Syntax and Semantics of Italian Poetry in the First Half of the 20th Century

In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic elements in Spec XP projections at various levels of constituency. Then we introduce LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) as the theory that allows us to connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first one uses best online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second one uses Getarun, the system created at Ca Foscari Computational Linguistics Laboratory. As will be shown, the first approach is unable to cope with these structures due to the use of only statistical probabilistic information. On the contrary, the second one, being a symbolic rule based system, is by far superior and allows also to complete both semantic an pragmatic analysis.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of AIUCD 2016 (revised version as of March 19, 2018

Semantic parsing with LFG and conceptual representations

A semantic parser is presented which aims at the attainment of a high linguistic coverage and an extendibility to many languages. To this end, a frequency distionary for Italian has been classified following LFG theoretical framework and a general decoder has been implemented to pass from the syntactic. to the semantic and conceptual levels. Syntactic structural derivation is produced by complete lexical froms, lexical redundancy rules and an extended phrase structure grammar which has been implemented in Prolog using XGs. Semantic and conceptual representation are produced following Jackendoff's system of conceptual representations plus a number of additions to compute time reference mainly inspired by J. Allen's system (1983a, b). We believe that a text rethorical organizations is mainly governed by linguistic principles like the alternation of FOCUS and TOPIC, the use of definiteness to qualify referring expressions, etc. We describe two algorithm to analyse the level of text: Logical Form, which provides scope assignment to quantified expressions; an algorithm for anaphora resolution which incorporates linguistic information and a number of psycholinguistic heuristic. Finally, we briefly describe how the inference engine provided by KL-ONE is integrated into the previous modules to produce semantic entailment and linguistic inferences. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers

Exploring Shakespeare's Sonnets with SPARSAR

Shakespeare's Sonnets have been studied by literary critics for centuries after their publication. However, only recently studies made on the basis of computational analyses and quantitative evaluations have started to appear and they are not many. In our exploration of the Sonnets we have used the output of SPARSAR which allows a full-fledged linguistic analysis which is structured at three macro levels, a Phonetic Relational Level where phonetic and phonological features are highlighted; a Poetic Relational Level that accounts for a poetic devices, i.e. rhyming and metrical structure; and a Syntactic-Semantic Relational Level that shows semantic and pragmatic relations in the poem. In a previous paper we discussed how colours may be used appropriately to account for the overall underlying mood and attitude expressed in the poem, whether directed to sadness or to happiness. This has been done following traditional approaches which assume that the underlying feeling of a poem is strictly related to the sounds conveyed by the words besides/beyond their meaning. In that study we used part of Shakespeare's Sonnets. We have now extended the analysis to the whole collection of 154 sonnets, gathering further evidence of the colour-sound-mood relation. We have also extended the semantic-pragmatic analysis to verify hypotheses put forward by other quantitative computationally-based analysis and compare that with our own. In this case, the aim is trying to discover what features of a poem characterize most popular sonnets

Understanding Implicit Entities and Events with Getaruns

Semantic processing represents the new challenge for all applications that require text understanding, as for instance Q/A. In this paper we will highlight the need to couple statistical approaches with deep linguistic processing and will focus on “implicit” or lexically unexpressed linguistic elements that are nonetheless necessary for a complete semantic interpretation of a text. We will address the following types of “implicit” entities and events: - grammatical ones, as suggested by a linguistic theories like LFG or similar generative theories; - semantic ones suggested in the FrameNet project, i.e. CNI, DNI, INI; - pragmatic ones: here we will present a theory and an implementation for the recovery of implicit entities and events of (non-) standard implicatures. In particular we will show how the use of commonsense knowledge may fruitfully contribute in finding relevant implied meanings. We will also briefly explore the Subject of Point of View which is computed by Semantic Informational Structure and contributes the intended entity from whose point of view is expressed a given subjective statement. We also present an evaluation based on section 24 of Penn Treebank as encoded by LFG people in the PARC-700 treebank where lexically unexpressed are adequately classified and diversified

