Final FLaReNet deliverable: Language Resources for the Future - The Future of Language Resources

Language Technologies (LT), together with their backbone, Language Resources (LR), provide an essential support to the challenge of Multilingualism and ICT of the future. The main task of language technologies is to bridge language barriers and to help creating a new environment where information flows smoothly across frontiers and languages, no matter the country, and the language, of origin. To achieve this goal, all players involved need to act as a community able to join forces on a set of shared priorities. However, until now the field of Language Resources and Technology has long suffered from an excess of individuality and fragmentation, with a lack of coherence concerning the priorities for the field, the direction to move, not to mention a common timeframe. The context encountered by the FLaReNet project was thus represented by an active field needing a coherence that can only be given by sharing common priorities and endeavours. FLaReNet has contributed to the creation of this coherence by gathering a wide community of experts and making them participate in the definition of an exhaustive set of recommendations

Czy efekt efektu ubocznego dotyczy pojęć?

According to Knobe’s own explanation of the side-effect findings, folk beliefs about the moral status of a behavior have an influence on their intuitions about whether or not the behavior was performed intentionally (Knobe 2006). I challenge this view. I show that the side-effect effect occurs also in cases where the action is described with a non-existing word or a word that does not make any sense in the context of the action description. I conclude that we should look for alternative explanations of the side-effect effects that would not assume that they are generated by folk understanding of the concept of intentionality as intimately bound up with moral considerations

Czy efekt efektu ubocznego dotyczy pojęć?

According to Knobe’s own explanation of the side-effect findings, folk beliefs about the moral status of a behavior have an influence on their intuitions about whether or not the behavior was performed intentionally (Knobe 2006). I challenge this view. I show that the side-effect effect occurs also in cases where the action is described with a non-existing word or a word that does not make any sense in the context of the action description. I conclude that we should look for alternative explanations of the side-effect effects that would not assume that they are generated by folk understanding of the concept of intentionality as intimately bound up with moral considerations

A 'Kees' study on nominal record linkage

This paper describes a case study on nominal record linkage on data from the Mandemakers family. It is demonstrated how names from birth, marriage and death certificates can be used for fast, probabilistic, ego-based record linkage, with the help of year of birth to arrive at unique identification. The procedure includes name standardization to overcome variation in spelling and the use of probabilities of combinations of given names and surnames, computed from the digitized 19th century Dutch vital register

Przed i aż do. Badanie eksperymentalne dwóch przyimków czasowych

Artykuł ten dotyczy monotoniczności dwóch operatorów czasowych, mianowicie przed i aż do. Wszystkie operatory języka naturalnego mogą być albo monotonicznie rosnące, monotonicznie malejące albo niemonotoniczne. Pierwsze dwie z tych własności zazwyczaj oznaczają, że operator zachowuje albo odwraca kierunek wynikania. Jednak monotoniczność nie musi być definiowana za pomocą pojęcia wynikania. W artykule definiuję trzy rodzaje monotoniczności: ze względu na poprzedzanie w czasie, ze względu na relację bycia podzdarzeniem i ze względu na wynikanie. Te rodzaje monotoniczności pozwalają przedstawić różne definicje operatorów przed i aż do. Dzięki nim wysnute zostają przewidywania, które zostają następnie sprawdzone eksperymentalnie

Scope Oddity: On the semantic and pragmatic interactions of modified numerals, negative indefinites, focus operators, and modals

Scope Oddity investigates three cases where scope interactions between different kinds of operators are more restricted than previously thought. These cases are: 1) split scope readings with negative indefinites, 2) interactions between modified numerals and modals, and 3) run-of-the-mill doubly quantified sentences with two nominal quantifiers. In these domains, accounts of the phenomena at hand are built on top of the assumption that surface scope configurations and inverse scope configurations are both available. Using data from the literature as well as novel and largely crosslinguistic data, this book illustrates that scope interactions in these areas are actually far more infrequent than thus far assumed. Scope Oddity comes to the rescue by offering an alternative to these accounts that does not rest on any non-existent scope configurations. The theory presented in this dissertation unifies the phenomena of split scope and scope interactions between modified numerals and modals. It does so by proposing that what underlies the characteristics of both phenomena is focus-sensitivity. Across languages, only the focus-sensitive expressions among negative indefinites and numeral modifiers display the kind of behaviour that results in both split scope readings and certain types of readings we observe when modified numerals occur with modals. Using focus semantics and inquisitive semantics, the account derives both the right semantics and the right pragmatic inferences of the relevant expressions. This work is of interest to semanticists, pragmaticists, and syntacticians alike, as well as to anyone who enjoys example sentences with cats

DRS at MRP 2020: Dressing up Discourse Representation Structures as Graphs

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is a formal account for representing the meaning of natural language discourse. Meaning in DRT is modeled via a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), a meaning representation with a model-theoretic interpretation, which is usually depicted as nested boxes. In contrast, a directed labeled graph is a common data structure used to encode semantics of natural language texts. The paper describes the procedure of dressing up DRSs as directed labeled graphs to include DRT as a new framework in the 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing. Since one of the goals of the shared task is to encourage unified models for several semantic graph frameworks, the conversion procedure was biased towards making the DRT graph framework somewhat similar to other graph-based meaning representation frameworks

Solving Textual Entailment with the Theorem Prover for Natural Language

We present a theorem prover for natural language and show how it processes various types of textual entailment problems. The prover itself is based on a tableau system for natural logic that employs logical forms similar to linguistic expressions. With respect to the problems drawn from textual entailment datasets, a wide-range of the judgments of the prover are discussed, including both correct and incorrect ones. The analysis shows that the false proofs, which are extremely rare, are mainly due to the wrong lexical senses or the noisy gold labels of the dataset. Knowledge sparsity is identified as the main reason for the failure in proof search

The Grammar of Standards. Judge-dependence, Purpose-relativity, and Comparison Classes in Degree Constructions

This dissertation explores the structure and semantics of constructions based on the positive form of gradable adjectives, such as tall, long, interesting or smart. Such forms – and constructions that are based on them – contain an element of semantic indeterminacy regarding the standard of comparison that they make reference to. At the same time, there are a number of phrases that can participate in constructions with such adjectives and remove some of this indeterminacy. Examples include ‘judge’-phrases, as in ‘The ride was fun for John’; purpose-clauses, as in ‘This is a long book to assign’; comparison-class phrases, such as ‘John is tall for a 4-year-old’. The dissertation investigates these constructions, providing a syntactic and semantic analysis for each of them, motivated by an array of empirical cross-linguistic evidence. Despite the apparent similarity between these ‘standard-affecting’ phrases in terms of their overall interpretational effect, the linguistic machinery behind these effects turns out to be very different in each case upon closer examination. The linguistic perspective taken in this dissertation on the problems of the standard of comparison in the positive construction uncovers various intricacies of the standards of gradable predicates and opens up new directions for studying the semantics of adjectives and standards of comparison