No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1993. / Microfiche. / 2 v. (xix, 558 leaves), bound 29 cm

The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of Integrated Circuits (IC). An effective way of verifying a design can be achieved by adding assertions to the design. Automatic translation of hardware specifications from natural language to assertions in a formal representation has the potential to improve the verification productivity of ICs. However, natural language specifications have the characteristics of being imprecise, incomplete, and ambiguous. An automation framework can benefit verification engineers only if it is designed with the right balance between the ease of expression and precision of meaning allowed for in the input natural language specifications. This requirement introduces two major challenges for designing an effective translation framework. The first challenge is to allow the processing of expressive specifications with flexible word order variations and sentence structures. The second challenge is to assist users in writing unambiguous and complete specifications in the English language that can be accurately translated. In this dissertation, we address the first challenge by modeling semantic parsing of the input sentence as a game of BINGO that can capture the combinatorial nature of natural language semantics. BINGO parsing considers the context of each word in the input sentence to ensure high precision in the creation of semantic frames. We address the second challenge by designing a suggestion and feedback framework to assist users in writing clear and coherent specifications. Our feedback generates different ways of writing acceptable sentences when the input sentence is not understood. We evaluated our BINGO model on 316 hardware design specifications taken from the documents of AMBA, memory controller, and UART architectures. The results showed that highly expressive specifications could be handled in our BINGO model. It also demonstrated the ease of creating rules to generate the same semantic frame for specifications with the same meaning but different word order. We evaluated the suggestion and rewriting framework on 132 erroneous specifications taken from AMBA and memory controller architectures documents. Our system generated suggestions for all the specs. On manual inspection, we found that 87% of these suggestions were semantically closer to the intent of the input specification. Moreover, automatic contextual analysis of the rewritten form of the input specification allowed the translation of the input specification with different words and different order of words that were not defined in our grammar. / Doctor of Philosophy / The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of hardware circuits. An effective way of verifying a design is to add programming codes called assertions in the design. The creation of assertions can be time-consuming and error-prone due to the technical details needed to write assertions. Automatically translating assertion specifications written in English to program code can reduce design time and errors since the English language hides away the technical details required for writing assertions. However, sentences written in English language can have multiple and incomplete interpretations. It becomes difficult for machines to understand assertions written in the English language. In this work, we automatically generate assertions from assertion descriptions written in English. We propose techniques to write rules that can accurately translate English specifications to assertions. Our rules allow a user to write specifications with flexible use of word order and word interpretations. We have tested the understanding framework on English specifications taken from four different types of hardware design architectures. Since we cannot create rules to understand all possible ways of writing a specification, we have proposed a suggestion framework that can inform the user about the words and word structures acceptable to our translation framework. The suggestion framework was tested on specifications of AMBA and memory controller architectures.

Habilitationsschrift--Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-162).

Habilitationsschrift--Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-162).

No description available.

Lithuanian language is quite in an early stage of language processing. And therefore has a high demand on automated tools like taggers, parsers, word sense disambiguators etc. During the last 10 years only a few researchers were attempting to create a parser for Lithuanian language. However none of them are used in practices nowadays. The process of designing and implementing rule based parser for Lithuanian language is presented in this paper. Rules and constraints of the formal grammar follow the principles of Dependency Grammar. Necessary language recourses were made up at the Computational Centre of Linguistics. Research area analysis and overview of the most popular methodologies is presented here as well. Syntax parser of the Lithuanian language was evaluated against the Gold Standard and gave 80,2 % of accuracy of in recognizing parts of the sentence.

