CAREER: Semantic Interpretation with Monolingual and Cross-lingual Evidence

词义是文本语义解释的核心。尽管到目前为止，很多工作都集中在统计方法上，这些方法往往忽略了对文本的明确理解，但最近的研究工作已经开始挑战这种简化，表明语义解释对于许多语言处理应用确实是必不可少的。这个CAREER项目的关键观察结果是，不同的词汇资源之间的词义差异是不同的，词义表示的最佳性应该由目标应用程序决定。该项目正在探索丰富而灵活的词义表示，这些表示结合了多种单语和跨语词汇资源的优点，并且可以根据上下文和目标应用程序进行调整。特别是，这些表示的多语言性质允许有效地利用不同语言的知识和资源。该项目还探讨了这些词义表示以及相应的单语和跨语知识来源在词汇替代、单词和文本翻译以及文本到文本语义相似等自然语言处理任务中所起的作用。该项目的另一个目标是将自然语言处理整合到教育应用中，并探索使用词义解释模型为英语作为第二语言（ESL）和英语作为外语（EFL）的学生构建理解辅助工具。该教育项目还通过学院外展项目和多语言计算语言学的新课程，提高了大学生、本科生和研究生对多语言自然语言处理研究的认识，并通过国际合作增加了学生对国际经验的接触。

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.