的知識。然而試題所給的詞彙集合往往除了可以組合成教師想要學生回答的正確語句之外，也可以組合成其它的合法語句。為了能辨識學生的回答，把這些合法語句以人工方式逐一建置為答案卻對出題教師造成了負擔。 我們建構了一個電腦輔助句子重組試題編製的環境來減輕出題教師的負擔。為了讓電腦可以恰當地判斷學生的回答，我們的編製環境限制了試題詞彙集的相對位置，藉此約束學生只能排出教師預設的特定答案。同時在出題教師建置試題答案時，我們的編製環境也試圖提供所有可能的合法詞序之語句，供出題教師參考。但本論文的研究經驗顯示要自動協助出題教師預示所有可能的合法詞序之語句卻是一件艱難的工作，而且這一研究問題與語法學有密切關係。 本論文以基礎詞組為主軸，透過合併詞組和史丹佛剖析器的操作建構出英文句子重組試題編製環境，供教師編輯與學生練習。同時，我們在論文中也提報了中文句子重組試題編製環境的初步探討。 / This thesis presents a computer assisted environment for authoring test items for sentence reconstruction. Not only the teacher can author the test items for sentence reconstruction, but also the student can practice the test items in this environment. A test item for sentence reconstruction asks the student to arrange the shuffled words in a correct order, and this type of tests can examine the knowledge of sentence patterns and grammars of the student. However, the rearranged sentence may match with not only the correct sentence that the teacher wants but also other sentences which are legal. But enumerating all possible legal and acceptable answers for judging the answer of the student manually makes the teacher taking a big load. We construct a computer assisted environment for authoring test items for sentence reconstruction to lighten the load of the teacher. For the purpose of judging the answer of the student by a computer easily, the relative locations of the words are restricted so that we can restrict the sentences that the student arranges. When the teacher provides the correct answers, we try to find and return all of the sentences which may be legal for the teacher's consideration. However, our experience shows that it is difficult to find all of the legal sentences for a given set of words, and this problem associates closely with a certain syntactic research work. This thesis depends on basic word groups to construct an environment of test item authoring for English sentence reconstruction by merging word groups and using the Stanford Parser, and report an initial study of an environment of test item preparation for Chinese sentence reconstruction.

S’estudia el procés de delimitació de la frontera hispanofrancesa, partint del Tractat dels Pirineus (1659) fins als Tractats de Límits de Baiona (1856-1868), fent especial esment al tram que correspon a la província de Girona. Amb el Tractat dels Pirineus les dues monarquies es van repartir el territori però no van arribar a fer una delimitació precisa de la línia fronterera. Durant el segle XVIII es van fer algunes delimitacions parcials i hi va haver diversos intents de fer-ne una de sencera. Va caldre esperar a la constitució de la Comisión Mixta de Límites de 1853 per a que es pogués portar a terme. La Comisión Mixta de Límites va treballar durant 15 anys i va haver de fer de mitjancera en una gran diversitat de conflictes que enfrontaven a les comunitats d’una i altra banda, la majoria dels quals relacionats amb l’aprofitament econòmic de les zones a cavall de la frontera (pastures, boscos, aigua, conreus, etc.). L’estudi es fa a dues escales: una de general, de mar a mar, on es descriuen les diferents problemàtiques i s’analitzen les solucions adoptades als Tractats de Límits de Baiona; una altra a escala local, centrada a la província de Girona, que descriu l’activitat de la Comisión Mixta de Límites, des de les negociacions fins als treballs d’afitament de la frontera. A més, es planteja un model relacional entre les diferents parts que intervenen al procés de delimitació i s’aporta el catàleg de totes les fites frontereres a Girona i el traçat fronterer desenvolupat a escala 1:25.000. Finalment, es discuteix sobre el paper d’aquest tipus de tractats tant en el Dret Internacional com a l’àmbit de les relacions de veïnatge i de l’ordenació del territori. / Summary of the thesis “The delimitation of the spanish-french border (1659-1868)” by Joan Capdevila Subirana We study the delimitation of the border between Spain and France since the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) to the Border Treaties of Bayonne (1856-1868), with particular emphasis on the section corresponding to the province of Girona. With the Treaty of the Pyrenees the two monarchies divided the territory but failed to make a precise demarcation of the border. During the eighteenth century there were some partial demarcations and there were several attempts to complete one. It was the Joint Boundary Commission (Comisión Mixta de Límites) established in 1853 who succeeded in bringing out the entire border demarcation by the