CAREER: Semantic Interpretation with Monolingual and Cross-lingual Evidence

词义是文本语义解释的核心，尽管迄今为止的许多工作都集中在统计方法上，但这些方法往往忽视了对文本的明确理解，最近的研究工作已经开始挑战这种简化，这表明语义解释确实对许多语言处理应用程序是必不可少的。这个CAREER项目的关键观察是，词义区别不同于一个词汇资源到另一个资源，并且词义表示的最优性应该由目标应用规定。该项目正在探索丰富和灵活的词义表示，联合收割机结合多种单语和跨语言词汇资源的好处，可以适应上下文和目标应用程序。特别是，这些表示的多语言性质允许有效利用不同语言的知识和资源。该项目还探索了这些词义表示和相应的单语和跨语言知识源在几个自然语言处理任务中所扮演的角色，包括词汇替换，单词和文本翻译以及文本到文本的语义相似性。该项目的另一个目的是将自然语言处理集成到教育应用中，并探讨如何利用词义解释模型来构建一个英语作为第二语言（ESL）和英语作为外语（EFL）学生的理解辅助工具。 该教育计划还通过大学外展计划和多语言计算语言学新课程，以及通过国际合作增加学生对国际经验的接触，提高了对大学，本科生和研究生多语言自然语言处理研究的认识。

Word meanings are central to the semantic interpretation of texts.Although much work to date has focused on statistical approaches that often ignore the explicit understanding of the text, recent research work has begun to challenge this simplification, demonstrating that semantic interpretation is indeed essential for a number of language processing applications.The key observation underlying this CAREER project is that word meaning distinctions differ from one lexical resource to another and that the optimality of word meaning representations should be dictated by the target application. The project is exploring rich and flexible word meaning representations that combine the benefits of multiple monolingual and cross-lingual lexical resources and that can be adapted to the context and to the target application. In particular, the multilingual nature of these representations allows for an effective exploitation of the knowledge and resources available in different languages. The project also explores the role played by these word meaning representations and the corresponding monolingual and cross-lingual knowledge sources in several natural language processing tasks including lexical substitution, word and text translation, and text-to-text semantic similarity.Another aim of the project is to integrate natural language processing into educational applications, and explore the use of the word meaning interpretation models to build a comprehension-assistant tool for students of English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL). The educational program also fosters increased awareness about research in multilingual natural language processing among college, undergraduate, and graduate students, through a college outreach program and a new course on multilingual computational linguistics, as well as increased exposure of students to international experiences through international collaborations.