Multilinguality in Temporal Annotation: A Case of Korean

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

Processing and Representing Temporally Sequential Events

In a discourse, events are narrated one by one linearly. But the temporal sequence of events does not always match the linear sequence of narration. One of such cases involves the mixed occurrences of durative and punctual events, as illustrated by “Mia took aspirin and slept, for she was ill. She then fell off a cliff in her dream." In this narration, five events are reported: three are durative events of sleeping, being ill and having a dream and two are punctual events of taking aspirin and falling off a cliff. This presentation aims at establishing some systematic way of processing such events and representing them in a reasonably understandable temporal sequence. For this, events are analyzed in terms of an interval semantics that allows them to be anchored to appropriate temporal intervals and be ordered in an appropriate temporal sequence. In order to provide a simple syntactic basis, the presentation attempts to develop a small computational program that derive representations in feature structure by analyzing a small fragment of Korean

Computing Information by Equation Solving

Assuming that representation is a crucial issue for Computational Semantics, I will show in this paper that equation solving is a very simple and elegant way or computing meaning representations or information structures conveyed by the use o

AMG : Case Theory in Montague Grammar

to establish a theory of case in Montague grammar and to account for case assignment and word order in case-marked languages. In my earlier papers(1981a,b, 1982a, b,c), I proposed RPTQ, a revised version of Montague's PTQ, to treat case marking and reordering in verb-final languages like Korean. But in RPTQ case marking was restricted to noun phrases, and so was reordering. In the present paper, I will propose a more generalized version AMG, an augmented Montague grammar, to extend case marking and reordering to other types of phrases, in particular verbal or sentential complements. I will then show how ANG works for a small fragment of Korean that includes negative constructions, 1. AMG is basically the same as RPTQ. Like RPTQ, it employs three basic devices of case assignment: (i) case indexing, (ii) case marking, and (iii) case shift-ing. 187 First, case indexing subcategorizes various types of verb phrases with respect to case indices. The IV

Interpretation of Indexical Sentences

Natural languages such as English abound in examples of indexical sentences, sentences that cannot be interpreted without knowing their contexts of utterance: the time and place of their utterance as well as their speakers and listeners. Consider: (1) Ice floats on water. (2) The snow is melting. (3) 1 voted for you. While sentence (l) can be understood as a general statement about the property of ice being lighter than water without any reference to its context of utterance, the interpretation of sentence (2) requires one's knowledge of when and where it was spoken. What is being stated by (2) is not a general fact about the melting property of the snow. It states that the snow is melting at the time near the speaker's vicinity. To understand sentence (3), one again has to have extralinguistic knowledge: he has to know who its speaker and listener are. Only then can he identify which individuals are referred to by the expression "I" and by "you" and determine whether or not sentence (3) is a true statement. Accordingly, one could suggest that each sentence be implemented with such contextual information. Sentences (2) and (3) would then be represented: (4) [Aug. 31, 1973, Austin]: The snow is melting. (5) [Pat Nixon said to Richard Nixon]: I voted for you. These sentences may now be replaced by non-indexical sentences: (6) The snow was melting on Aug. 31, 1973, in Austin. (7) Pat Nixon voted for Richard Nixon. Sentences (4) and (5) would, then, be interpreted as equivalent to sentences (6) and (7), respectively

A Constrained Finite-State Morphotactics for Korean

PACLIC 19 / Taipei, taiwan / December 1-3, 200