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

Epistemic NP Modifiers

The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation of quantifier scope and a restriction on the set of determiners which allow the reading in question. Epistemic modifiers are analyzed in a DRT framework with file (information state) discourse referents. The proposed semantics uses a predication on files and discourse referents which is related to recent developments in dynamic modal predicate calculus. It is argued that a compositional DRT semantics must employ a semantic type of discourse referents, as opposed to just a type of individuals. A connection is developed between the scope effects of epistemic modifiers and the scope-disambiguating effect of "a certain".Comment: Final pre-publication version, 27 pages, Postscript. Final version appears in the proceedings of SALT VI

隠された疑問

いわゆる「潜伏疑問」(concealed question) と称される表現は、名詞句でありながら、その意味が埋め込み疑問文に相当するものである。これは、特定の動詞、例えば「知っている」のような語と共起したときに、疑問文補文と同様の解釈を得る。本稿の目的は、このような表現について、基本的に存在量化子を含む意味論を仮定すれば、疑問文の解釈が得られることを示し、同時に、量化詞としての性質を示すことである。郡司(2017) で論じた、疑問文埋め込み文をとる「知っている」のような動詞の意味論と埋め込み疑問文の意味論を拡張し、それと存在量化の名詞句の意味論との相互作用で、「潜伏疑問」の解釈が導かれることを明らかにする。The so-called concealed questions are expressions whose meaning, although they are noun phrases, corresponds to embedded questions. This happens when these expressions co-occur with certain class of verb such as sitteiru ‘know’. In this article, I will aim to clarify that such expressions have essentially the semantics involving an existential quantifier that leads to the interpretation as interrogatives.At the same time, I will argue that these expressions share the properties that quantifiers have. I will extend the semantics of verbs like sitteiru ‘know’ that take embedded interrogatives as complements discussed in Gunji (2017), and show that the interaction of this kind of semantics and the semantics of these noun phrases as existential quantifiers will lead to the interpretation as concealed questions

Could have done otherwise, action sentences and anaphora

What does it mean to say of a certain agent, S, that he or she could have done otherwise? Clearly, it means nothing at all, unless the anaphoric devices within the sentence have been anchored to definite antecedents. In this paper, I shall argue that there may be more ways of effecting this anchoring than is commonly supposed, and hence more questions potentially available to be asked by means of the formulation ‘Could S have done otherwise?’ than is generally assumed to be the case in most of the relevant literature

Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software

Hopes, Fears, and Other Grammatical Scarecrows

The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not

Natural Language Processing approach to NLP Meta model automation

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is one of the most utilised approaches for personality development and Meta model is one of the most important techniques in this process. Usually, when one speaks about a problem or a situation, the words that one chooses will delete, distort or generalize portions of their experience. Meta model, which is a set of specific questions or language patterns, can be used to understand and recover the information hidden behind the words used. This technique can be adopted to understand other people’s problems or enable them to understand their own issues better. Applying the Meta Model, however, requires a great level of skill and experience for correct identification of deletion, distortion and generalization. Using the appropriate recovery questions is challenging for NLP practitioners and Psychologists. Moreover, the efficiency and accuracy of existing methods on the Meta model can potentially be hindered by human errors such as personal judgment or lack of experience and skill. This research aims to automate the process of using the Meta Model in conversation in order to eliminate human errors, thereby increasing the efficiency and accuracy of this method. An intelligent software has been developed using Natural Language Processing, with the ability to apply the Meta model techniques during conversation with its user. Comparisons of this software with performance of an established NLP practitioner have shown increased accuracy in identification of the deletion and generalization processes. Recovery of information has also been more efficient in the software in comparison to an NLP practitioner