18,367 research outputs found
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
An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure
In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and
temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that
is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following
Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points,
with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations
in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and
the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a
discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range
of situations
Learning Sentence-internal Temporal Relations
In this paper we propose a data intensive approach for inferring
sentence-internal temporal relations. Temporal inference is relevant for
practical NLP applications which either extract or synthesize temporal
information (e.g., summarisation, question answering). Our method bypasses the
need for manual coding by exploiting the presence of markers like after", which
overtly signal a temporal relation. We first show that models trained on main
and subordinate clauses connected with a temporal marker achieve good
performance on a pseudo-disambiguation task simulating temporal inference
(during testing the temporal marker is treated as unseen and the models must
select the right marker from a set of possible candidates). Secondly, we assess
whether the proposed approach holds promise for the semi-automatic creation of
temporal annotations. Specifically, we use a model trained on noisy and
approximate data (i.e., main and subordinate clauses) to predict
intra-sentential relations present in TimeBank, a corpus annotated rich
temporal information. Our experiments compare and contrast several
probabilistic models differing in their feature space, linguistic assumptions
and data requirements. We evaluate performance against gold standard corpora
and also against human subjects
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