Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity

I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed.Comment: Latex, 47 pages. Uses tree-dvips.sty, lingmacros.sty, fullname.st

Modeling Ambiguity in a Multi-Agent System

This paper investigates the formal pragmatics of ambiguous expressions by modeling ambiguity in a multi-agent system. Such a framework allows us to give a more refined notion of the kind of information that is conveyed by ambiguous expressions. We analyze how ambiguity affects the knowledge of the dialog participants and, especially, what they know about each other after an ambiguous sentence has been uttered. The agents communicate with each other by means of a TELL-function, whose application is constrained by an implementation of some of Grice's maxims. The information states of the multi-agent system itself are represented as a Kripke structures and TELL is an update function on those structures. This framework enables us to distinguish between the information conveyed by ambiguous sentences vs. the information conveyed by disjunctions, and between semantic ambiguity vs. perceived ambiguity.Comment: 7 page

Reinterpretation processes and humour understanding in English-speaking young adults with dyslexia

The aim of this study is to assess whether and how lexical and syntactic ambiguity are resolved in jokes by readers with and without dyslexia. This research focuses specifically on an important phenomenon of language comprehension, i.e., the ability to access word meaning quickly and effortlessly in sentences which, in this specific work, are made more challenging by the presence of “lexical and syntactic ambiguity”. The present study addresses the ambiguity in punchlines from a semantic perspective with the aim of showing how different types of ambiguity are perceived by readers and how they reanalyse jokes by considering their ambiguous forms. This work focuses on homonymy in jokes where the humorous effect is triggered by words whose disambiguation does not involve a change of word class (i.e., “bat” has two meanings that belong to the same word class, both are nouns) and words whose disambiguation instead requires a change in word class (i.e., “seal” has two meanings that belong to two different word classes, noun and verb)

Reinterpretation processes and humour understanding in English-speaking young adults with dyslexia

The aim of this study is to assess whether and how lexical and syntactic ambiguity are resolved in jokes by readers with and without dyslexia. This research focuses specifically on an important phenomenon of language comprehension, i.e., the ability to access word meaning quickly and effortlessly in sentences which, in this specific work, are made more challenging by the presence of “lexical and syntactic ambiguity”. The present study addresses the ambiguity in punchlines from a semantic perspective with the aim of showing how different types of ambiguity are perceived by readers and how they reanalyse jokes by considering their ambiguous forms. This work focuses on homonymy in jokes where the humorous effect is triggered by words whose disambiguation does not involve a change of word class (i.e., “bat” has two meanings that belong to the same word class, both are nouns) and words whose disambiguation instead requires a change in word class (i.e., “seal” has two meanings that belong to two different word classes, noun and verb)

Reinterpretation processes and humour understanding in English-speaking young adults with dyslexia

The aim of this study is to assess whether and how lexical and syntactic ambiguity are resolved in jokes by readers with and without dyslexia. This research focuses specifically on an important phenomenon of language comprehension, i.e., the ability to access word meaning quickly and effortlessly in sentences which, in this specific work, are made more challenging by the presence of “lexical and syntactic ambiguity”. The present study addresses the ambiguity in punchlines from a semantic perspective with the aim of showing how different types of ambiguity are perceived by readers and how they reanalyse jokes by considering their ambiguous forms. This work focuses on homonymy in jokes where the humorous effect is triggered by words whose disambiguation does not involve a change of word class (i.e., “bat” has two meanings that belong to the same word class, both are nouns) and words whose disambiguation instead requires a change in word class (i.e., “seal” has two meanings that belong to two different word classes, noun and verb)

A retrospective view on the promise on machine translation for Bahasa Melayu-English

Research and development activities for machine translation systems from English language to others are more progressive than vice versa. It has been more than 30 years since the machine translation was introduced and yet a Malay language or Bahasa Melayu (BM) to English machine translation engine is not available. Consequently, many translation systems have been developed for the world's top 10 languages in terms of native speakers, but none for BM, although the language is used by more than 200 million speakers around the world. This paper attempts to seek possible reasons as why such situation occurs. A summative overview to show progress, challenges as well as future works on MT is presented. Issues faced by researchers and system developers in modeling and developing a machine translation engine are also discussed. The study of the previous translation systems (from other languages to English) reveals that the accuracy level can be achieved up to 85 %. The figure suggests that the translation system is not reliable if it is to be utilized in a serious translation activity. The most prominent difficulties are the complexity of grammar rules and ambiguity problems of the source language. Thus, we hypothesize that the inclusion of ‘semantic’ property in the translation rules may produce a better quality BM-English MT engine

The Structure of Ambiguity Phenomena (Based on Cognitive Analyses of the Ways in Which Politicians Communicate)

The paper presents the ambiguity phenomena in terms of cognitive categorization and blending processes. The analyses of politicians’ programme speeches, based on Lakoff’s and Langacker’s semantics and Langacker’s grammar research, result in describing the ambiguity phenomena as sender’s or receiver’s mental concepts rather than relating it to linguistic properties of the message. Moreover, a cognitive point of view in the research on ambiguity reveals its multilevelled structure, which stems from the polysemic nature of mental categories and blends.Zadanie „Stworzenie anglojęzycznych wersji wydawanych publikacji” finansowane w ramach umowy nr 948/P-DUN/2016 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę