Download or read book Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification written by Kees van Deemter and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the winter of 1993-1994, essays were commissioned on the topic of ambiguity and underspecification. All papers received were subjected to a thorough review process. The present volume, comprising ten self-contained papers and an introductory chapter, is the result. Natural language is known for the ambiguity of its expressions. Whereas artificial forms of communication tend to be designed in such a way that ambiguity is reduced to a minimum, natural language is ambiguous at various 'levels' of interpretation. At a low (e.g., speech recognition) level, a signal can be ambiguous between various utterances; at a higher (semantic) level, a fully recognised utterance can be used to express various different propositions; and at an even higher (pragmatic) level, a proposition may be used for various different purposes. The present volume focuses on ambiguities of the second kind, which are sometimes called semantic ambiguities, or mostly just ambiguities, when there is no likelihood of confusion.
Download or read book Pragmatics Truth and Underspecification written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection.
Download or read book Semantics Lexical Structures and Adjectives written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.
Download or read book Default Semantics written by K. M. Jaszczolt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering book Kasia Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She shows that the compositionality of meaning may be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference. Among the applications the author discusses are constructions that pose problems in semantic analysis such as referring expressions, propositional attitude constructions, presupposition, modality, numerals, and sentential connectives. She proposes solutions to cutting edge problems in the semantics/pragmatics interface - for example, how many levels of meaning should be distinguished; the status of under-specification; how much contextual information should be placed in the representation of the speaker's meaning; whether there are default interpretations; the stage of utterance interpretation at which pragmatic inference begins; and whether compositionality is a necessary feature of the theory of meaning and if so how it is to be defined. The book is for advanced students and researchers in semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language.
Download or read book Resolving Semantic Ambiguity written by David S. Gorfein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resolving Semantic Ambiguity arrrays the work of leading theorists on the issues surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ambiguous text. The chapters are organized around three major themes: (1) retrieval, (2) representation of words, and (3) text as a context. The book offers a number of new challenges to the role of context in language processing, some striking new evidence on the repetition of homographs in different contexts, and new approaches to resolution capable of being incorporated into either modular or network models. In several papers the problem of ambiguity is extended to include the problem of weak ambiguity and understanding text themes. The book provides a unique starting point for researchers approaching the problems of meaning in cognitive science, psychology, and computational linguistics.
Download or read book Logic and Lexicon written by Manfred Pinkal and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property of natural language. This monograph provides a comprehensive survey of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness. The book discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness, which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer science. It argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential for further contextual specification, and proposes a unified logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic, philosophy of language, and NL- oriented AI. Although it makes extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts since all technical terms are carefully explained.
Download or read book Semantics Volume 1 written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 989 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (MAIENBORN ET AL.) BD. 33.1 HSK E-BOOK".
Download or read book Partiality and Underspecification in Information Languages and Knowledge written by Gemma Bel-Enguix and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, there has been a proliferation of technological developments that incorporate processing of human language. Hardware and software can be specialized for designated subject areas, and computational devices are designed for a widening variety of applications. At the same time, new areas and applications are emerging by demanding intelligent technology enhanced by the processing of human language. These new applications often perform tasks which handle information, and they have a capacity to reason, using both formal and human language. Many sub-areas of Artificial Intelligence demand integration of Natural Language Processing, at least to some degree. Furthermore, technologies require coverage of known as well as unknown agents, and tasks with potential variations. All of this takes place in environments with unknown factors. The book covers theoretical work, advanced applications, approaches, and techniques for computational models of information, reasoning systems, and presentation in language. The book promotes work on intelligent natural language processing and related models of information, thought, reasoning, and other cognitive processes. The topics covered by the chapters prompt further research and developments of advanced systems in the areas of logic, computability, computational linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience of language, robotics, and artificial intelligence, among others.
Download or read book Semantics and Pragmatics Drawing a Line written by Ilse Depraetere and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores new territory at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, reassessing a number of linguistic phenomena in the light of recent advances in pragmatic theory. It presents stimulating insights by experts in linguistics and philosophy, including Kent Bach, Philippe de Brabanter, Max Kölbel and François Recanati. The authors begin by reassessing the definition of four theoretical concepts: saturation, free pragmatic enrichment, completion and expansion. They go on to confront (sub)disciplines that have addressed similar issues but that have not necessarily been in close contact, and then turn to questions related to reported speech, modality, indirect requests and prosody. Chapters investigate lexical pragmatics and (cognitive) lexical semantics and other interactions involving experimental pragmatics, construction grammar, clinical linguistics, and the distinction between mental and linguistic content. The authors bridge the gap between different disciplines, subdisciplines and methodologies, supporting cross-fertilization of ideas and indicating the empirical studies that are needed to test current theoretical concepts and push the theory further. Readers will find overviews of the ways in which concepts are defined, empirical data with which they are illustrated and explorations of the theoretical frameworks in which concepts are couched. This exciting exchange of ideas has its origins in the editors’ workshop series on the theme ‘The semantics/pragmatics interface: linguistic, logical and philosophical perspectives’, held at the University of Lille 3 in 2012-13. Scholars of linguistics, logic and philosophy and those interested in the research benefits of crossing disciplines will find this work both accessible and thought-provoking, especially those with an interest in pragmatic theory or semantics.