Cette thèse explore le fonctionnement indexical des pronoms démonstratifs anglais this, that et it d’une part, et des pronoms démonstratifs français, en particulier ça, d’autre part, en vue d’une comparaison entre ces deux systèmes. L’ensemble des phénomènes référentiels et discursifs observés sont ramenés à certaines caractéristiques syntactico-sémantiques propres à chaque démonstratif, alors formalisées dans le cadre de la Grammaire Notionnelle Dépendancielle. Les occurrences de this, that, it et ça analysées étant issues de conversations orales spontanées et enregistrées selon le protocole des projets PAC et PFC, notre étude apporte un questionnement sur les avantages et les limites des grands corpus oraux pour les recherches en linguistique théorique. / This thesis focuses from a comparative perspective on the indexical functioning of both English and French demonstrative pronouns, namely this, that and it on the one hand, and celui-ci/là, ceci, cela and ça on the other – with particular emphasis on the neuter pronoun ça. The overall referential and discursive phenomena which are examined are tied to a number of syntactic and semantic features and representations characterizing each demonstrative item. Our treatment is then formalized within the framework of Notional Dependency Grammar. As all our crucial examples concerning this, that, it and ça are extracted from authentic face to face conversations from the PAC and PFC projects, the present study leads to a discussion of the potential advantages and limits of large spoken corpora for research in theoretical linguistics.

Les grammaires de dépendance permettent de construire une organisation hiérarchique syntaxique des mots d’une phrase. La construction manuelle des arbres de dépendances étant une tâche exigeant temps et expertise, de nombreux travaux cherchent à l’automatiser. Visant à établir un processus léger et facilement adaptable nous nous sommes intéressés à l’apprentissage non supervisé de dépendances, évitant ainsi d’avoir recours à une expertise coûteuse. L’état de l’art en apprentissage non supervisé de dépendances (DMV) se compose de méthodes très complexes et extrêmement sensibles au paramétrage initial. Nous présentons dans cette thèse un nouveau modèle pour résoudre ce problème d’analyse de dépendances, mais de façon plus simple, plus rapide et plus adaptable. Nous apprenons une famille de grammaires (PCFG) réduites à moins de 6 non terminaux et de 15 règles de combinaisons des non terminaux à partir des étiquettes grammaticales. Les PCFG de cette famille que nous nommons DGdg (pour DROITE GAUCHE droite gauche) se paramètrent très légèrement, ainsi elles s’adaptent sans effort aux 12 langues testées. L’apprentissage et l’analyse sont effectués au moins deux fois plus rapidement que DMV sur les mêmes données. Et la qualité des analyses DGdg est pour certaines langues proches des analyses par DMV. Nous proposons une première application de notre méthode d’analyse de dépendances à l’extraction d’informations. Nous apprenons par des CRF un étiquetage en fonctions « sujet », « objet » et « prédicat », en nous fondant sur des caractéristiques extraites des arbres construits. / Dependency grammars allow the construction of a hierarchical organization of the words of sentences. The one-by-one building of dependency trees can be very long and it requries expert knowledge. In this regard, we are interested in unsupervised dependency learning. Currently, DMV give the state-of-art results in unsupervised dependency parsing. However, DMV has been known to be highly sensitive to initial parameters. The training of DMV model is also heavy and long. We present in this thesis a new model to solve this problem in a simpler, faster and more adaptable way. We learn a family of PCFG using less than 6 nonterminal symbols and less than 15 combination rules from the part-of-speech tags. The tuning of these PCFG is ligth, and so easily adaptable to the 12 languages we tested. Our proposed method for unsupervised dependency parsing can show the near state-of-the-art results, being twice faster. Moreover, we describe our interests in dependency trees to other applications such as relation extraction. Therefore, we show how such information from dependency structures can be integrated into condition random fields and how to improve a relation extraction task.

