Computing That Serves

Linguistic Feature Engineering for Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing


Thursday, March 17, 2005 - 10:00am


Eric Ringger, Researcher in the NLP group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington

According to various estimates, empirical work in the field of NLP has grown from less than 10% a decade and a half ago to nearly 90% of all published research papers.  For some computational linguists, this has been a shock to the system, as ideas from statistical physics and machine learning have replaced theoretical linguistics as the tools of choice.  Whereas Chomsky and his cohorts focused on linguistic competence (the abstract knowledge of grammar possessed by a native speaker) to the exclusion of performance (the actual utterances from a native speaker), modern approaches to speech and language processing owe more to information theory in the vein of Shannon and are focused on performance.  The old approaches to big problems such as parsing and semantic interpretation of sentences, discourses, and dialog using logic and inference have been largely replaced by a new, more pragmatic approach that tends to attack simpler problems, including part-of-speech tagging, named entity tagging, shallow parsing (or parse chunking), and information extraction, with a focus on handling the common cases with high accuracy, as a good engineer would.  Are the computational linguists who used to write rules out of a job?

To address the question, I discuss two research problems in which linguistic and empirical insights have met in hybrid systems with mixed results.  The first is the sentence realization problem: given an abstract representation of a sentence, we aim to produce a fluent string.  For a transfer-based MT system, this is the third leg of a three-step process (analysis, transfer, generation).  In a previous BYU CS colloquium, I presented our approach to producing fluent word order; in this talk, I focus on our empirical approach to an inherently linguistic problem, namely clausal extraposition in German.  (This work is part of the Amalgam and MSR-MT systems.)



Eric Ringger is a Researcher in the NLP group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, since 1997.  Eric has a B.S. in Mathematics from BYU and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester.  His research interests include computational linguistics, statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, text classification, language generation, machine translation, and statistical language modeling.  Eric served an LDS mission in Munich, Germany ('87-'89).