Approved for Public Release; distribution is unlimited / Formal methods hold significant potential for automating the development, refinement, and implementation of policy. For this potential to be realized, however, improved techniques are required for converting natural-language statements of policy into a computational form. In this paper we present and analyze an architecture for carrying out this conversion. The architecture employs semantic networks to represent both policy statements and objects in the domain of those statements. We present a case study which illustrates how a system based on this architecture could be developed. The case study consists of an analysis of natural language policy statements taken from a policy document for web sites at a university, and is carried out with support from a software tool we developed which converts text output from a natural language parser into a graphical form. / Naval Postgraduate School author (civilian).

Many systems of Knowledge Representation exist, but none were designed specifically for general purpose large scale natural language processing. This thesis introduces a set of metrics to evaluate the suitability of representations for this purpose, derived from an analysis of the problems such processing introduces. These metrics address three broad categories of question: Is the representation sufficiently expressive to perform its task? What implications has its design on the architecture of the system using it? What inefficiencies are intrinsic to its design? An evaluation of existing Knowledge Representation systems reveals that none of them satisfies the needs of general purpose large scale natural language processing. To remedy this lack, this thesis develops a new representation: SemNet. SemNet benefits not only from the detailed requirements analysis but also from insights gained from its use as the core representation of the large scale general purpose system LOLITA (Large-scale Object-based Linguistic Interactor, Translator, and Analyser). The mapping process between Natural language and representation is presented in detail, showing that the representation achieves its goals in practice.

The purpose of the research was to investigate the effects of aircraft noise on the auditory language processing abilities of English First Language (EFL) primary school learners. Schools located in close proximity to airports are exposed to extremely high levels of chronic, yet intermittent noise. These levels have been shown to cause cognitive, health and hearing problems. However, it is unsure whether this long term exposure to these noise levels may cause auditory language processing problems when hearing is normal, which could result in decreased academic performance. This study utilised a non-experimental, cross sectional and descriptive design, as well as a post-hoc design. Seventy children attending schools that are exposed to high levels of noise were matched according to socio-demographic characteristics to seventy children in quieter schools. All the schools were situated in Durban, South Africa, while the noisy schools were located 1.7 km and 1.9 km from the airport and the quieter schools were 4.6km and 3.5km from the airport. All participants are EFL, have attended the respective schools from grade 1, have hearing within normal limits, are in grade 6 or 7, are 12 years or younger, and have no pre-diagnosed learning, auditory or attention problems. Audiological screening and auditory language processing assessments (subtests of the TAPS, PhAB and the Dollaghan and Campbell task) were undertaken. This study utilised various types of statistical analyses, including descriptive methods, Pearson’s chi-squared tests, Fisher’s tests, three-way ANOVAs, Cramer’s V tests and Cohen’s D tests. The results from the schools that are exposed to noise have scored below average in all the auditory processing subtests. This study aimed to provide evidence that not only can hearing be affected by noise, but so too can the processing of sounds, even when hearing is normal. The results of this study are hoped to serve as a motivation for the provision of speech-language therapy and audiology posts within mainstream legislation with regard to schools due to the large amount of children with auditory language processing difficulties in both noisy and quieter schools, as well as for noise treatment surrounding airports and appropriate to zoning of schools around airports to help and prevent this chronic noise interrupting the development of auditory language processing abilities and thus in turn affecting learning.

