Post Meeting Summary 3-3-2011 by Weisi Duan

Besides the focused paper, people have read related papers including machine learning techniques, Word Sense Disambiguation methods, linguistics, translation, and temporal event ordering which is semantically related.

For the focused paper, the authors come up with the idea of tackling a smaller semantic problem which has not been tackled before. They formulated this problem of Tense Disambiguation, which is related to WSD but not exactly the same. The influence of the problem is manifold. It can be applied to help many other problem such as machine translation, text entailment and so on.

For machine learning techniques, I read a paper that discusses a cascading model where the model is a pipeline of classifiers and the output of the previous classifier is used to identify the next classifier, and then classify the instance by the next classifier. Dong read a paper that explore the combination of classifiers to address the WSD. The authors experimented 6 different classifiers and different ways to combine them.

For WSD methods, beside the paper Dong read, Daniel read a paper that exploits novel syntactic features to improve the precision of WSD. The authors use minipar to generate the dependencies to be used as features. For classifier, they used Decision List and AdaBoost.

For temporal model, Dhananjay read a paper about ordering events based on temporal relations. The justifications of superiority of Integer linear programming against Greedy methods are discussed. The authors used SVM based transitivity to obtain output as pairwise ordering of temporal events.

For linguistics, Brendan read the paper about construction grammars. The definition of construction is discussed as well as the tree substitution grammar and decision oriented parsing.

For translation, Alan read a paper on translating verbs in Chinese to English, regarding the difficulty of tense. The authors explore latent features (not exactly features involving hidden variables) such as temporal features to show the effectiveness of such features. Ablation and comparison with surface features are conducted.