Is this a Child, a Girl, or a Car? Exploring the Contribution of Distributional Similarity to Learning Referential Word Meanings

Zarrieß S, Schlangen D. Is this a Child, a Girl, or a Car? Exploring the Contribution of Distributional Similarity to Learning Referential Word Meanings. In: Short Papers -- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). 2017

An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German

The role of constituents in multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany

The role of constituents in multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology

cognitive science; semantics; languag

Inferential Role Semantics for Natural Language

The most general goal of semantic theory is to explain facts about language use. In keeping with this goal, I introduce a framework for thinking about linguistic expressions in terms of (a) the inferences they license, (b) the behavioral predictions that their uses thereby sustain, and (c) the affordances that they provide to language users in virtue of these inferential and predictive involvements. Within this framework, linguistic expressions acquire meanings by regulating social practices that involve “intentional interpretation,” wherein people explain and predict one another’s behavior through linguistically specified mental state attributions. Developing a theory of meaning therefore requires formalizing the inferential roles that determine how linguistic expressions license predictions in the context intentional interpretation. Accordingly, the view I develop is an inferential role semantics for natural language. To describe this semantics, I take advantage of recently developed techniques in the field of natural language processing. I introduce a model that assigns inferential roles to arbitrary linguistic expressions by learning from examples of how sentences are distributed as premises and conclusions in a space of possible inferences. I then empirically evaluate the model’s ability to generate accurate entailments for novel sentences not used as training examples. I argue that this model takes a small but important step towards codifying the meanings of the expressions it manipulates. Next, I examine the theoretical implications of this work with respect to debates about the compositionality of language, the relationship between language and cognition, and the relationship between language and the world. With respect to compositionality, I argue that the debate is really about generalization in language use, and that the required sort of generalization can be achieved by “interpolating” between familiar examples of correct inferential transitions. With respect to the relationship between thought and language, I argue that it is a mistake to try to derive a theory of natural language semantics from a prior theory of mental representation because theories of mental representation invoke the sort of intentional interpretation at play in language use from the get-go. With respect to the relationship between language and the world, I argue that questions about truth conditions and reference relations are best thought of in terms of questions about the norms governing language use. These norms, in turn, are best characterized in primarily inferential terms. I conclude with an all-things-considered evaluation of my theory that demonstrates how it overcomes a number of challenges associated with semantic theories that take inference, rather than reference, as their starting point

Approximation in Morphology

This Special Issue "Approximation in Morphology" has been collated from peer-reviewed papers presented at the ApproxiMo 'discontinuous' workshop (2022), which was held online between December 2021 and May 2022, and organized by Francesca Masini (Bologna), Muriel Norde (Berlin) and Kristel Van Goethem (Louvain)

Learning Functional Prepositions

In first language acquisition, what does it mean for a grammatical category to have been acquired, and what are the mechanisms by which children learn functional categories in general? In the context of prepositions (Ps), if the lexical/functional divide cuts through the P category, as has been suggested in the theoretical literature, then constructivist accounts of language acquisition would predict that children develop adult-like competence with the more abstract units, functional Ps, at a slower rate compared to their acquisition of lexical Ps. Nativists instead assume that the features of functional P are made available by Universal Grammar (UG), and are mapped as quickly, if not faster, than the semantic features of their lexical counterparts. Conversely, if Ps are either all lexical or all functional, on both accounts of acquisition we should observe few differences in learning. Three empirical studies of the development of P were conducted via computer analysis of the English and Spanish sub-corpora of the CHILDES database. Study 1 analyzed errors in child usage of Ps, finding almost no errors in commission in either language, but that the English learners lag in their production of functional Ps relative to lexical Ps. That no such delay was found in the Spanish data suggests that the English pattern is not universal. Studies 2 and 3 applied novel measures of phrasal (P head + nominal complement) productivity to the data. Study 2 examined prepositional phrases (PPs) whose head-complement pairs appeared in both child and adult speech, while Study 3 considered PPs produced by children that never occurred in adult speech. In both studies the productivity of Ps for English children developed faster than that of lexical Ps. In Spanish there were few differences, suggesting that children had already mastered both orders of Ps early in acquisition. These empirical results suggest that at least in English P is indeed a split category, and that children acquire the syntax of the functional subset very quickly, committing almost no errors. The UG position is thus supported. Next, the dissertation investigates a \u27soft nativist\u27 acquisition strategy that composes the distributional analysis of input, minimal a priori knowledge of the possible co-occurrence of morphosyntactic features associated with functional elements, and linguistic knowledge that is presumably acquired via the experience of pragmatic, communicative situations. The output of the analysis consists in a mapping of morphemes to the feature bundles of nominative pronouns for English and Spanish, plus specific claims about the sort of knowledge required from experience. The acquisition model is then extended to adpositions, to examine what, if anything, distributional analysis can tell us about the functional sequences of PPs. The results confirm the theoretical position according to which spatiotemporal Ps are lexical in character, rooting their own extended projections, and that functional Ps express an aspectual sequence in the functional superstructure of the PP