Border Treaties of Bayonne. The Joint Boundary Commission worked for 15 years and had to mediate in a variety of conflicts facing the communities of both sides, most of which were related to the economic use of the areas on the border. The study was performed at two scales: on the one hand, a study on a general scale, from sea to sea, which describes the different problems and what were the solutions adopted; on the other hand, a local-scale study focusing on the province of Girona, which describes the activity of the Joint Boundary Commission, from the negotiations until the work of demarcation of the border. It also presents a relational model between the different parties involved in the process of demarcation, it provides the catalog of all border markers in Girona and the border is drawn on 1:25,000 scale mapping. Finally, we discuss the role of such treaties in both international law and in the field of neighborly relations between local communities.

The formalized and algorithmic study of human language within the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has motivated much theoretical work in the related field of formal languages, in particular the subfields of grammar and automata theory. Motivated and informed by NLP, the papers in this thesis explore the connections between expressibility – that is, the ability for a formal system to define complex sets of objects – and algorithmic complexity – that is, the varying amount of effort required to analyse and utilise such systems. Our research studies formal systems working not just on strings, but on more complex structures such as trees and graphs, in particular syntax trees and semantic graphs. The field of mildly context-sensitive languages concerns attempts to find a useful class of formal languages between the context-free and context-sensitive. We study formalisms defining two candidates for this class; tree-adjoining languages and the languages defined by linear context-free rewriting systems. For the former, we specifically investigate the tree languages, and define a subclass and tree automaton with linear parsing complexity. For the latter, we use the framework of parameterized complexity theory to investigate more deeply the related parsing problems, as well as the connections between various formalisms defining the class. The field of semantic modelling aims towards formally and accurately modelling not only the syntax of natural language statements, but also the meaning. In particular, recent work in semantic graphs motivates our study of graph grammars and graph parsing. To the best of our knowledge, the formalism presented in Paper III of this thesis is the first graph grammar where the uniform parsing problem has polynomial parsing complexity, even for input graphs of unbounded node degree.

Selon la représentation d’entrée, cette thèse étudie ces deux types : la génération de texte à partir de représentation de sens et à partir de texte. En la première partie (Génération des phrases), nous étudions comment effectuer la réalisation de surface symbolique à l’aide d’une grammaire robuste et efficace. Cette approche s’appuie sur une grammaire FB-LTAG et prend en entrée des arbres de dépendance peu profondes. La structure d’entrée est utilisée pour filtrer l’espace de recherche initial à l’aide d’un concept de filtrage local par polarité afin de paralléliser les processus. Afin nous proposons deux algorithmes de fouille d’erreur: le premier, un algorithme qui exploite les arbres de dépendance plutôt que des données séquentielles et le second, un algorithme qui structure la sortie de la fouille d’erreur au sein d’un arbre afin de représenter les erreurs de façon plus pertinente. Nous montrons que nos réalisateurs combinés à ces algorithmes de fouille d’erreur améliorent leur couverture significativement. En la seconde partie (Simplification des phrases), nous proposons l’utilisation d’une forme de représentations sémantiques (contre à approches basées la syntaxe ou SMT) afin d’améliorer la tâche de simplification de phrase. Nous utilisons les structures de représentation du discours pour la représentation sémantique profonde. Nous proposons alors deux méthodes de simplification de phrase: une première approche supervisée hybride qui combine une sémantique profonde à de la traduction automatique, et une seconde approche non-supervisée qui s’appuie sur un corpus comparable de Wikipedia / Depending on the input representation, this dissertation investigates issues from two classes: