The Meaning of Syntactic Dependencies

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties of dependencies, the paper will be focused on two particular linguistic tasks: word sense disambiguation and attachment resolution. The second task will be performed using a strategy based on automatic acquisition from corpora

The Lexical Grid: Lexical Resources in Language Infrastructures

Language Resources are recognized as a central and strategic for the development of any Human Language Technology system and application product. they play a critical role as horizontal technology and have been recognized in many occasions as a priority also by national and spra-national funding a number of initiatives (such as EAGLES, ISLE, ELRA) to establish some sort of coordination of LR activities, and a number of large LR creation projects, both in the written and in the speech areas

Web 2.0, language resources and standards to automatically build a multilingual named entity lexicon

This paper proposes to advance in the current state-of-the-art of automatic Language Resource (LR) building by taking into consideration three elements: (i) the knowledge available in existing LRs, (ii) the vast amount of information available from the collaborative paradigm that has emerged from the Web 2.0 and (iii) the use of standards to improve interoperability. We present a case study in which a set of LRs for different languages (WordNet for English and Spanish and Parole-Simple-Clips for Italian) are extended with Named Entities (NE) by exploiting Wikipedia and the aforementioned LRs. The practical result is a multilingual NE lexicon connected to these LRs and to two ontologies: SUMO and SIMPLE. Furthermore, the paper addresses an important problem which affects the Computational Linguistics area in the present, interoperability, by making use of the ISO LMF standard to encode this lexicon. The different steps of the procedure (mapping, disambiguation, extraction, NE identification and postprocessing) are comprehensively explained and evaluated. The resulting resource contains 974,567, 137,583 and 125,806 NEs for English, Spanish and Italian respectively. Finally, in order to check the usefulness of the constructed resource, we apply it into a state-of-the-art Question Answering system and evaluate its impact; the NE lexicon improves the system’s accuracy by 28.1%. Compared to previous approaches to build NE repositories, the current proposal represents a step forward in terms of automation, language independence, amount of NEs acquired and richness of the information represented

Learning Ontology Relations by Combining Corpus-Based Techniques and Reasoning on Data from Semantic Web Sources

The manual construction of formal domain conceptualizations (ontologies) is labor-intensive. Ontology learning, by contrast, provides (semi-)automatic ontology generation from input data such as domain text. This thesis proposes a novel approach for learning labels of non-taxonomic ontology relations. It combines corpus-based techniques with reasoning on Semantic Web data. Corpus-based methods apply vector space similarity of verbs co-occurring with labeled and unlabeled relations to calculate relation label suggestions from a set of candidates. A meta ontology in combination with Semantic Web sources such as DBpedia and OpenCyc allows reasoning to improve the suggested labels. An extensive formal evaluation demonstrates the superior accuracy of the presented hybrid approach

Qualia in Markets: Ruili's Jadeite Marketplaces in the China-Myanmar Borderland

Ph.D

An exercise in learning what "they" don't say when they speak

Abstract Artificial Intelligence (AI) will surpass human intelligence significantly in less than 50 years if the trend of exponential growth of its computing power holds true. AI’s ability to process trillions of gbs of data patterns within hours and to predict outcomes with increasing accuracy has made it the most sought-after technology of the 21st Century. Its use by governments and multinational corporations without gathering much attention has radically impacted all aspects of human life. AI technologies have maintained complete invisibility yet are omnipresent, precisely the reason for the illusion of absence of their political and material effects. AI machines are modeled after the human brain and much like the latter they create learning methodologies (algorithms) on their own in their digital computational space to handle complexities that only the human brain could have dealt with previously. The evolution of these machines into entities that can soon match the complexity of thought of a human brain has raised multiple philosophical and ethical questions. Amongst these is the classic conundrum of machines becoming conscious and developing emotions and intentionality of their own. How should humans treat such entities and how will such entities treat humans? Can they co-exist? A new paradigm of cognitive, imaginative and physical change awaits us. In order to reconfigure our agency in a world run by AI it is crucial to understand the technology we are dealing with. For this purpose, the thesis adopts a methodology which splits in two. The thesis work for its first part employs textual research based argumentative analysis of the origination of Artificial Intelligence and the developing concerns regarding machine consciousness. The work also identifies and deconstructs the functioning and effects of systems employed by owners of AI for computation and control of society. The work utilizes its findings to suggest installation of ethical codes in the AI and testing of these technologies in Virtual Reality (VR). Such an experiment promises to disclose secrets about human consciousness itself and also enrich the developing field of ethics. The second part of the thesis adapts the Truing test format to engage with an actual AI in a game of Chinese whispers instead of a direct recursive interrogation of AI. Through feeding non-language sounds as inputs to the AI the work excites and reveals the imagination of AI which remains locked in its computational space otherwise. The project is presented as a Video Artwork and supplements the learnings from the textual part of the thesis. The thesis work in its entirety is not an attempt to further an agenda against AI technologies but rather encourages investigation of this technology through the lenses of Art and Philosophy. These fields are perhaps better equipped to understand the abstractions of a technology that mimics its complex human creators