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Design and realization of a modular architecture for textual entailment
- SEBASTIAN PADÓ, TAE-GIL NOH, ASHER STERN, RUI WANG, ROBERTO ZANOLI
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- Journal:
- Natural Language Engineering / Volume 21 / Issue 2 / March 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 December 2013, pp. 167-200
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A key challenge at the core of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks is the ability to determine which conclusions can be inferred from a given natural language text. This problem, called the Recognition of Textual Entailment (RTE), has initiated the development of a range of algorithms, methods, and technologies. Unfortunately, research on Textual Entailment (TE), like semantics research more generally, is fragmented into studies focussing on various aspects of semantics such as world knowledge, lexical and syntactic relations, or more specialized kinds of inference. This fragmentation has problematic practical consequences. Notably, interoperability among the existing RTE systems is poor, and reuse of resources and algorithms is mostly infeasible. This also makes systematic evaluations very difficult to carry out. Finally, textual entailment presents a wide array of approaches to potential end users with little guidance on which to pick. Our contribution to this situation is the novel EXCITEMENT architecture, which was developed to enable and encourage the consolidation of methods and resources in the textual entailment area. It decomposes RTE into components with strongly typed interfaces. We specify (a) a modular linguistic analysis pipeline and (b) a decomposition of the ‘core’ RTE methods into top-level algorithms and subcomponents. We identify four major subcomponent types, including knowledge bases and alignment methods. The architecture was developed with a focus on generality, supporting all major approaches to RTE and encouraging language independence. We illustrate the feasibility of the architecture by constructing mappings of major existing systems onto the architecture. The practical implementation of this architecture forms the EXCITEMENT open platform. It is a suite of textual entailment algorithms and components which contains the three systems named above, including linguistic-analysis pipelines for three languages (English, German, and Italian), and comprises a number of linguistic resources. By addressing the problems outlined above, the platform provides a comprehensive and flexible basis for research and experimentation in textual entailment and is available as open source software under the GNU General Public License.
A New Analytical Method and its Application to Cylinder Seals
- J. M. Asher-Greve, W. B. Stern
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Material analysis is a basic task of archaeometry, but it is problematic in many ways: the analysis should be representative but should not destroy or damage the object: the analysis should be rapid and inexpensive in order to enable the study of large quantities of objects for statistical evaluation. Analyses based upon small subsamples tend to give random results, i.e. results not representative for the entire specimen, but analyses of the entire body should be truly non-destructive.
EDS-XFA (energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence analysis) is one of the few non-destructive analytical tools giving chemical information on the average composition of a surface. Nearly 90% of all natural chemical elements can be detected provided they are present as major or minor constituents. Like all instrumental techniques, EDS-XFA is based upon a comparison of unknown samples with standards of known composition (for details see Bertin, 1978); quantitative analysis is possible when surface conditions (size, morphology, texture, etc.) of unknowns and standards are identical. Regarding archaeological objects, the sample surface should not be treated, smoothed or flattened, but has to be left in its original morphology (which varies from specimen to specimen) and this may influence the analytical results. These are therefore considered to be qualitative and are essentially used to establish groups of similar chemical composition (Fig. 1). This chemical classification, when applied to cylinder seals, is closely associated with mineral/rock species since a clear interdependence exists between mineral species and their composition. The mineralogical classification, however, is, by tradition, based upon physical properties of minerals like optics, hardness, etc., and not primarily on their chemistry.