CL-students from the University of Tartu/Estonia and from the University of Zurich held a workshop at Tartu from Sept. 9th through 13th, 1996 (Trip Report in German as published by the University of Zurich Press Service). Subsequently their contributions were written up as research papers and published as a technical report:
M. Koit, H. Õim (eds.): Papers of the First Swiss-Estonian Student Workshop on Computational and Theoretical Linguistics. University of Tartu. Dept. of General Linguistics and Institute of Computer Science. 1996.
Here we provide access to the papers submitted by the Zurich students. The papers submitted by the Tartu students can be found at http://www.cl.ut.ee/ee/yllitised .
(Full version (compressed postscript))
There are still a lot of uncertainties about the evaluation of machine translation (MT) systems. In this report, we try to establish a catalog of criteria which we consider to be crucial for a systematic assessment of MT systems; the paper is divided into three parts: technical, linguistic and entrepreneurial criteria. Furthermore, we give hints on how to organize an evaluation project.
(Full version (compressed postscript))
Interactive fiction (IF) or text adventures are text-based computer games. After a short introduction I will explain some details of an IF authoring system. As an illustration I will give an outline of my own project. I will conclude by discussing some scientific attempts to improve the genre using theories of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
(Full version (compressed postscript))
This paper uses examples from Danish, English and German in order to illustrate how to write NL grammars in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Linguistically based on Government & Binding (GB) theory, it tries to combine well-researched GB analyses with the high versatility, flexibility and implementability of LFG. The grammar excerpt presented focusses on word-order.
(Full version (compressed postscript))
The following paper summarizes part of the findings that resulted from a seminar on Machine Translation in Practical Use, which was held in September 1996 at the University of Zurich. In the seminar, fundamental decision-making criteria regarding introduction and choice of an MT system were discussed. The focus of this paper is on currently available translation tools for German-English translation, especially MT systems, and their usefulness in a business environment. To this purpose, we have concentrated on a survey of commercial MT systems and the criteria for their use. An outlook at possible developments in MT concludes the paper.
(Full version (compressed postscript))
It is a well-known fact that many natural language sentences may have a large number of possible syntactic analyses with semantically inconsistent interpretations. In this paper, we focus on selectional restrictions as a device for lexical and syntactic disambiguation. We will briefly sketch the notion of selectional restrictions from a practical point of view. We provide an example of how such constraints can be used for ambiguity resolution. In section 2 and 3, we address the topic of this article, the problem of acquiring selectional restrictions. We discuss different approaches, in particular methods based on statistical corpus analysis. The role of selectional restrictions in a concrete NLP system is shown in section 4.