meaning representation (MR) to text and text-to-text generation. In the first class (MR-to-text generation, "Generating Sentences"), we investigate how to make symbolic grammar based surface realisation robust and efficient. We propose an efficient approach to surface realisation using a FB-LTAG and taking as input shallow dependency trees. Our algorithm combines techniques and ideas from the head-driven and lexicalist approaches. In addition, the input structure is used to filter the initial search space using a concept called local polarity filtering; and to parallelise processes. To further improve our robustness, we propose two error mining algorithms: one, an algorithm for mining dependency trees rather than sequential data and two, an algorithm that structures the output of error mining into a tree to represent them in a more meaningful way. We show that our realisers together with these error mining algorithms improves on both efficiency and coverage by a wide margin. In the second class (text-to-text generation, "Simplifying Sentences"), we argue for using deep semantic representations (compared to syntax or SMT based approaches) to improve the sentence simplification task. We use the Discourse Representation Structures for the deep semantic representation of the input. We propose two methods: a supervised approach (with state-of-the-art results) to hybrid simplification using deep semantics and SMT, and an unsupervised approach (with competitive results to the state-of-the-art systems) to simplification using the comparable Wikipedia corpus

Dans ces travaux, nous explorons comment les techniques de Générations Automatiques de Langue Naturelle (GLN) peuvent être utilisées pour aborder la tâche de génération (semi-)automatique de matériel et d'activités dans le contexte de l'apprentissage de langues assisté par ordinateur. En particulier, nous montrons comment un Réalisateur de Surface (RS) basé sur une grammaire peut être exploité pour la création automatique d'exercices de grammaire. Notre réalisateur de surface utilise une grammaire réversible étendue, à savoir SemTAG, qui est une Grammaire d'Arbre Adjoints à Structure de Traits (FB-TAG) couplée avec une sémantique compositionnelle basée sur l'unification. Plus précisément, la grammaire FB-TAG intègre une représentation plate et sous-spécifiée des formules de Logique de Premier Ordre (FOL). Dans la première partie de la thèse, nous étudions la tâche de réalisation de surface à partir de formules sémantiques plates et nous proposons un algorithme de réalisation de surface basé sur la grammaire FB-TAG optimisé, qui supporte la génération de phrases longues étant donné une grammaire et un lexique à large couverture. L'approche suivie pour l'optimisation de la réalisation de surface basée sur FB-TAG à partir de sémantiques plates repose sur le fait qu'une grammaire FB-TAG peut être traduite en une Grammaire d'Arbres Réguliers à Structure de Traits (FB-RTG) décrivant ses arbres de dérivation. Le langage d'arbres de dérivation de la grammaire TAG constitue un langage plus simple que le langage d'arbres dérivés, c'est pourquoi des approches de génération basées sur les arbres de dérivation ont déjà été proposées. Notre approche se distingue des précédentes par le fait que notre encodage FB-RTG prend en compte les structures de traits présentes dans la grammaire FB-TAG originelle, ayant de ce fait des conséquences importantes par rapport à la sur-génération et la préservation de l'interface syntaxe-sémantique. L'algorithme de génération d'arbres de dérivation que nous proposons est un algorithme de type Earley intégrant un ensemble de techniques d'optimisation bien connues: tabulation, partage-compression (sharing-packing) et indexation basée sur la sémantique. Dans la seconde partie de la thèse, nous explorons comment notre réalisateur de surface basé sur SemTAG peut être utilisé pour la génération (semi-)automatique d'exercices de grammaire. Habituellement, les enseignants éditent manuellement les exercices et leurs solutions et les classent au regard de leur degré de difficulté ou du niveau attendu de l'apprenant. Un courant de recherche dans le Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) pour l'apprentissage des langues assisté par ordinateur traite de la génération (semi-)automatique d'exercices. Principalement, ces travaux s'appuient sur des textes extraits du Web, utilisent des techniques d'apprentissage automatique et des techniques d'analyse de textes (par exemple, analyse de phrases, POS