Mok, Oi Yan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-99). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Overview --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Thesis Goals --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Outline --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Natural Language Understanding --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Rule-based Approaches --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Phrase-spotting Approaches --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Stochastic Approaches --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Belief Network Framework - the N Binary Formulation --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Introduction of Belief Network --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- The N Binary Formulation --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Semantic Tagging --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Belief Networks Development --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2.5 --- Goal Inference --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.6 --- Potential Problems --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- The ATIS Domain --- p.17 / Chapter 2.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.19 / Chapter 3 --- Belief Network Framework - the One N-ary Formulation --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- The One N-ary Formulation --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2 --- Belief Network Development --- p.23 / Chapter 3.3 --- Goal Inference --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Multiple Selection Strategy --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Maximum Selection Strategy --- p.26 / Chapter 3.4 --- Advantages of the One N-ary Formulation --- p.27 / Chapter 3.5 --- Chapter Summary --- p.29 / Chapter 4 --- Evaluation on the N Binary and the One N-ary Formula- tions --- p.30 / Chapter 4.1 --- Evaluation Metrics --- p.31 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Accuracy Measure --- p.32 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Macro-Averaging --- p.32 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Micro-Averaging --- p.35 / Chapter 4.2 --- Experiments --- p.35 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Network Dimensions --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Thresholds --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Overall Goal Identification --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Out-Of-Domain Rejection --- p.65 / Chapter 4.2.5 --- Multiple Goal Identification --- p.67 / Chapter 4.2.6 --- Computation --- p.68 / Chapter 4.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.70 / Chapter 5 --- Portability to Chinese --- p.72 / Chapter 5.1 --- The Chinese ATIS Domain --- p.72 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Word Tokenization and Parsing --- p.73 / Chapter 5.2 --- Experiments --- p.74 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Network Dimension --- p.76 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Overall Goal Identification --- p.77 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Out-Of-Domain Rejection --- p.83 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- Multiple Goal Identification --- p.86 / Chapter 5.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.88 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.39 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary --- p.89 / Chapter 6.2 --- Contributions --- p.91 / Chapter 6.3 --- Future Work --- p.92 / Bibliography --- p.94 / Chapter A --- The Communicative Goals --- p.100 / Chapter B --- Distribution of the Communicative Goals --- p.101 / Chapter C --- The Hand-Designed Grammar Rules --- p.103 / Chapter D --- The Selected Concepts for each Belief Network --- p.115 / Chapter E --- The Recalls and Precisions of the Goal Identifiers in Macro- Averaging --- p.125

Yip Wing Lin Winnie. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-105). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Overview --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Thesis Goals --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Outline --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Natural Language Generation --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Template-based Approach --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Rule-based Approach --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Statistical Approach --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Hybrid Approach --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1.5 --- Machine Learning Approach --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- Evaluation Method --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Cooperative Principles --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.13 / Chapter 3 --- Natural Language Understanding --- p.14 / Chapter 3.1 --- The CUHK Restaurant Domain --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2 --- "Task Goals, Dialog Acts, Concept Categories and Annotation" --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Task Goals (TGs) and Dialog Acts (DAs) --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Concept Categories (CTG/CDA) --- p.20 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Utterance Segmentation and Annotation --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3 --- Task Goal and Dialog Act Identification --- p.22 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Belief Networks Development --- p.22 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Task Goal and Dialog Act Inference --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Network Dimensions --- p.25 / Chapter 3.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.29 / Chapter 4 --- Automatic Utterance Segmentation --- p.30 / Chapter 4.1 --- Utterance Definition --- p.31 / Chapter 4.2 --- Segmentation Procedure --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Tokenization --- p.35 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- POS Tagging --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Multi-Parser Architecture (MPA) Language Parsing --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Top-down Generalized Representation --- p.40 / Chapter 4.3 --- Evaluation --- p.47 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Results --- p.47 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Analysis --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.50 / Chapter 5 --- Natural Language Response Generation --- p.52 / Chapter 5.1 --- System Overview --- p.52 / Chapter 5.2 --- Corpus-derived Dialog State Transition Rules --- p.55 / Chapter 5.3 --- Hand-designed Text Generation Templates --- p.56 / Chapter 5.4 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Task Completion Rate --- p.61 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Grice's Maxims and Perceived User Satisfaction --- p.62 / Chapter 5.4.3 --- Error Analysis --- p.64 / Chapter 5.5 --- Chapter Summary --- p.65 / Chapter 6 --- Bilingual Response Generation using Semi-Automatically- Induced Response Templates --- p.67 / Chapter 6.1 --- Response Data --- p.68 / Chapter 6.2 --- Semi-Automatic Grammar Induction --- p.69 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Agglomerative Clustering --- p.69 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Parameters Selection --- p.70 / Chapter 6.3 --- Application to Response Grammar Induction --- p.71 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- Parameters Selection --- p.73 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- Unsupervised Grammar Induction --- p.76 / Chapter 6.3.3 --- Post-processing --- p.80 / Chapter 6.3.4 --- Prior Knowledge Injection --- p.82 / Chapter 6.4 --- Response Templates Generation --- p.84 / Chapter 6.4.1 --- Induced Response Grammar --- p.84 / Chapter 6.4.2 --- Template Formation --- p.84 / Chapter 6.4.3 --- Bilingual Response Templates --- p.89 / Chapter 6.5 --- Evaluation --- p.89 / Chapter 6.5.1 --- "Task Completion Rate, Grice's Maxims and User Sat- isfaction" --- p.91 / Chapter 6.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.94 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.96 / Chapter 7.1 --- Summary --- p.96 / Chapter 7.2 --- Contributions --- p.98 / Chapter 7.3 --- Future Work --- p.100 / Bibliography --- p.102 / Chapter A --- Domain-Specific Task Goals in the CUHK Restaurants Do- main --- p.107 / Chapter B --- Full List of VERBMOBIL-2 Dialog Acts --- p.109 / Chapter C --- Dialog Acts for Customer Requests and Waiter Responsesin the CUHK Restaurants Domain --- p.111 / Chapter D --- Grammar for Task Goal and Dialog Act Identification --- p.116 / Chapter E --- Utterance Definition --- p.119 / Chapter F --- Dialog State Transition Rules --- p.121 / Chapter G --- Full List of Templates Selection Conditions --- p.125 / Chapter H --- Hand-designed Text Generation Templates --- p.130 / Chapter I --- Evaluation Test Questionnaire for Dialog System in the CUHK Restaurant Domain --- p.135 / Chapter J --- POS Tags --- p.137 / Chapter K --- Full List of Lexicon and contextual rule modifications --- p.139 / Chapter L --- Top-down Generalized Representations --- p.141 / Chapter M --- Sample Outputs for Automatic Utterance Segmentation --- p.144 / Chapter N --- Induced Grammar --- p.145 / Chapter O --- Seeded Categories --- p.148 / Chapter P --- Semi-Automatically-Induced Response Templates --- p.150 / Chapter Q --- Details of the Statistical Testing Regarding Grice's Maxims and User Satisfaction --- p.156

