491 research outputs found

    At the intersection of temporal & modal interpretation

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    This work is chiefly concerned with the semantics of linguistic categories including tense, modality and negation and the relationships between them. In particular, how do they interact in order to “displace” discourse and to talk about situations remote from the time & place where they\u27re produced? What gets conventionally encoded in linguistic expressions (semantics)? And what\u27s the role of discourse context and extralinguistic factors (pragmatics) in performing these operations? The current thesis contains three connected (but independent) components; each explores different sets of data in view of understanding particular types of displacement phenomena — that is, how, in a given discourse context, reference is established to different possible worlds and different times. In other words, we are concerned with the interactions between temporal reference, modal reference and negation/polarity, and the linguistic phenomena that these give rise to. Methodologically, these projects also engage with diachronic considerations in view of explaining variation and change across spatially and temporally separate language varieties. This is motivated by the desiderata formulated by the amphichronic program --- that is, I assume that studying ostensible changes in language use over time has something to teach us about synchronic systems and vice versa, all in the service of developing an understanding of human language as a cognitive system. Each of these three component “essays” considers data from a number of languages spoken in Aboriginal Australia --- particularly YolƋu Matha and Australian Kriol --- on the basis of both published and original data, collected on-site in the Top End in consultation with native speakers. While there is a rich tradition of Australian language description, little Australian language data has been brought to bear on the development of formal theories of meaning. Data from these languages promise to challenge and enrich the methodological and theoretical toolbox of formal semantics. Equally, it is a general contention throughout this work that formal perspectives hold exceptional promise in terms of better understanding the range of linguistic diversity exhibited across Australian languages and developing typologies of the expression of grammatical categories. ‘The emergence of apprehensionality in Australian Kriol’ considers the semantics of the adverb bambai in Australian Kriol, a creole language spoken by indigenous populations across northern Australia. Derived from English archaism by-and-by, cognates of bambai are found across contact varieties in the south Pacific. Kriol has retained the “temporal frame” use that is found in other South Pacific contact varieties (roughly `soon afterward\u27), although has also developed an identifiable “apprehensional” use. Apprehensionals, an understudied if cross-linguistically well-documented category, are taken to modalize their prejacent while implicating their speaker\u27s negative attitude vis-à-vis the possibility described in the prejacent. This essay proposes an unified analysis of the meaning contribution of bambai, analyzing the item as unambiguous and claiming that, synchronically, the apprehensional reading “emerges” reliably in discourse contexts where the truth of its prejacent is not presumed settled as a result of standard assumptions about pragmatic reasoning. Diachronically, it is shown that a similar set of processes led to the generalisation and conventionalization of bambai\u27s meaning components. ‘The semantics of the Negative Existential Cycle’ represents a semantic treatment of another little-theorized but cross-linguistically attested cyclic change as it is instantiated in a number of Australian (Pama-Nyungan) language (sub)families. The Cycle involves the recruitment of a “special” nominal negative element which diachronically displaces an older sentential negator. In this essay, the privative---a nominal case marking described in many Australian languages---is analysed as a negative quantifier. The Cycle, then, is understood as the progressive generalisation in the quantificational domain of a negative quantifier: privatives scope over nominalized event descriptions and ultimately over full sentences, at which stage they have encroached into the domain of “standard” negation. ‘Reality status & the YolƋu verbal paradigm’ contains a description of and formal proposal for strategies of expressing temporal and modal categories in Western Dhuwal(a), a YolƋu language of northern Arnhem Land. Crucially, this language exhibits a number of puzzling phenomena --- in particular, cyclic tense and the neutralization of reality status marking in negative sentences. As a consequence of these phenomena, the four inflectional categories that constitute WD\u27s verbal paradigm have been treated as unanalyzable from a compositional perspective. Further, neither of these phenomena has received attention in the formal semantic literature. Consequently, this essay represents the first formal proposal for the semantics WD inflectional paradigm (as instantiating a cyclic tense system and an irrealis mood which is licensed by negation) as well as the first formal analysis of these two typological phenomena

    Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

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    This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

    Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

    Get PDF
    This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

    Category-Theoretic Quantitative Compositional Distributional Models of Natural Language Semantics

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    This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over these contexts and represents them as vectors in high dimensional spaces. The problem of compositionality for such models concerns itself with how to produce representations for larger units of text by composing the representations of smaller units of text. This thesis focuses on a particular approach to this compositionality problem, namely using the categorical framework developed by Coecke, Sadrzadeh, and Clark, which combines syntactic analysis formalisms with distributional semantic representations of meaning to produce syntactically motivated composition operations. This thesis shows how this approach can be theoretically extended and practically implemented to produce concrete compositional distributional models of natural language semantics. It furthermore demonstrates that such models can perform on par with, or better than, other competing approaches in the field of natural language processing. There are three principal contributions to computational linguistics in this thesis. The first is to extend the DisCoCat framework on the syntactic front and semantic front, incorporating a number of syntactic analysis formalisms and providing learning procedures allowing for the generation of concrete compositional distributional models. The second contribution is to evaluate the models developed from the procedures presented here, showing that they outperform other compositional distributional models present in the literature. The third contribution is to show how using category theory to solve linguistic problems forms a sound basis for research, illustrated by examples of work on this topic, that also suggest directions for future research.Comment: DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, Submitted and accepted in 201

    Doctor of Philosophy

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    dissertationKÆĄho, a Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) language, is spoken by an indigenous population of more than 207,000 people located in LĂąm Đồng province in the highland region of Vietnam. There are also several thousand additional members of this ethnic group who live in France and the United States (primarily North Carolina). The goal of this dissertation is to describe the KÆĄho-Sre language in such a manner that it is accessible both to linguists and also to those in the KÆĄho-speaking community interested in their own language. This grammar-based on a linguistic analysis that is informed by current linguistic theory and best practices in the field-includes phonological, morphological, and syntactic data. A grammatical description of KÆĄho is needed, in spite of the fact that a literature of the language does exist. This is because (1) adequate documentation is not achieved by the extant literature; (2) materials are dated and do not reflect recent advances in typology and linguistic analysis; (3) many materials are published in Russian and Vietnamese or are not readily available to most researchers; and (4) earlier descriptions are cast in frameworks that are not amenable to contemporary documentary linguistic analysis. This dissertation, based on data collected during fieldwork in Vietnam and North Carolina, supplemented with previously published syntactic and lexicographic materials, provides an overview of the grammatical structure of Sre. Sre is a polysyllabic (usually dissyllabic) language with a synchronic tendency towards reduction of the presyllable (the weaker or minor syllable) and development in the remaining (main or major) syllable of contrastive pitch characteristics associated with vowel length. Vowel length, in turn, is influenced by the main syllable coda. A formerly complex system of nominal classifiers (operating in the pattern: numeral + classifier + noun) has been reduced to three generally used classifiers. Sentence structure is subject + verb + object with a fairly rigid word order with some phrase or clause movement to indicate certain syntactic functions

    Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

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    Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

    Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

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    On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges
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