16 research outputs found
Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2010
This book contains state-of-the-art contributions to the 10th
conference on Natural Language Processing, KONVENS 2010
(Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache), with a focus
on semantic processing.
The KONVENS in general aims at offering a broad perspective
on current research and developments within the interdisciplinary
field of natural language processing. The central theme
draws specific attention towards addressing linguistic aspects
ofmeaning, covering deep as well as shallow approaches to semantic
processing. The contributions address both knowledgebased
and data-driven methods for modelling and acquiring
semantic information, and discuss the role of semantic information
in applications of language technology.
The articles demonstrate the importance of semantic processing,
and present novel and creative approaches to natural
language processing in general. Some contributions put their
focus on developing and improving NLP systems for tasks like
Named Entity Recognition or Word Sense Disambiguation, or
focus on semantic knowledge acquisition and exploitation with
respect to collaboratively built ressources, or harvesting semantic
information in virtual games. Others are set within the
context of real-world applications, such as Authoring Aids, Text
Summarisation and Information Retrieval. The collection highlights
the importance of semantic processing for different areas
and applications in Natural Language Processing, and provides
the reader with an overview of current research in this field
The domain of Finiteness: Anchoring without Tense in copular amalgam sentences
The central thesis of this work is that a clause consisting only of left-peripheral functional structure can be fully finite. Generative models of clause structure typically assume that a finite clause must be tensed, including a projection of T and a temporal relation between the proposition and the utterance context. In light of evidence from tenseless languages, this assumption has come under scrutiny in recent years. This dissertation offers a new body of evidence from English, a tensed language, in support of the claim that finite clauses can lack the projection of T.
Drawing on the results of formal acceptability experiments, this dissertation presents an original investigation of the understudied family of specificational copular amalgam sentences (e.g., She wrote about finiteness is what she did), which differs from canonical specificational copular sentences with respect to a number of syntactic and semantic properties. The most salient of these properties is the occurrence of a root clause in the role of logical and structural subject. I propose that copular amalgam sentences are finite, but their functional spine consists only of the C-domain, lacking projections of T and V. Since C-domain heads can project in the absence of T and V, there can be no implicational relation between higher and lower heads in the functional sequence.
Copular amalgams show that finiteness can be reduced to phenomena originating in the left periphery of the clause. These phenomena include [T] and [phi] inflection, the licensing of an independently referential subject, and independent anchoring of the proposition to the utterance context. Independent anchoring, which is typically conflated with temporal anchoring in the T domain, obtains via deixis to the utterance context in finite clauses that lack T. This dissertation has two main contributions: to catalogue the properties of a typologically rare, yet understudied construction, and to challenge the Extended Projections model of the clause
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)