22,867 research outputs found
Semantics of nouns and nominal number
In the present paper, I will discuss the semantic structure of nouns and nominal number markers. In particular, I will discuss the question if it is possible to account for the syntactic and semantic formation of nominals in a parallel way, that is I will try to give a compositional account of nominal semantics. The framework that I will use is "twolevel semantics". The semantic representations and their type-theoretical basis will account for general cross-linguistic characteristics of nouns and nominal number and will show interdependencies between noun classes, number marking and cardinal constructions. While the analysis will give a unified account of bare nouns (like dog / water), it will distinguish between the different kinds of nominal terms (like a dog / dogs / water). Following the proposal, the semantic operations underlying the formation of the SR are basically the same for DPs as for CPs. Hence, from such an analysis, independent semantic arguments can be derived for a structural parallelism of nominals and sentences - that is, for the "sentential aspect" of noun phrases. I will first give a sketch of the theoretical background. I will then discuss the cross-linguistic combinatorial potential of nominal constructions, that is, the potential of nouns and number markers to combine with other elements and form complex expressions. This will lead to a general type-theoretical classification for the elements in question. In the next step, I will model the referential potential of nominal constructions. Together with the combinatorial potential, this will give us semantic representations for the basic elements involved in nominal constructions. In an overview, I will summarize our modeling of nouns and nominal number. I will then discuss in an outlook the "sentential aspect" of noun phrases
SemAxis: A Lightweight Framework to Characterize Domain-Specific Word Semantics Beyond Sentiment
Because word semantics can substantially change across communities and
contexts, capturing domain-specific word semantics is an important challenge.
Here, we propose SEMAXIS, a simple yet powerful framework to characterize word
semantics using many semantic axes in word- vector spaces beyond sentiment. We
demonstrate that SEMAXIS can capture nuanced semantic representations in
multiple online communities. We also show that, when the sentiment axis is
examined, SEMAXIS outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in building
domain-specific sentiment lexicons.Comment: Accepted in ACL 2018 as a full pape
Robust Subgraph Generation Improves Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing
The Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a representation for open-domain
rich semantics, with potential use in fields like event extraction and machine
translation. Node generation, typically done using a simple dictionary lookup,
is currently an important limiting factor in AMR parsing. We propose a small
set of actions that derive AMR subgraphs by transformations on spans of text,
which allows for more robust learning of this stage. Our set of construction
actions generalize better than the previous approach, and can be learned with a
simple classifier. We improve on the previous state-of-the-art result for AMR
parsing, boosting end-to-end performance by 3 F on both the LDC2013E117 and
LDC2014T12 datasets.Comment: To appear in ACL 201
Context Dependence, MOPs,WHIMs and procedures Recanati and Kaplan on Cognitive Aspects in Semantics
After presenting Kripkeâs criticism to Fregeâs ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanatiâs non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplanâs ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semanti
- âŠ