Background: Performance stability is an implicit assumption within theoretical explanations of aphasia. The assumption being that when completing language processing tasks, performance will be stable from moment to moment and day to day. Theoretically, aphasia is most commonly viewed within a modular framework. that is, language processing is carried out by specific, specialised language processing modules. Aphasia is thought to result when one of these modules is dammed leading to a unique pattern of performance results. Implicit to this view of aphasia is stability, once damaged, the module will no longer be accessed and any process using the module will be impaired. This theory of aphasia is widely held within both research and clinical communities and underlies many of our approaches to the assessment and treatment of aphasia. However more recently researchers have been expressing doubts about the validity of assuming stability in aphasia performance. Instead variability in performance is being reported and alternative explanations of aphasia are being provided. One of these considers aphasia to result from a reduction in or the inefficient allocation of cognitive resources. Aims: This research explored variability in aphasic performance, with the aim to examine variability over a range of tasks and time periods. Methods and Procedures: Eight aphasic and ten non-brain damaged individuals participated in eight sessions. Within these sessions they completed a spontaneous language task; which contained four different narrative genres. a lexical decision task and a simple reaction task.\ / Performance on these tasks was examined for three different levels of variability; inter session variability (across session means for time measures), intra session variability (across items for time measures) and inter session variability (item to item accuracy for lexical decision). The three different levels of variability examined performance on the same task across days and within the same task on the same day. To determine whether the change in the performance of aphasic individuals was in the same range and followed the same pattern of change and variation demonstrated by the non-brain damaged participants, the pooled results of the non-bruin damaged individuals' performance developed a 'normal' range of performance. Using the group's data the results of each of the aphasic individual was then converted to a z- score. Outcomes and results: The results demonstrate that for all aphasic individuals, across the three tasks and three time periods examined, variability is a regular, if not universal feature of aphasia. Conclusions: Stability in aphasic performance cannot be assumed. Instead research and clinical approaches must establish stability or consider the impact of variability before conclusions about performance can be drawn. The presence of variability also calls into questions the traditionally held view that aphasia results from the selective impairment of specialised language processing modules. Instead an alternative mechanism for impairment must be considered. The resource allocation view of aphasia was explored and found to explain the performance of aphasic individuals within this study.