Text in Afrikaans / Twee sentrale probleme word hier ondersoek, naamlik die daarstelling van 'n teoreties adekwate model om leksikale valensie te verreken en die problematiek rondom die beskrywing van Afrikaanse bewegingswerkwoorde. Die vertrekpunt is dat 'n teorie van UG lesikale valensie slegs ten dele verreken. So 'n teorie is gemoeid met die vorm van 'n konstruksie wat op LF-vlak leesbaar is. Gevolglik beskryf 'n teorie van UG valensie net in universele sintakties-kategoriale terme. In hierdie studie word die semantiese en pragmatiese komponente van 'n valensieteorie derhalwe uitgebou sodat daar 'n duideliker begrip verkry kan word van die wisselwerking tussen alle veranderlikes van valensie op 'n taalspesifieke LF-vlak. 'n Valensieteorie word op eklektiese wyse saamgestel uit verskeie ander teoriee. Die apparaat om die sintaktiese komponent van 'n valensieteorie te beskryf, word aan TGGmodelle ontleen. Die semantiese komponent van die teorie word aangevul vanuit die Konseptuele Semantiek en die pragmatiese komponent daarvan vanui t kogni ti ewe grammatikamodelle. Die interaksie tussen hierdie komponente word verreken deur teoriee van leksikalisasie, korrespondensiereels en die passing tussen konstruksies en leksikale items. Die ontleding van Afrikaanse bewegingswerkwoorde spesif iseer die omvattender anali tiese apparaat wat nodig is vir die verrekening van valensie verby die punt waarvoor 'n teorie van UG voorsiening maak. Dit blyk uit hierdie analise dat die valensie van die kategorie in 'n aantal valensieraambeskrywings vir die aparte subklasse saamgevat kan word. 'n Duidelike beeld van die universele en taalspesifiekidiosinkratiese aspekte van hierdie kategorie kan in terme van hierdie valensierame aangetoon word. 'n Verdere hipotese (die onakkusatiwiteithipotese) is dat die sintaktiese verspreiding van werkwoorde ui t hulle semantiek voorspel kan word. Hierdie hipotese word getoets aan die empiriese data van Afrikaanse bewegingswerkwoorde. Hierdie bewegingswerkwoorde word in groepe geklassifiseer na gelang van ooreenstemmende semanties-pragmatiese kenmerke. Daar word getoon dat bewegingswerkwoorde met dieself de semantiespragmatiese kenmerke dieselfde valensierame het. Valensierame is daarom op sistematiese wyse uit semanties-pragmatiese kenmerke afleibaar. Sekere fasette van valensierame word egter ook bepaal deur konvensies soos profilering, en deur bereelde interaksie met 'n basiese konstruksie se argumentstruktuur. / This thesis focuses on the development of a theoretically adequate model to account for lexical valence and to provide the detail for such a model by means of an analysis of Afrikaans verbs of motion. The thesis is a response to a theory of UG which inadequately accounts for lexical valence. A theory of UG is concerned with the universal syntactic form of a construction that is legible on LF level. It therefore describes valence in universal syntactic-categorial terms only. This thesis develops the semantic and pragmatic components of a theory of valence in order that a clearer understanding may be gained of the interaction between all the variables of valence on a language specific LF level. A theory of valence is construed eclectically from several other theories. TGG models provide the methods used to describe the syntactic component of a theory of valence. Conceptual Semantics contributes to the development of the semantic component, and models of cognitive grammar to the pragmatic component. The interaction between these components is explained by theories of lexicalisation, rules of correspondence and the fusion of constructions and lexical items. The analysis of Afrikaans verbs of motion provides the comprehensive set of analytical devices required to account for valence beyond the point of LF. From this analysis it emerges that the valence of this category can be summarized in a finite number of frames of valence for distinct classes within the category. 'n Clear understanding of the universal and language specific aspects of this category is achieved by means of these frames of valence. A further hypothesis (the unaccusativity hypothesis) posits that the syntactic distribution of verbs can be predicted from their semantics. This hypothesis is tested by means of empirical data of Afrikaans verbs of motion. These verbs are classified according to similar semantic-pragmatic features. It is shown that verbs of motion with the same semanticpragmatic features share frames of valence. These frames thus are deducible systematically from semantic-pragmatic features. Certain aspects of frames of valence, however, are determined by conventions such as profiling and the regulated interaction between verbs and constructions. / Afrikaans / D.Litt. et Phil. (Afrikaans)