4,254 research outputs found
Computing Presuppositions by Contextual Reasoning
This paper describes how automated deduction methods for natural language
processing can be applied more efficiently by encoding context in a more
elaborate way. Our work is based on formal approaches to context, and we
provide a tableau calculus for contextual reasoning. This is explained by
considering an example from the problem area of presupposition projection.Comment: 5 page
Going Deeper with Semantics: Video Activity Interpretation using Semantic Contextualization
A deeper understanding of video activities extends beyond recognition of
underlying concepts such as actions and objects: constructing deep semantic
representations requires reasoning about the semantic relationships among these
concepts, often beyond what is directly observed in the data. To this end, we
propose an energy minimization framework that leverages large-scale commonsense
knowledge bases, such as ConceptNet, to provide contextual cues to establish
semantic relationships among entities directly hypothesized from video signal.
We mathematically express this using the language of Grenander's canonical
pattern generator theory. We show that the use of prior encoded commonsense
knowledge alleviate the need for large annotated training datasets and help
tackle imbalance in training through prior knowledge. Using three different
publicly available datasets - Charades, Microsoft Visual Description Corpus and
Breakfast Actions datasets, we show that the proposed model can generate video
interpretations whose quality is better than those reported by state-of-the-art
approaches, which have substantial training needs. Through extensive
experiments, we show that the use of commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet
allows the proposed approach to handle various challenges such as training data
imbalance, weak features, and complex semantic relationships and visual scenes.Comment: Accepted to WACV 201
BECOME and its presuppositions
In hindsight, the debate about presupposition following Frege’s discovery that the referential function of names and definite descriptions depended on the fulfillment of an existence and a uniqueness condition was curiously limited for a very long time. On the one hand, it was only in the 1960s that linguists began to take an interest and showed that presupposition was an allpervasive phenomenon far beyond this philosophers’ pet definite descriptions. And on the other hand, and this is our real concern, it is now only too obvious that the uniqueness condition is too restrictive to be applicable to the general case. An utterance of “The cat is on the mat” should not imply that there is only one cat and one mat in the whole world. The obvious move is to limit the uniqueness condition to some notion of utterance context
On embedded implicatures
The Gricean approach explains implicatures by assumptions about the pragmatics of entire utterances. The phenomenon of embedded implicatures remains a challenge for this approach since in such cases apparently implicatures contribute to the truth-conditional content of constituents smaller than utterances. In this paper, I investigate three areas where embedded implicatures seem to differ from implicatures at the utterance level: optionality, epistemic status, and implicated presuppositions. I conclude that the differences between the two kinds of implicatures justify an approach that maintains Gricean assumptions at the utterance level, and assumes a special operator for embedded implicatures
Probabilistic Knowledge as Objective Knowledge in Quantum Mechanics: Potential Powers Instead of Actual Properties
In classical physics, probabilistic or statistical knowledge has been always
related to ignorance or inaccurate subjective knowledge about an actual state
of affairs. This idea has been extended to quantum mechanics through a
completely incoherent interpretation of the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein
statistics in terms of "strange" quantum particles. This interpretation,
naturalized through a widespread "way of speaking" in the physics community,
contradicts Born's physical account of {\Psi} as a "probability wave" which
provides statistical information about outcomes that, in fact, cannot be
interpreted in terms of 'ignorance about an actual state of affairs'. In the
present paper we discuss how the metaphysics of actuality has played an
essential role in limiting the possibilities of understating things
differently. We propose instead a metaphysical scheme in terms of powers with
definite potentia which allows us to consider quantum probability in a new
light, namely, as providing objective knowledge about a potential state of
affairs.Comment: 35 pages, no figures. To be published in Probing the Meaning of
Quantum Mechanics, D. Aerts, C. de Ronde, H. Freytes and R. Giuntini (Eds.),
World Scientific, Singapore, forthcoming. More comments welcome
Dependent Types for Pragmatics
This paper proposes the use of dependent types for pragmatic phenomena such
as pronoun binding and presupposition resolution as a type-theoretic
alternative to formalisms such as Discourse Representation Theory and Dynamic
Semantics.Comment: This version updates the paper for publication in LEU
Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures
A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes (EXCLUSIVITY) and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took (IGNORANCE). The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra (FREE CHOICE). These EXCLUSIVITY, IGNORANCE and FREE CHOICE inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which EXCLUSIVITY and IGNORANCE appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo (Linguist Philos 40(5):473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which FREE CHOICE appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s (2017) hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave, London, pp 71–120, 2007), we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s (2017) account coming from the conflicting presupposed IGNORANCE triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of EXCLUSIVITY, IGNORANCE, and FREE CHOICE. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels (Gajewski and Sharvit in Nat Lang Semant 20(1):31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels.publishedVersio
On argumentation schemes and the natural classification of arguments
We develop conceptions of arguments and of argument types that will, by serving as the basis for developing a natural classification of arguments, benefit work in artificial intelligence. Focusing only on arguments construed as the semantic entities that are the outcome of processes of reasoning, we outline and clarify our view that an argument is a proposition that represents a fact as both conveying some other fact and as doing so wholly. Further, we outline our view that, with respect to arguments that are propositions, (roughly) two arguments are of the same type if and only if they represent the same relation of conveyance and do so in the same way. We then argue for our conceptions of arguments and argument types, and compare them to rival positions. We also illustrate the need for, and some of the strengths of, our approach to classifying arguments through an examination of aspects of two prominent and recent attempts to classify arguments using argumentation schemes, namely those of M. Kienpointner and D. Walton. Finally, we clarify how our conception of arguments and of argument types can assist in developing an exhaustive classification of arguments
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