Negation of Noun Phrases with \u3cem\u3enot\u3c/em\u3e

In this paper, I give a semantic account of the grammaticality of the negative particle not with noun phrases in English. On the way to developing my solution, I explore a few previous attempts at this problem, including an extension of Horn’s discussion of the availability of NEG-Q readings (Horn, 1989) and Barwise and Cooper’s treatment of this phenomenon within the generalized quantifiers approach (Barwise & Cooper, 1981). I will show that while both of these approaches provide interesting insights, neither approach is an adequate solution. My solution focuses on the nature of the complement of the noun phrase. After a thorough investigation of a large data set, I conclude that negation of a noun phrase is possible if and only if the size of the complement of the noun phrase is representable by a continuous set of values, and the noun phrase contains no other aspect of its meaning that can be negated

An approach to the syntax and semantics of the imperative in English

PhD ThesisThis study provides a categorial analysis of the syntax and the semantics of the imperative in English, using two related grammatical models of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Montague Semantics. With regard to syntax, aspects of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar are extended to the construction. The analysis shows that possible imperative subject noun phrases, except where they are pronouns, contain post-modifiers. A noun phrase which lacks this characteristic does not therefore occur as a subject in it. The examination of the verb phrases reveals that they constitute a unique category, as demonstrated by the nature of the constituents themselves, and the syntactic behaviour the elements that occur in them. The various imperative sentence structures and their major components are captured by a set of Phrase Structure rules. The analysis sheds light on many aspects of the syntactic nature of the construction. The semantic analysis of the construction, through an extension of Montague Semantics, identifies the kinds of semantic types that its major constituent categories are. It is observed that although the imperative subject noun phrases and the verb phrases are susceptible to a surface compositional analysis, the S-structures are not. The analysis shows that this is due to the nature of its subject-predicate relationship, and so identifies a significant aspect of the grammar of the imperative that has not been given adequate attention. For example, it is this aspect that excludes certain elements from occurring in the sentence, and also separates it from other sentences in certain respects. A special model-theoretic analysis provided for sections of the construction gives new insights into the semantic pragmatic conditions surrounding it, especially with regard to the specification of the intended agent-of-action. Apart from identifying aspects of the "fulfilment conditions" of the imperative, the semantic analysis examines the issue of its "propositional content" and specifies the problems that need to be resolved in this regard. The present approach provides new ideas on the semantic organization of the imperative, and so makes it easier to understand.University of Lago

Information Extraction, Data Integration, and Uncertain Data Management: The State of The Art

Information Extraction, data Integration, and uncertain data management are different areas of research that got vast focus in the last two decades. Many researches tackled those areas of research individually. However, information extraction systems should have integrated with data integration methods to make use of the extracted information. Handling uncertainty in extraction and integration process is an important issue to enhance the quality of the data in such integrated systems. This article presents the state of the art of the mentioned areas of research and shows the common grounds and how to integrate information extraction and data integration under uncertainty management cover

Function, Semantics And Pragmatics Of Evaluative Adjectives In Fictional Discourse

We constantly assess other people, objects, phenomena, and events around us. The process of evaluation is based on a set of values pertaining to an individual and on certain norms and traditions of the society. The use of certain language means expressing people's attitudes may shed light on such complex cognitive process. Evaluative adjectives are frequently used and form an integral part of the world view in conceptual and language aspects. The present paper provides the results of syntactic, semantic, functional and pragmatic peculiarities of evaluative adjectives in fiction

Unsupervised Extraction of Representative Concepts from Scientific Literature

This paper studies the automated categorization and extraction of scientific concepts from titles of scientific articles, in order to gain a deeper understanding of their key contributions and facilitate the construction of a generic academic knowledgebase. Towards this goal, we propose an unsupervised, domain-independent, and scalable two-phase algorithm to type and extract key concept mentions into aspects of interest (e.g., Techniques, Applications, etc.). In the first phase of our algorithm we propose PhraseType, a probabilistic generative model which exploits textual features and limited POS tags to broadly segment text snippets into aspect-typed phrases. We extend this model to simultaneously learn aspect-specific features and identify academic domains in multi-domain corpora, since the two tasks mutually enhance each other. In the second phase, we propose an approach based on adaptor grammars to extract fine grained concept mentions from the aspect-typed phrases without the need for any external resources or human effort, in a purely data-driven manner. We apply our technique to study literature from diverse scientific domains and show significant gains over state-of-the-art concept extraction techniques. We also present a qualitative analysis of the results obtained.Comment: Published as a conference paper at CIKM 201