tagging, etc.). Ces approches confrontent l'apprenant à des phrases qui ont des syntaxes potentiellement complexes et du vocabulaire varié. En revanche, l'approche que nous proposons dans cette thèse aborde la génération (semi-)automatique d'exercices du type rencontré dans les manuels pour l'apprentissage des langues. Il s'agit, en d'autres termes, d'exercices dont la syntaxe et le vocabulaire sont faits sur mesure pour des objectifs pédagogiques et des sujets donnés. Les approches de génération basées sur des grammaires associent les phrases du langage naturel avec une représentation linguistique fine de leur propriété morpho-syntaxiques et de leur sémantique grâce à quoi il est possible de définir un langage de contraintes syntaxiques et morpho-syntaxiques permettant la sélection de phrases souches en accord avec un objectif pédagogique donné. Cette représentation permet en outre d'opérer un post-traitement des phrases sélectionées pour construire des exercices de grammaire / In this work, we explore how Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques can be used to address the task of (semi-)automatically generating language learning material and activities in Camputer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). In particular, we show how a grammar-based Surface Realiser (SR) can be usefully exploited for the automatic creation of grammar exercises. Our surface realiser uses a wide-coverage reversible grammar namely SemTAG, which is a Feature-Based Tree Adjoining Grammar (FB-TAG) equipped with a unification-based compositional semantics. More precisely, the FB-TAG grammar integrates a flat and underspecified representation of First Order Logic (FOL) formulae. In the first part of the thesis, we study the task of surface realisation from flat semantic formulae and we propose an optimised FB-TAG-based realisation algorithm that supports the generation of longer sentences given a large scale grammar and lexicon. The approach followed to optimise TAG-based surface realisation from flat semantics draws on the fact that an FB-TAG can be translated into a Feature-Based Regular Tree Grammar (FB-RTG) describing its derivation trees. The derivation tree language of TAG constitutes a simpler language than the derived tree language, and thus, generation approaches based on derivation trees have been already proposed. Our approach departs from previous ones in that our FB-RTG encoding accounts for feature structures present in the original FB-TAG having thus important consequences regarding over-generation and preservation of the syntax-semantics interface. The concrete derivation tree generation algorithm that we propose is an Earley-style algorithm integrating a set of well-known optimisation techniques: tabulation, sharing-packing, and semantic-based indexing. In the second part of the thesis, we explore how our SemTAG-based surface realiser can be put to work for the (semi-)automatic generation of grammar exercises. Usually, teachers manually edit exercises and their solutions, and classify them according to the degree of dificulty or expected learner level. A strand of research in (Natural Language Processing (NLP) for CALL addresses the (semi-)automatic generation of exercises. Mostly, this work draws on texts extracted from the Web, use machine learning and text analysis techniques (e.g. parsing, POS tagging, etc.). These approaches expose the learner to sentences that have a potentially complex syntax and diverse vocabulary. In contrast, the approach we propose in this thesis addresses the (semi-)automatic generation of grammar exercises of the type found in grammar textbooks. In other words, it deals with the generation of exercises whose syntax and vocabulary are tailored to specific pedagogical goals and topics. Because the grammar-based generation approach associates natural language sentences with a rich linguistic description, it permits defining a syntactic and morpho-syntactic constraints specification language for the selection of stem sentences in compliance with a given pedagogical goal. Further, it allows for the post processing of the generated stem sentences to build grammar exercise items. We show how Fill-in-the-blank, Shuffle and Reformulation grammar exercises can be automatically produced. The approach has been integrated in the Interactive French Learning Game (I-FLEG) serious game for learning French and has been evaluated both based in the interactions with online players and in collaboration with a language teacher