438 research outputs found
Categorial Grammar
The paper is a review article comparing a number of approaches to natural language syntax and semantics that have been developed using categorial frameworks.
It distinguishes two related but distinct varieties of categorial theory, one related to Natural Deduction systems and the axiomatic calculi of Lambek, and another which involves more specialized combinatory operations
Gapping as Constituent Coordination
A number of coordinate constructions in natural languages conjoin sequences which do not appear to correspond to syntactic constituents in the traditional sense. One striking instance of the phenomenon is afforded by the gapping construction of English, of which the following sentence is a simple example: (1) Harry eats beans, and Fred, potatoes Since all theories agree that coordination must in fact be an operation upon constituents, most of them have dealt with the apparent paradox presented by such constructions by supposing that such sequences as the right conjunct in the above example, Fred, potatoes, should be treated in the grammar as traditional constituents, of type S, but with pieces missing or deleted
Surface Structure
Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) was originally advanced as a theory relating coordination and relativization. The claim was that these constructions can be analysed at the level of surface grammar, without rules of movement, deletion, passing of slash-features, or the syntactic empty category Wh-trace. Instead, CCG generalizes the notion of grammatical constituency to cover everything that can coordinate or result from extraction, via the use of a small number of operations which apply to adjacent lexically realised grammatical categories interpreted as functions
Learning the Semantics of Manipulation Action
In this paper we present a formal computational framework for modeling
manipulation actions. The introduced formalism leads to semantics of
manipulation action and has applications to both observing and understanding
human manipulation actions as well as executing them with a robotic mechanism
(e.g. a humanoid robot). It is based on a Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The
goal of the introduced framework is to: (1) represent manipulation actions with
both syntax and semantic parts, where the semantic part employs
-calculus; (2) enable a probabilistic semantic parsing schema to learn
the -calculus representation of manipulation action from an annotated
action corpus of videos; (3) use (1) and (2) to develop a system that visually
observes manipulation actions and understands their meaning while it can reason
beyond observations using propositional logic and axiom schemata. The
experiments conducted on a public available large manipulation action dataset
validate the theoretical framework and our implementation
LangPro: Natural Language Theorem Prover
LangPro is an automated theorem prover for natural language
(https://github.com/kovvalsky/LangPro). Given a set of premises and a
hypothesis, it is able to prove semantic relations between them. The prover is
based on a version of analytic tableau method specially designed for natural
logic. The proof procedure operates on logical forms that preserve linguistic
expressions to a large extent. %This property makes the logical forms easily
obtainable from syntactic trees. %, in particular, Combinatory Categorial
Grammar derivation trees. The nature of proofs is deductive and transparent. On
the FraCaS and SICK textual entailment datasets, the prover achieves high
results comparable to state-of-the-art.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP) 201
Segregatory Coordination and Ellipsis in Text Generation
In this paper, we provide an account of how to generate sentences with
coordination constructions from clause-sized semantic representations. An
algorithm is developed to generate sentences with ellipsis, gapping,
right-node-raising, and non-constituent coordination constructions. Various
examples from linguistic literature will be used to demonstrate that the
algorithm does its job well.Comment: 7 pages, uses colacl.st
Intonation and Syntax in Spoken Language Systems
Phrasal intonation is notorious for a tendency to perceptually segment the word-string of a spoken utterance into groups which may violate orthodox syntactic notions of constituency. For example, the normal prosody for the answer (b) to the following question (a) imposes the intonational constituency indicated by the brackets (stress, marked in this case by raised pitch, is indicated by capit als) :
(1) a. I know that brassicas are a good source of minerals, but what are LEGumes a good source of?
b. (LEGumes are a good source of) VITamins .
Such a grouping cuts across the traditional syntactic structure of the sentence. The presence of two apparently uncoupled levels of structure in natural language grammar appears to complicate the path from speech to interpretation unreasonably, and to thereby threaten a number of computational applications in speech recognition and and speech synthesis
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