104,127 research outputs found
Type-driven semantic interpretation and feature dependencies in R-LFG
Once one has enriched LFG's formal machinery with the linear logic mechanisms
needed for semantic interpretation as proposed by Dalrymple et. al., it is
natural to ask whether these make any existing components of LFG redundant. As
Dalrymple and her colleagues note, LFG's f-structure completeness and coherence
constraints fall out as a by-product of the linear logic machinery they propose
for semantic interpretation, thus making those f-structure mechanisms
redundant. Given that linear logic machinery or something like it is
independently needed for semantic interpretation, it seems reasonable to
explore the extent to which it is capable of handling feature structure
constraints as well.
R-LFG represents the extreme position that all linguistically required
feature structure dependencies can be captured by the resource-accounting
machinery of a linear or similiar logic independently needed for semantic
interpretation, making LFG's unification machinery redundant. The goal is to
show that LFG linguistic analyses can be expressed as clearly and perspicuously
using the smaller set of mechanisms of R-LFG as they can using the much larger
set of unification-based mechanisms in LFG: if this is the case then we will
have shown that positing these extra f-structure mechanisms is not
linguistically warranted.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in the the ``Glue Language'' volume edited by
Dalrymple, uses tree-dvips, ipa, epic, eepic, fullnam
Ontologies and Information Extraction
This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven
process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern
matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted
with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that
depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for
extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This
report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical
needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which
becomes a major application domain for IE
Linear Logic for Meaning Assembly
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by
providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of
larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to
combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure
trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the
functional structure of Lexical-Functional Grammar is best used to provide the
syntactic information necessary for constraining derivations of meaning in a
cross-linguistically uniform format. It has been difficult, however, to
reconcile this approach with the combination of meanings by function
application. In contrast to compositional approaches, we present a deductive
approach to assembling meanings, based on reasoning with constraints, which
meshes well with the unordered nature of information in the functional
structure. Our use of linear logic as a `glue' for assembling meanings allows
for a coherent treatment of the LFG requirements of completeness and coherence
as well as of modification and quantification.Comment: 19 pages, uses lingmacros.sty, fullname.sty, tree-dvips.sty,
latexsym.sty, requires the new version of Late
Robust Processing of Natural Language
Previous approaches to robustness in natural language processing usually
treat deviant input by relaxing grammatical constraints whenever a successful
analysis cannot be provided by ``normal'' means. This schema implies, that
error detection always comes prior to error handling, a behaviour which hardly
can compete with its human model, where many erroneous situations are treated
without even noticing them.
The paper analyses the necessary preconditions for achieving a higher degree
of robustness in natural language processing and suggests a quite different
approach based on a procedure for structural disambiguation. It not only offers
the possibility to cope with robustness issues in a more natural way but
eventually might be suited to accommodate quite different aspects of robust
behaviour within a single framework.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, uses pstricks.sty, pstricks.tex, pstricks.pro,
pst-node.sty, pst-node.tex, pst-node.pro. To appear in: Proc. KI-95, 19th
German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld (Germany), Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, Springer 199
A Data-Oriented Approach to Semantic Interpretation
In Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated language corpus is used as a
stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new input sentence is
constructed by combining sub-analyses from the corpus in the most probable way.
This approach has been succesfully used for syntactic analysis, using corpora
with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Treebank. If a corpus with
semantically annotated sentences is used, the same approach can also generate
the most probable semantic interpretation of an input sentence. The present
paper explains this semantic interpretation method, and summarizes the results
of a preliminary experiment. Semantic annotations were added to the syntactic
annotations of most of the sentences of the ATIS corpus. A data-oriented
semantic interpretation algorithm was succesfully tested on this semantically
enriched corpus.Comment: 10 pages, Postscript; to appear in Proceedings Workshop on
Corpus-Oriented Semantic Analysis, ECAI-96, Budapes
Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses
Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces
designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level
of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we
have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects
in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of
the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several
shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the
benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for
discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
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