Mari Broman Olsen

Also published as: Mari Olsen


2018

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Lexical Conceptual Structure of Literal and Metaphorical Spatial Language: A Case Study of “Push”
Bonnie Dorr | Mari Olsen
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding

Prior methodologies for understanding spatial language have treated literal expressions such as “Mary pushed the car over the edge” differently from metaphorical extensions such as “Mary’s job pushed her over the edge”. We demonstrate a methodology for standardizing literal and metaphorical meanings, by building on work in Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS), a general-purpose representational component used in machine translation. We argue that spatial predicates naturally extend into other fields (e.g., circumstantial or temporal), and that LCS provides both a framework for distinguishing spatial from non-spatial, and a system for finding metaphorical meaning extensions. We start with MetaNet (MN), a large repository of conceptual metaphors, condensing 197 spatial entries into sixteen top-level categories of motion frames. Using naturally occurring instances of English push , and expansions of MN frames, we demonstrate that literal and metaphorical extensions exhibit patterns predicted and represented by the LCS model.

2001

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Implicit cues for explicit generation: using telicity as a cue for tense structure in a Chinese to English MT system
Mari Olsen | David Traum | Carol van Ess-Dykema | Amy Weinberg
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VIII

2000

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Telicity as a Cue to Temporaland Discourse Structure in Chinese-English Machine Translation
Mari Olsen | David Traum | Carol Van Ess-Dykema | Amy Weinberg | Ron Dolan
NAACL-ANLP 2000 Workshop: Applied Interlinguas: Practical Applications of Interlingual Approaches to NLP

1999

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Modeling the language assessment process and result: Proposed architecture for automatic oral proficiency assessment
Gina-Anne Levow | Mari Broman Olsen
Computer Mediated Language Assessment and Evaluation in Natural Language Processing

1998

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Enhancing automatic acquisition of the thematic structure in a large-scale lexicon for Mandarin Chinese
Mari Broman Olsen | Bonnie J. Dorr | Scott C. Thomas
Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers

This paper describes a refinement to our procedure for porting lexical conceptual structure (LCS) into new languages. Specifically we describe a two-step process for creating candidate thematic grids for Mandarin Chinese verbs, using the English verb heading the VP in the subde_nitions to separate senses, and roughly parsing the verb complement structure to match thematic structure templates. We accomplished a substantial reduction in manual effort, without substantive loss. The procedure is part of a larger process of creating a usable lexicon for interlingual machine translation from a large on-line resource with both too much and too little information.

1997

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Structured Lexicons and Semantic Tagging
Bonnie J. Dorr | Mari Broman Olsen
Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?

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Deriving Verbal and Compositonal Lexical Aspect for NLP Applications
Bonnie J. Dorr | Mari Broman Olsen
35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Toward compact monotonically compositional interlingua using lexical aspect
Bonnie J. Dorr | Mari Broman Olsen | Scott C. Thomas
AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas

We describe a theoretical investigation into the semantic space described by our interlingua (IL), which currently has 191 main verb classes divided into 434 subclasses, represented by 237 distinct Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs). Using the model of aspect in Olsen (1994; 1997)—monotonic aspectual composition—we have identified 71 aspectually basic subclasses that are associated with one or more of 68 aspectually non-basic classes via some lexical (“type-shifting”) rule (Bresnan, 1982; Pinker, 1984; Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995). This allows us to refine the IL and address certain computational and theoretical issues at the same time. (1) From a linguistic viewpoint, the expected benefits include a refinement of the aspectual model in (Olsen, 1994; Olsen, 1997) (which provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for aspectual com- position), and a refinement of the verb classifications in (Levin, 1993); we also expect our approach to eventually produce a systematic definition (in terms of LCSs and compositional operations) of the precise meaning components responsible for Levin's classification. (2) Computationally, the lexicon is made more compact.

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Using WordNet to posit hierarchical structure in Levin’s verb classes
Mari Broman Olsen | Bonnie J. Dorr | David J. Clark
AMTA/SIG-IL First Workshop on Interlinguas

In this paper we report on experiments using WordNet synset tags to evaluate the semantic properties of the verb classes cataloged by Levin (1993). This paper represents ongoing research begun at the University of Pennsylvania (Rosenzweig and Dang, 1997; Palmer, Rosenzweig, and Dang, 1997) and the University of Maryland (Dorr and Jones, 1996b; Dorr and Jones, 1996a; Dorr and Jones, 1996c). Using WordNet sense tags to constrain the intersection of Levin classes, we avoid spurious class intersections introduced by homonymy and polysemy (run a bath, run a mile). By adding class intersections based on a single shared sense-tagged word, we minimize the impact of the non-exhaustiveness of Levin’s database (Dorr and Olsen, 1996; Dorr, To appear). By examining the syntactic properties of the intersective classes, we provide a clearer picture of the relationship between WordNet/EuroWordNet and the LCS interlingua for machine translation and other NLP applications.