A Principled Representation Of Attributive Descriptions For Generating Integrated Text And Information Graphics Presentations

This paper describes a media-independent, compositional, plan-based approach to representing attributive descriptions for use in integrated text and graphics generation. An attributive description's main function is to convey information directly contributing to the communicative goals of a discourse, whereas a referential description's only function is to enable the audience to identify a particular referent. This approach has been implemented as part of an architecture for generating integrated text and information graphics. Uses of referential and attributive descriptions are represented as two distinct types of communicative acts in a media-independent plan. It is particularly important to distinguish the two types of acts, since they have different consequences for dialogue and text generation, and for graphic design

Qualities, objects, sorts, and other treasures : gold digging in English and Arabic

In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined

Language thought and literal meaning

PhD ThesisThe notion of literalness in linguistics is based on the following assumptions: Linguistic expressions are vehicle-meaning p airs (since literal meaning has to be the meaning of something). Linguistic expressions have to be cognised a nd used (especially uttered) in order for their meanings to be regarded as literally theirs. "Linguistie, vehicle-meaning relations are fixed and autonomous- - rather than having particular meanings in virtue of being used to express those meanings," linguistie' vehicle-meaning p airs are used to express certain meanings in virtue of having the meanings th at they have. This thesis criticises Chomsky's and Sperber and Wilson's attempts to establish the autonomy of "linguistie'vehicle-meaning pairs. I argue that " Both Chomsky and Sperber and Wilson fail to distinguish "linguistie' semantics from the "real" semantics of what "linguistic" vehicle-meaning pairs are used to express. " They persist in the idea that "linguistic" vehicles are specifically for being uttered (physically instantiated), thus defeating their own purpose of setting the linguistic absolutely apart from what it is used for. " Neither Chomsky's internalist conception of language nor Sperber and Wilson's relevance framework is able to account for the phenomenon of "language misuse", i.e. the use of a "linguistic" vehicle to express the "wrong" meaning. Burton-Roberts' representational conjecture is applied and developed in the presentation of an alternative non/ extra-linguistic account of "literal meaning" and "language use/ misuse". This account has it that neither "linguistic" vehicles nor "linguistic" vehicle-meaning relations are actually linguistic. It avoids the problems attending the notion of linguistic expressions as objects with sortally disjoint and arbitrarily conjoint properties (i.e. physically instantiable "vehicle" and mentally constituted "meaning"), and resolves the unease within Chomsky's Minimalist Program about the inclusion of phonology in I-language. Finally, by way of this resolution, I address some seemingly unrelated issues concerning vehicle-less "meanings" and the relations between l anguage,thought and consciousness

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Generating referring expressions in a domain of objects and processes

This thesis presents a collection of algorithms and data structures for the generation of pronouns, anaphoric definite noun phrases, and one-anaphoric phrases. After a close analysis of the particular kinds of referring expressions that appear in a particular domain -that of cookery recipes -the thesis presents an appropriate ontology and a corresponding representation language. This ontology is then integrated into a wider framework for language generation as a whole, whereupon we show how the representation language can be successfully used to produce appropriate referring expressions for a range of complex object types.Amongst the more important ideas explored in the thesis are the following:• We introduce the notion of a generalized physical object as a way of representing singular entities, mass entities, and entities which are sets.• We adopt the view that planning operators are essentially underspecified events, and use this, in conjunction with a simple model of the hearer, to allow us to determine the appropriate level of detail at which a given plan should be described.• We make use of a discourse model that distinguishes local and global focus, and is closely tied to a notion of discourse structure; and we introduce a notion of DISCRIMINATORY POWER as a means to choosing the content of a referring expression.• We present a model of the generation of referring expressions that makes use of two levels of intermediate representation, and integrate this model with the use of a linguistically- founded grammar for noun phrases.The thesis ends by making some suggestions for further extensions to the work reported here

Varieties of specification: Redefining over-and under-specification

A long tradition of research in theoretical, experimental and computational pragmatics has investigated over-specification and under-specification in referring expressions. Along broadly Gricean lines, these studies compare the amount of information expressed by a referring expression against the amount of information that is required. Often, however, these studies offer no formal definition of what “required” means, and how the comparison should be performed. In this paper, we use a simple set-theoretic perspective to define some communicatively important types of over-/under-specification. We argue that our perspective enables an enhanced understanding of reference phenomena that can pay important dividends for the analysis of reference in corpora and for the evaluation of computational models of referring. To illustrate and substantiate our claims, we analyse two corpora, containing Chinese and English referring expressions respectively, using the new perspective. The results show that interesting new monolingual and cross-linguistic insights can be obtained from our perspective

Situations and individuals

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-233).I argue that definite descriptions, pronouns and proper names share one common syntax and semantics, basically that of definite descriptions. E-type pronouns are argued to be definite articles that take NP complements elided in the phonology; referential and bound variable pronouns are analyzed as definite articles taking indices as phonologically null complements. Proper names are shown to have previously undetected E-type and bound readings, meaning that they too are best regarded as definite descriptions. It is shown that this position has deleterious consequences for the philosophical theories of direct reference and rigid designation.by Paul Elbourne.Ph.D

Content and Psychology

The theoretical underpinnings and practical worth of content-based, intentional, or "folk" psychology have been challenged by three distinct groups of philosophical critics in the past 15 years or so. The first group, comprised by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and other advocates of "wide" or "externalist" theories of meaning, claims that traditional psychologists have been mistaken in assuming that our beliefs, desires, and other content-laden states supervene on or inhere in our individual minds or brains. The other two groups are both "eliminative materialists," who charge that the intentional approach is inadequate and that it can or will be replaced by a completely non-interpretive discipline: either neuropsychology, in the view of Patricia and Paul Churchland, or a strictly syntactic computational psychology, according to Stephen Stich. ;This dissertation defends "notional world" or narrow intentional psychology against these charges, primarily on the strength of its practical merits, in contrast to the limitations and adverse effects of the proposed alternatives. Psychology is at least partly an applied science with a mandate to help understand and treat concrete psychological problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, I argue, so any theorist who proposes to reconfigure or phase out existing approaches must be prepared to take over these duties with at least equal facility. However, whereas various "narrow" schools of psychotherapy such as Cognitive Therapy are fairly successful in this regard and show every indication of continuing to be needed for the foreseeable future, the Syntactic Theory seems to show very poor promise of being able to help relieve the distress of people with psychological disturbances, while a purely neurobiological approach is inappropriate in many cases, and tends to cause a variety of untoward and dangerous side-effects. As for the "wide" theorists with their emphasis upon the social and environmental contributions to meaning: they must acknowledge that a good deal of content is in the head; and, more importantly, by focusing on the role of the "experts" in a society's language-game, they miss the whole point of a psychological attribution, which is to understand an individual's reasons--however idiosyncratic--for acting as he or she does