Co-Indexing Labelled DRSs to Represent and Reason with Ambiguities

The paper addresses the problem of representing ambiguities in a way that allows for monotonic disambiguation and for direct deductive computation. The paper focuses on an extension of the formalism of underspecified DRSs to ambiguities introduced by plural NPs. It deals with the collective/distributive distinction, and also with generic and cumulative readings. In addition it provides a systematic account for an underspecified treatment of plural pronoun resolution.Comment: gzipped ps-file. To appear in: Stanley Peters, Kees van Deemter (1995): Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification, CSLI Publications, Stanfor

Towards Foundational Semantics - Ontological Semantics Revisited -

Cimiano P, Reyle U. Towards Foundational Semantics - Ontological Semantics Revisited -. In: Bennett B, Fellbaum C, eds. Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference, FOIS 2006. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 150. IOS Press; 2006: 51-62

Talking about trees, scope and concepts

Cimiano P, Reyle U. Talking about trees, scope and concepts. In: Bunt H, Geertzen J, Thijse E, eds. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS). 2005

Talking about trees, scope and concepts

Language can be ambiguous at all levels – at the level of the word, of the phrase, of the sentence, as well as of the text or dialogue. The source of ambiguity is often lexical or morphological, but ambiguities also emerge when passing from one level of linguistic analysis – morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics – to another. This transitio

UDRT-based Semantics Construction for LTAG - and what it tells us about the role of adjunction in LTAG

Cimiano P, Frank A, Reyle U. UDRT-based Semantics Construction for LTAG - and what it tells us about the role of adjunction in LTAG. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Computational Semantics. 2007

The meaning of French “implication” contour in conversation

International audiencetune which presents very interesting semantic properties. It has been called “intonation d'implication” by Delattre [1] suggesting that the contour triggers an implicit meaning, i.e. an implicature in Gricean terms. Besides, the “implication” contour has been claimed to convey various attitudinal meanings from obviousness to exasperation, and also to mark contrastive focus. The aim of the present paper is to give a unified account of these seemingly differing semantic descriptions of the “implication” contour in French, using a dynamic semantic framework, namely Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). We claim that the main semantic component of the “implication” contour is to convey a contradiction (or a contrast). We first sketch our DRTtheoretical approach, and then apply it to occurrences of the “implication” contour in a corpus of conversational dialogue

Combining syntax and prosody to signal information structure: the case of French

International audienceThe work on informational structure (IS) in French highlights two types of markers: syntactic constructions and prosody, but often without looking at their interactions. The only studies that focus on both aspects have studied the prosody of syntactic constructions themselves without conceiving the complementarity of syntax and prosody. Our perspective is different and shows that syntax and prosody operate both independently and jointly to shape the informational structure of French. This paper relies on the extensive analysis of a 45 min radio debate, entirely annotated for IS, syntax and prosody. For IS, we used an annotation procedure that retrieves the implicit question under discussion (QUD) for each utterance, and defines its focus, focus domain, potential contrastive topic, topic and not-at-issue contents. For syntax, we identified the constructions that have been proposed to encode IS: clefts, left and right dislocation, presentationals and subject-verb inversion. For prosody, we used a phonological approach and the French ToBI framework. The intersection of syntactic, prosodic and QUD analyses show that, indeed the syntactic constructions cited above encode topic, focus and background, that prosody alone encodes IS in sentences without these constructions, but crucially, that syntax and prosody interplay in conveying more subtle IS organization