A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding

A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019

Natural Language Ontology

The aim of natural language ontology is to uncover the ontological categories and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, that a speaker accepts when using a language. This article aims to clarify what exactly the subject matter of natural language ontology is, what sorts of linguistic data it should take into account, how natural language ontology relates to other branches of metaphysics, in what ways natural language ontology is important, and what may be distinctive of the ontological categories and structures reflected in natural language

Introduction

International audienceThis introductory chapter is organized into three parts. The first part focuses on the syntactic structure and compositional interpretation of determiner phrases, and frames the ontological issues related to reference to kinds in this context. It addresses a series of ontological issues relevant to the analysis of natural language: in order to account for linguistic data, must we postulate the existence of kinds, viewed as a type of entities, distinguished from particulars or tokens? What is the relationship between kinds and sets of entities, between kinds and properties, between kinds and sets of properties? The second part is comprised of three sections which are dedicated respectively to the stage-level/individual-level distinction, to the contribution of unboundedness and plurality, and to the dispositional reading of generic sentences. The questions addressed in this part pertain to the relationship between genericity, habituality, abilities, and dispositions. The third part examines the type of generic sentences, opposing analytic vs synthetic judgments, and raises the question of the notion of normality. It comprises two sections. The first section addresses the issue of the linguistic manifestation of the analytic/synthetic distinction and investigates the sources of the available interpretations for indefinite generic sentences, bare plurals, and definite plural generics. The second section discusses the notion of normality, comparing the view of normality as a statistical fact and the view of normality as a normative one

Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This paper is a commissioned 'target' article, with commentaries by W. Davis, B. Arsenijevic, K. Moulton, K. Liefke, M. Kaufmann, R. Matthews, P. Portner and A. Rubinstein, P. Elliott, G. Ramchand and my reply

The descriptive content of names as predicate modifiers

In this paper I argue that descriptive content associated with a proper name can serve as a truth-conditionally relevant adjunct and be an additional contribution of the name to the truth-conditions. Definite descriptions the so-and-so associated by speakers with a proper name can be used as qualifying prepositional phrases as so-and-so, so sentences containing a proper name NN is doing something could be understood as NN is doing something as NN (which means as so-and-so). Used as an adjunct, the descriptive content of a proper name expresses the additional circumstances of an action (a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose) and constitute a part of a predicate. I argue that qualifying prepositional phrases should be analyzed as predicate modifiers and propose a formal representation of modified predicates. The additional truth-conditional relevance of the descriptive content of a proper name helps to explain the phenomenon of the substitution failure of coreferential names in simple sentences

The syntax and semantics of degree expressions in Spanish

This article provides an overview of the syntax and semantics of degree in Spanish, eventually suggesting that degree structure should be viewed as equivalent to aspect in the verbal domain. §1 introduces several of the themes that will be discussed in the article, while §2 introduces the semantics of degree. §3 discusses the basic syntactic properties of degree, particularly with adjectives. §4 introduces the notion of scale, which we will argue should correspond to Aktionsart in the verbal domain. §5 analyses positive degree, and explains how it differs from a scale both in syntax and in semantics. §6-§8 discuss comparative and superlative degrees, first their morphological facts (§6), then the specific properties of comparatives (§7) and finally those of superlatives (§8). The article ends with some conclusions in §9

Paving two roads to a theory of the de re / de dicto distinction

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-165).The main goal of this dissertation is to determine the best theory of de re/de dicto intensionality. Recently, it has become apparent that the traditional scope theory of this phenomenon is inadequate, the most marked evidence for this being the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), BaƯuerle (1983), and Percus (2000). This work therefore discusses two theories designed to replace the traditional theory. The first such replacement is the situation pronoun theory, which posits covert pronouns in the syntax of natural language representing pairs of worlds and times.This theory overgenerates, though, in several areas where the scope theory does not.These are discussed in terms of several generalizations captured by the latter but not the former. First, extending work by Musan (1997), the Intersective Predicate Generalization (IPG) states that two nodes combined via Predicate Modification must be evaluated at the same world and time. To capture this generalization in the situation pronoun theory, a rule of Situation Economy is proposed, which favors natural language structures having fewer situation pronouns. However, three more generalizations are next discussed, based on and extending work by Percus (2000): Generalizations X, Y, and Z rule out de re readings for VPs, adverbs, and the head nouns of weak NPs, respectively. Proposals to capture these generalizations by Shimada (2007) and Schueler (2007) are discussed. The last chapter of the dissertation raises several new ways in which the situation pronoun theory predicts unattested readings of intensional sentences.(cont.) These cases,involving island constraints, polarity items, and subconstituents of DPs, are all captured under the scope theory. Therefore, a second replacement for the scope theory is proposed, which represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator's quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ? after Montague (1970). Although further work is required, this new system preliminarily seems able to solve the problems with the traditional theory without overgenerating as the situation pronoun theory does.by Ezra Keshet.Ph.D