Eye4Ref is a rich multimodal dataset of eye-movement recordings collected from referentially complex situated settings where the linguistic utterances and their visual referential world were available to the listener. It consists of not only fixation parameters but also saccadic movement parameters that are time-locked to accompanying German utterances (with English translations). Additionally, it also contains symbolic knowledge (contextual) representations of the images to map the referring expressions onto the objects in corresponding images. Overall, the data was collected from 62 participants in three different experimental setups (86 systematically controlled sentence–image pairs and 1844 eye-movement recordings). Referential complexity was controlled by visual manipulations (e.g. number of objects, visibility of the target items, etc.), and by linguistic manipulations (e.g., the position of the disambiguating word in a sentence). This multimodal dataset, in which the three different sources of information namely eye-tracking, language, and visual environment are aligned, offers a test of various research questions not from only language perspective but also computer vision.

This paper describes CCG/AMR, a novel grammar for semantic parsing of Abstract Meaning Representations. CCG/AMR equips Combinatory Categorial Grammar derivations with graph semantics by assigning each CCG combinator an interpretation in terms of a graph algebra. We provide an algorithm that induces a CCG/AMR from a corpus and show that it creates a compact lexicon with low ambiguity and achieves a robust coverage of 78% of the examined sentences under ideal conditions. We also identify several phenomena that affect any approach relying either on CCG or graph algebraic approaches for AMR parsing. This includes differences of representation between CCG and AMR, as well as non-compositional constructions that are not expressible through a monotonous construction process. To our knowledge, this paper provides the first analysis of these corpus issues.

Incomplete linguistic input, i.e. due to a noisy environment, is one of the challenges that a successful communication system has to deal with. In this paper, we study text completion with a data set composed of sentences with gaps where a successful completion cannot be achieved through a uni-modal (language-based) approach. We present a solution based on a context-integrating dependency parser incorporating an additional non-linguistic modality. An incompleteness in one channel is compensated by information from another one and the parser learns the association between the two modalities from a multiple level knowledge representation. We examined several model variations by adjusting the degree of influence of different modalities in the decision making on possible filler words and their exact reference to a non-linguistic context element. Our model is able to fill the gap with 95.4% word and 95.2% exact reference accuracy hence the successful prediction can be achieved not only on the word level (such as mug) but also with respect to the correct identification of its context reference (such as mug 2 among several mug instances).

For the WMT 2018 shared task of translating documents pertaining to the Biomedical domain, we developed a scoring formula that uses an unsophisticated and effective method of weighting term frequencies and was integrated in a data selection pipeline. The method was applied on five language pairs and it performed best on Portuguese-English, where a BLEU score of 41.84 placed it third out of seven runs submitted by three institutions. In this paper, we describe our method and results with a special focus on Spanish-English where we compare it against a state-of-the-art method. Our contribution to the task lies in introducing a fast, unsupervised method for selecting domain-specific data for training models which obtain good results using only 10% of the general domain data.

In this paper, a novel approach to Quality Estimation is introduced, which extends the method in (Duma and Menzel, 2017) by also considering pseudo-reference translations as data sources to the tree and sequence kernels used before. Two variants of the system were submitted to the sentence level WMT18 Quality Estimation Task for the English-German language pair. They have been ranked 4th and 6th out of 13 systems in the SMT track, while in the NMT track ranks 4 and 5 out of 11 submissions have been reached.

This paper describes our unsupervised knowledge-free approach to the SemEval-2017 Task 1 Competition. The proposed method makes use of Paragraph Vector for assessing the semantic similarity between pairs of sentences. We experimented with various dimensions of the vector and three state-of-the-art similarity metrics. Given a cross-lingual task, we trained models corresponding to its two languages and combined the models by averaging the similarity scores. The results of our submitted runs are above the median scores for five out of seven test sets by means of Pearson Correlation. Moreover, one of our system runs performed best on the Spanish-English-WMT test set ranking first out of 53 runs submitted in total by all participants.

We present the Hamburg Dependency Treebank (HDT), which to our knowledge is the largest dependency treebank currently available. It consists of genuine dependency annotations, i. e. they have not been transformed from phrase structures. We explore characteristics of the treebank and compare it against others. To exemplify the benefit of large dependency treebanks, we evaluate different parsers on the HDT. In addition, a set of tools will be described which help working with and searching in the treebank.

Within a grammar formalism that treats syntax analysis as a global optimization problem, methods are investigated to improve parsing performance by recombining the solutions of smaller and easier subproblems. The robust nature of the formalism allows the application of this technique with little change to the original grammar.

A transformation-based approach to robust parsing is presented, which achieves a strictly monotonic improvement of its current best hypothesis by repeatedly applying local repair steps to a complex multi-level representation. The transformation process is guided by scores derived from weighted constraints. Besides being interruptible, the procedure exhibits a performance profile typical for anytime procedures and holds great promise for the implementation of time-adaptive behaviour.