In this paper, we propose a new annotation approach to Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency labelling that aims to overcome the two major issues in traditional morphology-based annotation: Inconsistency and data sparsity. We re-annotate the Penn Chinese Treebank 5.0 (CTB5) and demonstrate the advantages of this approach compared to the original CTB5 annotation through word segmentation, POS tagging and machine translation experiments.

Reflection symmetry is an important feature of an object. Main goals in symmetry analysis include quantifying the amount of asymmetry in an object and finding the nearest symmetric object to a given asymmetric one. Samir et al. [19] achieved these goals using a shape distance between representations of curves termed square-root velocity functions. We extend their work by defining shape descriptors based on this representation. The descriptors are based on asymmetry measures computed for a set of reflections of a curve and are invariant to all shape preserving transformations (translation, scale, rotation and re-parameterization). We utilize these descriptors for retrieval of shapes in the Flavia leaf database and a subset of a handwritten digit dataset. We show that we outperform the commonly used angle function and other state of the art descriptors.

In pursuing machine understanding of human language, highly accurate syntactic analysis is a crucial step. In this work, we focus on dependency grammar, which models syntax by encoding transparent predicate-argument structures. Recent advances in dependency parsing have shown that employing higher-order subtree structures in graph-based parsers can substantially improve the parsing accuracy. However, the inefficiency of this approach increases with the order of the subtrees. This work explores a new reranking approach for dependency parsing that can utilize complex subtree representations by applying efficient subtree selection methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank and the Chinese Treebank. Our system achieves the best performance among known supervised systems evaluated on these datasets, improving the baseline accuracy from 91.88% to 93.42% for English, and from 87.39% to 89.25% for Chinese.