COMP34411
Two hours
Question ONE is COMPULSORY
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Natural Language Systems
Date: Thursday 21st January 2016
Time: 09:45 - 11:45
Please answer Question ONE in Section A and TWO Questions from Section B.
This is a CLOSED book examination
The use of electronic calculators is permitted provided they are not programmable and do not store text
[PTO]
, COMP34411
Section A
You should answer question 1: each part of this question carries 5 marks
1. a) Explain, with examples, the difference between lexical, structural and scope ambiguity.
[3 marks] Which of these is the most significant problem for machine translation
systems (and say why)? [2 marks]
b) What are precision, recall and F-measure? [3 marks]. Suppose you had a system
that prescribed drugs in response to natural language descriptions of symptoms.
Would it be better for this system to have high precision or high recall (and say
why)? [2 marks]
c) What is the difference between the way that people use their articulators to produce
vowels and the way they use them to produce consonants? [3 marks] On the basis
of what you have just said about this difference, decide which of the following
speech signals and intensity contours corresponds to someone saying ‘kick’ and
which to someone saying ‘icky’. [2 marks]
Figure 1: Recordings of ‘kick’ and ‘icky’
d) What are ‘transfer rules’? Illustrate your answer by sketching a rule for turning
Page 2 of 8
Two hours
Question ONE is COMPULSORY
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Natural Language Systems
Date: Thursday 21st January 2016
Time: 09:45 - 11:45
Please answer Question ONE in Section A and TWO Questions from Section B.
This is a CLOSED book examination
The use of electronic calculators is permitted provided they are not programmable and do not store text
[PTO]
, COMP34411
Section A
You should answer question 1: each part of this question carries 5 marks
1. a) Explain, with examples, the difference between lexical, structural and scope ambiguity.
[3 marks] Which of these is the most significant problem for machine translation
systems (and say why)? [2 marks]
b) What are precision, recall and F-measure? [3 marks]. Suppose you had a system
that prescribed drugs in response to natural language descriptions of symptoms.
Would it be better for this system to have high precision or high recall (and say
why)? [2 marks]
c) What is the difference between the way that people use their articulators to produce
vowels and the way they use them to produce consonants? [3 marks] On the basis
of what you have just said about this difference, decide which of the following
speech signals and intensity contours corresponds to someone saying ‘kick’ and
which to someone saying ‘icky’. [2 marks]
Figure 1: Recordings of ‘kick’ and ‘icky’
d) What are ‘transfer rules’? Illustrate your answer by sketching a rule for turning
Page 2 of 8
