4,762 research outputs found
Enriching Knowledge Bases with Counting Quantifiers
Information extraction traditionally focuses on extracting relations between
identifiable entities, such as . Yet, texts
often also contain Counting information, stating that a subject is in a
specific relation with a number of objects, without mentioning the objects
themselves, for example, "California is divided into 58 counties". Such
counting quantifiers can help in a variety of tasks such as query answering or
knowledge base curation, but are neglected by prior work. This paper develops
the first full-fledged system for extracting counting information from text,
called CINEX. We employ distant supervision using fact counts from a knowledge
base as training seeds, and develop novel techniques for dealing with several
challenges: (i) non-maximal training seeds due to the incompleteness of
knowledge bases, (ii) sparse and skewed observations in text sources, and (iii)
high diversity of linguistic patterns. Experiments with five human-evaluated
relations show that CINEX can achieve 60% average precision for extracting
counting information. In a large-scale experiment, we demonstrate the potential
for knowledge base enrichment by applying CINEX to 2,474 frequent relations in
Wikidata. CINEX can assert the existence of 2.5M facts for 110 distinct
relations, which is 28% more than the existing Wikidata facts for these
relations.Comment: 16 pages, The 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018
Under what Conditions is a Plural Represented as More than One? Two Methods for Testing
This paper reviews the findings from a series of psycholinguistic experiments using two different methods designed to probe the conceptual representation of plural expressions. Experiments using a novel number interference paradigm suggested that singular indefinite NPs within distributed predicates are mentally represented as multiple entities (Patson & Warren 2010), but that distributed predicates are conceptually represented as multiple events only in the presence of strong cues to plurality (Patson & Warren 2015). These findings show that the number interference paradigm can be used to probe when comprehenders mentally represent multiple events and entities. A second set of experiments used a picture-judgment task to begin to understand the nature of the plural representations created by comprehenders. These studies suggest that the conceptual representations of plural definite descriptions are no more similar to pictures of small sets of items than they are to pictures of singletons (Patson et al. 2014). These findings and others contribute to a more nuanced view of how language comprehenders compute and represent number. Importantly, these findings introduce two experimental paradigms useful for probing plural representations
Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure
In this paper, I argue that this informally given list of characteristics covers only a certain subclass of specific indefinites. […] In particular, I dispute the definition of specific indefinites as "the speaker has the referent in mind" as rather confusing if one is working with a semantic theory. Furthermore, I discuss "relative specificity", it. cases in which the specific indefinite does not exhibit wide, but intermediate or narrow scope behavior. Based on such data, I argue that specificity expresses a referential dependency between introduced discourse items. Informally speaking, the specificity of the indefinite expression something [...] expresses that the reference of the expression depends on the reference of another expression, here, on the expression a monk, not the speaker
Quantifier Elimination over Finite Fields Using Gr\"obner Bases
We give an algebraic quantifier elimination algorithm for the first-order
theory over any given finite field using Gr\"obner basis methods. The algorithm
relies on the strong Nullstellensatz and properties of elimination ideals over
finite fields. We analyze the theoretical complexity of the algorithm and show
its application in the formal analysis of a biological controller model.Comment: A shorter version is to appear in International Conference on
Algebraic Informatics 201
Variable types for meaning assembly: a logical syntax for generic noun phrases introduced by most
This paper proposes a way to compute the meanings associated with sentences
with generic noun phrases corresponding to the generalized quantifier most. We
call these generics specimens and they resemble stereotypes or prototypes in
lexical semantics. The meanings are viewed as logical formulae that can
thereafter be interpreted in your favourite models. To do so, we depart
significantly from the dominant Fregean view with a single untyped universe.
Indeed, our proposal adopts type theory with some hints from Hilbert
\epsilon-calculus (Hilbert, 1922; Avigad and Zach, 2008) and from medieval
philosophy, see e.g. de Libera (1993, 1996). Our type theoretic analysis bears
some resemblance with ongoing work in lexical semantics (Asher 2011; Bassac et
al. 2010; Moot, Pr\'evot and Retor\'e 2011). Our model also applies to
classical examples involving a class, or a generic element of this class, which
is not uttered but provided by the context. An outcome of this study is that,
in the minimalism-contextualism debate, see Conrad (2011), if one adopts a type
theoretical view, terms encode the purely semantic meaning component while
their typing is pragmatically determined
Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature
Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean "John does not own more than one dog", but rather "John does not own a dog". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy)
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