Expressivity in TTS from Semantics and Pragmatics

In this paper we present ongoing work to produce an expressive TTS reader that can be used both in text and dialogue applications. The system called SPARSAR has been used to read (English) poetry so far but it can now be applied to any text. The text is fully analyzed both at phonetic and phonological level, and at syntactic and semantic level. In addition, the system has access to a restricted list of typical pragmatically marked phrases and expressions that are used to convey specific discourse function and speech acts and need specialized intonational contours. The text is transformed into a poem-like structures, where each line corresponds to a Breath Group, semantically and syntactically consistent. Stanzas correspond to paragraph boundaries. Analogical parameters are related to ToBI theoretical in- dices but their number is doubled. In this paper, we concentrate on short stories and fables

Syntax and Semantics of Italian Poetry in the First Half of the 20th Century

In this paper we study, analyse and comment on rhetorical figures present in a selected body of poetry of the first half of the 20th century. These figures are at first traced back to famous poets of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called upon to show how these rethorical figures can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic elements in SpecXP projections at various levels of constituency. We then introduce LFG – Lexical Functional Grammar – as the theory that allows us to connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first experiment uses the best performing online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second experiment use Getarun – a system created at the Computational Linguistics Laboratory of Ca' Foscari. As will be shown, the first approach is unable to cope with these structures because only statistical probabilistic information is used. Conversely, as a symbolic rule-based system, the second approach is much superior and facilitates both semantic and pragmatic analyses

VENSESEVAL at SemEval-2016 task 2: iSTS - With a full-fledged rule-based approach

In our paper we present our rule-based system for semantic processing. In particular we show examples and solutions that may be challenge our approach. We then discuss problems and shortcomings of Task 2 - iSTS. We comment on the existence of a tension between the inherent need to on the one side, to make the task as much as possible "semantically feasible". Whereas the detailed presentation and some notes in the guidelines refer to inferential processes, paraphrases and the use of commonsense knowledge of the world for the interpretation to work. We then present results and some conclusions

VIT – Venice Italian Treebank: Syntactic and Quantitative Features

Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 43-54. © 2007 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476

Linguistically Based QA by Dinamyc LOD Access from Logical Form

We present a system for Question Answering which computes a prospective answer from Logical Forms (hence LFs) produced by a full-fledged NLP for text understanding, and then maps the result onto schemata in SPARQL to be used for accessing the Semantic Web. As an intermediate step, and whenever there are complex concepts to be mapped, the system looks for a corresponding amalgam in YAGO classes. This is what happens in case the query to be constructed has [president,'United States'] as its goal, and the amalgam search will produce the complex concept [PresidentOfTheUnitedStates]. In case no class has been recovered, as for instance in the query related to the complex structure [5th,president,'United States'] the system knows that the cardinal figure '5th' behaves like a quantifier restricting the class of [PresidentOfTheUnitedStates]. In fact LFs are organized with a restricted ontology made up of 7 types: FOCus, PREDicate, ARGument, MODifier, ADJunct, QUANTifier, INTensifier, CARDinal. In addition, every argument has a Semantic Role to tell Subject from Object and Referential from non-Referential predicates. Another important step in the computation of the final LF, is the translation of the interrogative pronoun into a corresponding semantic class word taken from general nouns, in our case the highest concepts of WordNet hierarchy. The result is mapped into classes, properties, and restrictions (filters) as for instance in the question: Who was the wife of President Lincoln ? which becomes the final LF: be-[focus-person, arg-[wife/theme_bound], arg-['Lincoln'/theme-[mod-[pred-['President']]]]] and is then turned into the SPARQL expression, ?x dbpedia-owl:spouse :Abraham_Lincoln where "dbpedia-owl:spouse" is produced by searching the DBpedia properties and in case of failure looking into the synset associated to the concept as WIFE. In particular then, the concept "Abraham_Lincoln" is derived from DBpedia by the association of a property and an entity name, "President" and "Lincoln", which contextualizes the reference of the name to the appropriate referent in the world. It is just by the internal structure of the Logical Form that we are able to produce a suitable and meaningful context for concept disambiguation. Logical Forms are the final output of a complex system for text understanding - GETARUNS - which can deal with different levels of syntactic and semantic ambiguity in the generation of a final structure, by accessing computational lexical equipped with sub-categorization frames and appropriate selectional restrictions applied to the attachment of complements and adjuncts. The system also produces pronominal binding and instantiates the implicit arguments, if needed, in order to complete the required Predicate Argument structure which is licensed by the semantic component