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Unsupervised Linguistic Inference

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Abstract:
This dissertation describes two novel algorithms for fully unsupervised part-of-speech tagging (POST), both of which exceed the performance of the current state-of-the-art models in both accuracy and computational cost. The first iterative algorithm produces a collection of geometric descriptor vectors that characterize each word type along with a clustering of these vectors which provide the inferred POS labels. The second algorithm also produces a clustering of descriptor vectors, but it relies on simple biologically-plausible mechanisms which cause these vectors to self-organize in response to the presentation of natural language data. These biological mechanisms are extended for use in a related algorithm for grammar induction which is shown to perform well on simple context free grammars. Finally, a careful examination of the three most common evaluation criteria for unsupervised POST is included which demonstrates that only one of these three criteria performs satisfactorily.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)

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Citation

Lamar, Michael Taylor, "Unsupervised Linguistic Inference" (2010). Applied Mathematics Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z07M0655

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