17,351 research outputs found
Predicate logic unplugged
this paper we describe the syntax and semantics of a description language for underspecified semantic representations. This concept is discussed in general and in particular applied to Predicate Logic and Discourse Representation Theory. The reason for exploring underspecified representations as suitable semantic representations for natural language expressions emerges directly from practical natural language processing applications. The so-called Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle, a well known problem in this area, can succesfully be tackled by using underspecified representations. The source of this problem, scopal ambiguities in natural language expressions, is discussed in section 2. The core of the paper presents Hole Semantics. This is a general proposal for a framework, in principle suitable for any logic, where underspecified representations play a central role. There is a clear separation between the object language (the logical language one is interested in) and the meta language (the language that describes and interprets underspecified structures). It has been noted by various authors that the meaning of an underspecified semantic representation cannot be expressed in terms of a disjunction of denotations, but rather as a set of denotations (cf. Poesio 1994). We support this view, and use it as underlying principle for the definition of the semantic interpretation function of underspecified structures. Section 3 is an informal introduction to Hole Semantics, and in section 4 things are formally defined. In section 5 we apply Hole Semantics to Predicate Logic, resulting in an "unplugged" version of (static and dynamic) Predicate Logic. In section 6 we show that this idea easily carries over to Discourse Representation Structures. A lot of attention has been paid..
A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding
A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP
community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference.
Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the
nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language
semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This
document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL),
which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these
needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such
as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a
starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural
inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary
results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training
a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement
of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer
approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to
semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and
will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on
Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019
Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics
We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics
that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional
semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic:
coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting
we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, dis- tributive,
coverings,...) can be modelled
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
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AQUA: an ontology driven question answering system
This paper describes AQUA our question answering over the Web. AQUA was designed to work over heterogeneous sources. This means that AQUA is equipped to work as closed domain and in addition to open-domain question answering. As a first instance, AQUA tries to answer a question using a Knowledge base. If a query cannot be satisfied over a knowledge base/database. Then, AQUA tries to find an answer on web pages (i.e. it uses as corpus the internet as resource). Our system uses NLP (Natural Language Processing), First order logic and Information Extraction technologies. AQUA has been tested using an ontology which describes academic life. Keywords Ontologies, Information Extraction, Machine Learnin
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