Contents xv
3.3 Empirical Results..................................................... 117
3.3.1 Parsing Modern Standard Arabic .......................... 117
3.3.2 Parsing Modern Hebrew.................................... 120
3.4 Conclusion and Future Work ........................................ 123
References.................................................................... 124
4 Semantic Processing of Semitic Languages .............................. 129
Mona Diab and Yuval Marton
4.1 Introduction ........................................................... 129
4.2 Fundamentals of Semitic Language Meaning Units ................ 130
4.2.1 Morpho-Semantics: A Primer .............................. 130
4.3 Meaning, Semantic Distance, Paraphrasing and
Lexicon Generation .................................................. 135
4.3.1 Semantic Distance .......................................... 136
4.3.2 Textual Entailment.......................................... 138
4.3.3 Lexicon Creation ........................................... 138
4.4 Word Sense Disambiguation and Meaning Induction .............. 139
4.4.1 WSD Approaches in Semitic Languages .................. 140
4.4.2 WSI in Semitic Languages ................................. 141
4.5 Multiword Expression Detection and Classification................ 142
4.5.1 Approaches to Semitic MWE Processing and
Resources ................................................... 143
4.6 Predicate–Argument Analysis ....................................... 145
4.6.1 Arabic Annotated Resources ............................... 146
4.6.2 Systems for Semantic Role Labeling ...................... 148
4.7 Conclusion............................................................ 152
References.................................................................... 152
5 Language Modeling ........................................................ 161
Ilana Heintz
5.1 Introduction ........................................................... 161
5.2 Evaluating Language Models with Perplexity ...................... 162
5.3 N-Gram Language Modeling ........................................ 164
5.4 Smoothing: Discounting, Backoff, and Interpolation............... 166
5.4.1 Discounting ................................................. 166
5.4.2 Combining Discounting with Backoff ..................... 168
5.4.3 Interpolation ................................................ 168
5.5 Extensions to N-Gram Language Modeling ........................ 170
5.5.1 Skip N-Grams and FlexGrams ............................. 170
5.5.2 Variable-Length Language Models ........................ 171
5.5.3 Class-Based Language Models ............................ 173
5.5.4 Factored Language Models ................................ 174
5.5.5 Neural Network Language Models ........................ 175
5.5.6 Syntactic or Structured Language Models................. 177
5.5.7 Tree-Based Language Models ............................. 178
5.5.8 Maximum-Entropy Language Models..................... 178