MPMartha Palmer

Martha Palmer

*This is an algorithmically generated author record based on publicly available information.

Current Organizations / Institutes

The organizations/institutes from the scholar's latest article


Martha Palmer has a total of 13 co-authors. Here are the top co-authors by number of shared publications:


Latest Publications

  • Top Cited Papers

    The Penn Chinese TreeBank: Phrase structure annotation of a large corpus

    by Naiwen Xue, Fei Xia, Fu-Dong Chiou, Marta Palmer

    With growing interest in Chinese Language Processing, numerous NLP tools (e.g., word segmenters, part-of-speech taggers, and parsers) for Chinese have been developed all over the world. However, since no large-scale bracketed corpora are available to the public, these tools are trained on corpora with different segmentation criteria, part-of-speech tagsets and bracketing guidelines, and therefore, comparisons are difficult. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we have been preparing a large bracketed corpus since late 1998. The first two installments of the corpus, 250 thousand words of data, fully segmented, POS-tagged and syntactically bracketed, have been released to the public via LDC (www.ldc.upenn.edu). In this paper, we discuss several Chinese linguistic issues and their implications for our treebanking efforts and how we address these issues when developing our annotation guidelines. We also describe our engineering strategies to improve speed while ensuring annotation quality.


  • Open Access

    Machine translation using probabilistic synchronous dependency insertion grammars

    by Yuan Ding, Martha Palmer

    Syntax-based statistical machine translation (MT) aims at applying statistical models to structured data. In this paper, we present a syntax-based statistical machine translation system based on a probabilistic synchronous dependency insertion grammar. Synchronous dependency insertion grammars are a version of synchronous grammars defined on dependency trees. We first introduce our approach to inducing such a grammar from parallel corpora. Second, we describe the graphical model for the machine translation task, which can also be viewed as a stochastic tree-to-tree transducer. We introduce a polynomial time decoding algorithm for the model. We evaluate the outputs of our MT system using the NIST and Bleu automatic MT evaluation software. The result shows that our system outperforms the baseline system based on the IBM models in both translation speed and quality.


  • Development and Evaluation of a Korean Treebank and its Application to NLP

    by Chung-Hye Han, Na-Rae Han, Eon-Suk Ko, Martha Palmer

    학술논문검색사이트 KISS는 학술논문,연구논문,연구자료,학술지 등 다양한 자료를 서비스하며, 주제별, 등재별, 인용지수, 인기논문, 이슈논문 등 다양한 키워드의 논문을 제공하여 빠른 학술검색 및 인용이 가능하도록 서비스합니다.


  • Verb semantics for English-Chinese translation

    by Martha Palmer, Zhibiao Wu


  • Open Access

    Constraining Lexical Selection Across Languages Using TAGs

    by Dania Egedi, Martha Palmer

    Lexical selection in Machine Translation consists of several related components. Two that have received a lot of attention are lexical mapping from an underlying concept or lexical item, and choosing the correct subcategorization frame based on argument structure. Because most MT applications are small or relatively domain specific, a third component of lexical selection is generally overlooked - distinguishing between lexical items that are closely related conceptually. While some MT systems have proposed using a 'world knowledge' module to decide which word is more appropriate based on various pragmatic or stylistic constraints, we are interested in seeing how much we can accomplish using a combination of syntax and lexical semantics. By using separate ontologies for each language implemented in FB-LTAGs, we are able to elegantly model the more specific and language dependent syntactic and semantic distinctions necessary to further filter the choice of the lexical item.

  • Open Access

    Korean to English Translation Using Synchronous TAGs

    by Dania Egedi, Martha Palmer, Hyun S. Park, Aravind K. Joshi

    It is often argued that accurate machine translation requires reference to contextual knowledge for the correct treatment of linguistic phenomena such as dropped arguments and accurate lexical selection. One of the historical arguments in favor of the interlingua approach has been that, since it revolves around a deep semantic representation, it is better able to handle the types of linguistic phenomena that are seen as requiring a knowledge-based approach. In this paper we present an alternative approach, exemplified by a prototype system for machine translation of English and Korean which is implemented in Synchronous TAGs. This approach is essentially transfer based, and uses semantic feature unification for accurate lexical selection of polysemous verbs. The same semantic features, when combined with a discourse model which stores previously mentioned entities, can also be used for the recovery of topicalized arguments. In this paper we concentrate on the translation of Korean to English.

  • Open Access

    Verb Semantics and Lexical Selection

    by Zhibiao Wu, Martha Palmer

    This paper will focus on the semantic representation of verbs in computer systems and its impact on lexical selection problems in machine translation (MT). Two groups of English and Chinese verbs are examined to show that lexical selection must be based on interpretation of the sentence as well as selection restrictions placed on the verb arguments. A novel representation scheme is suggested, and is compared to representations with selection restrictions used in transfer-based MT. We see our approach as closely aligned with knowledge-based MT approaches (KBMT), and as a separate component that could be incorporated into existing systems. Examples and experimental results will show that, using this scheme, inexact matches can achieve correct lexical selection.