While studies suggest that figurative, or non-literal, meanings are automatically activated in single language users, little is known about how language proficiency may influence the automaticity of non-literal meaning activation. The present research sought to address this issue by comparing figurative language activation in Spanish-English bilinguals. An interference paradigm (Glucksberg, Gildea & Bookin, 1982) was used in which participants were to judge the literal truth or falsity of statements of the form Some Xs are Ys. Judgments on this task are typically slower to statements that, though literally false, are metaphorically true (e.g., Some lawyers are sharks), suggesting that metaphorical meanings are non-optionally activated (at least in single language users). The present research involved four experiments: Experiment 1 conducted with English-speaking monolinguals, replicated the metaphor interference effect; in Experiment 2 the effect was replicated in English-dominant and in balanced bilinguals tested only in English. Experiment 3 conducted with bilinguals tested in both languages, showed that the metaphor interference effect was not obtained in either language in English-dominant bilinguals and was obtained in Spanish only in the balanced group. The findings from Experiments 1 and 2 support the view that nonliteral (metaphoric) meanings are automatically accessed in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. Experiment 3 involved a fewer number of metaphor trials per language, raising the possibility that this procedural difference may have led to a weakening of the metaphor interference effect. This possibility was directly tested in Experiment 4, conducted with English-speaking monolinguals presented with the same number of metaphor trials as the bilinguals in Experiment 3. The results showed a clear metaphor interference, even with the reduced number of trials. As such, the findings of Experiment 3, where a metaphor interference effect was obtained only for Spanish items, are somewhat equivocal: at face value, they suggest that the effect is modulated by language proficiency. Alternatively, the metaphor interference effect may turn out to be present in both languages, but may simply have been obscured by variability owing to the small sample size per language order. Which of these two interpretations turns out to be valid will depend on additional testing. Implications of the present findings for theories of the organization of the bilingual representational system are addressed.

While studies suggest that figurative, or non-literal, meanings are automatically activated in single language users, little is known about how language proficiency may influence the automaticity of non-literal meaning activation. The present research sought to address this issue by comparing figurative language activation in Spanish-English bilinguals. An interference paradigm (Glucksberg, Gildea & Bookin, 1982) was used in which participants were to judge the literal truth or falsity of statements of the form Some Xs are Ys. Judgments on this task are typically slower to statements that, though literally false, are metaphorically true (e.g., Some lawyers are sharks), suggesting that metaphorical meanings are non-optionally activated (at least in single language users). The present research involved four experiments: Experiment 1 conducted with English-speaking monolinguals, replicated the metaphor interference effect; in Experiment 2 the effect was replicated in English-dominant and in balanced bilinguals tested only in English. Experiment 3 conducted with bilinguals tested in both languages, showed that the metaphor interference effect was not obtained in either language in English-dominant bilinguals and was obtained in Spanish only in the balanced group. The findings from Experiments 1 and 2 support the view that nonliteral (metaphoric) meanings are automatically accessed in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. Experiment 3 involved a fewer number of metaphor trials per language, raising the possibility that this procedural difference may have led to a weakening of the metaphor interference effect. This possibility was directly tested in Experiment 4, conducted with English-speaking monolinguals presented with the same number of metaphor trials as the bilinguals in Experiment 3. The results showed a clear metaphor interference, even with the reduced number of trials. As such, the findings of Experiment 3, where a metaphor interference effect was obtained only for Spanish items, are somewhat equivocal: at face value, they suggest that the effect is modulated by language proficiency. Alternatively, the metaphor interference effect may turn out to be present in both languages, but may simply have been obscured by variability owing to the small sample size per language order. Which of these two interpretations turns out to be valid will depend on additional testing. Implications of the present findings for theories of the organization of the bilingual representational system are addressed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xv, 268 p.; also includes graphics. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Chris Brew, Dept. of Linguistics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 252-266) and index.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989.