Download or read book Underspecification and Resolution in Discourse Semantics written by Johannes Bos and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Semantics Lexical Structures and Adjectives written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.
Download or read book Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity written by Graeme Hirst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. While parsing techniques have been greatly improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally been ad hoc and had little theoretical basis. Graeme Hirst offers a new, theoretically motivated foundation for conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of lexical and syntactic ambiguities. His approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on research in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, montague semantics, and cognitive psychology.
Download or read book Semantic Underspecification and Its Contextual Resolution in the Domain of Degrees written by Ciyang Qing and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many natural language expressions have context-sensitive interpretations, which can make it difficult to pin down the exact meaning of an expression. To address this challenge, it is common for semanticists to assign context-sensitive expressions underspecified meaning representations, where parts of the meanings need to be resolved in context. This naturally raises two important theoretical issues concerning their semantics/pragmatics interface: (i) How do we represent their conventional, context-invariant meaning (i.e., the semantic question)? (ii) How does context, together with the conventional meaning, determine the interpretation (i.e., the metasemantic question)? In this dissertation, I focus on the domain of degrees and argue for the generality and importance of the distinction between semantic contextual resolution mechanisms and pragmatic ones in addressing these questions. The contrast is in parallel with that between the pronouns "I" (which conventionally refers to the speaker in context) and "they" (whose referent is determined via pragmatic reasoning). Concretely, I use directional modified numerals (e.g., "up to 100") and gradable adjectives (e.g., "tall" and "full") as two case studies to argue that (a) the two contextual resolution mechanisms can be unified by a general principle of informativity-applicability trade-off, which is a quantitative generalization of the interaction between Grice's maxims of Quantity and Quality, and that (b) the way to tease them apart is by examining whether the contextual resolution of an expression is sensitive to the larger linguistic environment in which it appears. If yes, the mechanism is pragmatic, and if no, it is semantic. For directional modified numerals, the opposite inference patterns they trigger when they are unembedded and embedded under deontic modals suggest that they have a pragmatic contextual resolution mechanism. For relative and maximum gradable adjectives, I examine how they are used in definite descriptions in referential contexts and argue that, contrary to some recent proposals, their contextual resolution mechanism is in fact semantic in nature. In addition to providing a more precise and unified semantics for relative (e.g., "tall") and maximum (e.g., "full") gradable adjectives, I further examine the class of minimum gradable adjectives (e.g., "bent") and illustrate that many of them are in fact systematically ambiguous between a relative reading and a > 0 reading, which is based on a meaningful notion of zero rather than the minimum. I argue that this suggests a new taxonomy of positive forms of gradable adjectives. On the one hand, some positive forms are threshold-introducing, which include maximum and relative adjectives, together with minimum adjectives with relative readings. They share a unified semantics and their differences are explained by the different contextual parameters. On the other hand, the > 0 reading of a gradable adjective is derived in a way parallel to comparative constructions, which provides a straightforward explanation of their similarities observed in the literature.
Download or read book Semantics and Pragmatics written by Katarzyna Jaszczolt and published by Pearson PTR Interactive. This book was released on 2002 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive and wide ranging introduction to various approaches to meaning. The book contains a critical discussion of these approaches and gives accessible explanations of relevant terminology.
Download or read book The Mathematics of Syntactic Structure written by Hans-Peter Kolb and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-09-12 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.
Download or read book Representation and Inference for Natural Language written by Patrick Blackburn and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can computers distinguish the coherent from the unintelligible, recognize new information in a sentence, or draw inferences from a natural language passage? Computational semantics is an exciting new field that seeks answers to these questions, and this volume is the first textbook wholly devoted to this growing subdiscipline. The book explains the underlying theoretical issues and fundamental techniques for computing semantic representations for fragments of natural language. This volume will be an essential text for computer scientists, linguists, and anyone interested in the development of computational semantics.
Download or read book Handbook of Natural Language Processing written by Robert Dale and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2000-07-25 with total page 1015 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the design and application of natural language text-based processing systems, based on generative linguistics, empirical copus analysis, and artificial neural networks. It emphasizes the practical tools to accommodate the selected system.
