A Psychological Investigation of the Use and Interpretation of English Quantifiers

The work in this thesis is an investigation of quantifiers as they are used and interpreted in everyday language. Attention in the present work is paid to problems of proportion and emphasis, rather than to questions of the scope of quantifiers, which must account for a great deal of the literature on quantification in language. The literature reviews are accordingly restricted and do not address the question of scope. Experiments 1 to 5 are designed to answer questions about the way in which quantifiers relate to amounts or proportions. Experiment 1, in which subjects were invited to describe things in proportional terms, provides a large corpus of quantifiers and the proportions they are used to describe. Experiments 2 to 5 explore the effect of prior expectations on the meaning of quantifiers, and the effects of the use of quantifiers on the proportion which the speaker is believed to expect. These studies show that the proportions denoted by any one quantifier are influenced little, if at all, by prior expectations, a somewhat surprising finding. However, quantifiers do have various effects on the proportion which subjects believe the speaker to have expected in the situation she is describing. The second part of the thesis, and experiments 6 to 8, consider certain aspects of the meanings of quantifiers which are not related to amounts or proportions. Particular attention is paid to the way in which quantifiers can emphasise different subsets of the set which follows them in a piece of discourse. These differences in emphasis are assessed using a sentence continuation method. They are related to the idea of 'focus' which is used in later chapters. Finally, a computer program is used to illustrate one possible process which allows the various aspects of quantifier meanings to be assigned interpretation. The program, like the empirical studies, aims to discover and describe the effects of various quantifiers as they are used by human language users in descriptions of simple situations

A path from broader to narrower grammars: the acquisition of argument structure in English and Hungarian

In recent years a growing number of theoretical and empirical studies of first language acquisition have cast doubt on the hypothesis that acquiring language is a deterministic process in which the role of experience is restricted to triggering innate principles of grammatical content. The aim of this thesis is to explore areas of language where input -based learning demonstrably plays a role and to find learning mechanisms that account for the construction of observed overgeneral grammars and the process of their restriction.The thesis is a comparative study of the acquisition of argument structure in English and in Hungarian. The detailed analysis of spontaneous speech samples of two -- year -old children reveals that the omission of subjects, objects and prepositions at the so- called telegraphic stage of English child language cannot be explained either by limitations in processing capacity or by postulating an incomplete Universal Grammar. It is suggested that children's implicit arguments and oblique noun phrases lacking case or prepositional marking need not be analysed as syntactically ill- formed, since they conform to permissible abstract structural configurations. The errors may instead be attributed to overgeneral or indeterminate rules of pragmatics, which are fuzzy and variable in the mature grammar.It is shown that the nature of the children's intake of the primary linguistic data is a good predictor of the nature and extent of overgeneralisation or indeterminacy and of the speed with which the rules are fine -tuned to match the target

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Understanding complex constructions: a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach to the processing of english relative clauses

Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert einen korpusbasierten Ansatz an die kognitive Verarbeitung komplexer linguistische Konstruktionen am Beispiel englischer Relativsatzkonstruktionen (RCC). Im theoretischen Teil wird für eine konstruktionsgrammatische Perspektive auf sprachliches Wissen argumentiert, welche erlaubt, RCCs als schematische Konstruktionen zu charakterisieren. Diese Perspektive wird mit Konzeptionen exemplarbasierter Modelle menschlicher Sprachverarbeitung zusammengeführt, welche die Verarbeitung einer linguistischen Struktur als Funktion von der Häufigkeit vergangener Verarbeitungen typidentischer Vorkommnisse begreift. Häufige Strukturen gelangen demnach zu einem priviligierten Status im kognitiven System eines Sprechers, welcher in konstruktionsgrammatischen Theorien als entrenchment bezeichnet wird. Während der jeweilge entrenchment-Wert einer gegebenen Konstruktion für konkrete Zeichen vergleichsweise einfach zu bestimmen ist, wird die Einschätzung mit ansteigender Komplexität und Schematizität der Zielkonstruktion zunehmend schwieriger. Für höherstufige N-gramme, welche durch eine grosse Anzahl an variablen Positionen ausgezeichnet sind, ist das Feld noch vergleichweise unerforscht. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist bemüht, diese Lücke zu schließen entwickelt eine korpusbasierte mehrstufige Messprozedur, um den entrenchment-Wert komplexer schematischer Konstruktionen zu erfassen. Da linguistisches Wissen hochstrukturiert ist und menschliche Sprachverarbeitungsprozesse struktursensitiv sind, wird ein clusteranalytisches Verfahren angewendet, welches die salienten RCC hinsichtlich ihrer strukturellen Ähnlichlichkeit organisiert. Aus der Position einer RCC im konstruktionalen Netzwerk sowie dessen entrenchment-Wert kann nun der Grad der erwarteteten Verarbeitungsschwierigkeit abgeleitet werden. Der abschliessende Teil der Arbeit interpretiert die Ergebnisse vor dem Hintergrung psycholinguistischer Befunde zur Relativsatzverarbeitung

Identifier les pronoms anaphoriques et trouver leurs antécédents : l'intérêt de la classification bayésienne

National audienceIn NLP, a traditional distinction opposes linguistically-based systems and knowledge-poor ones, which mainly rely on surface clues. Each approach has its drawbacks and its advantages. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on Bayes Networks that allows to combine both types of information. As a case study, we focus on the anaphora resolution which is known as a difficult NLP problem. We show that our bayesain system performs better than a state-of-the-art one for this task