Part-of relations, functionality and dependence

International audienceThat language hosts a multiplicity of part-whole relations is largely accepted, but no complete formal account is currently available. We first show how most distinctions between part-whole relations can be explained by considering the ontological categories of the arguments. We then focus on "component-integral whole" (CIW), a most important but formally little-studied relation. The analysis of the functional concepts involved leads us to introduce lexical categories and to characterize a notion of functional dependence. On this basis, four cases of CIW are distinguished and formally defined. The contrastive acceptability of determinative compound nouns shows the linguistic relevance of these distinctions. Lastly, we show how the definitions provide a simple solution to the elusive issue of variable transitivity patterns

A three-level approach to the semantics of space

This paper proposes some formal tools for representing the semantic content of French expressions referring to space. These tools consist of first, a relational –or qualitative– geometry encompassing topology, distance notions and projective geometry, as well as temporal notions, thus constituting a rather complete theory of naive space-time; and second, several formalisms to deal with functional aspects of entities such as intrinsic orientation, internal structure and categorizing; more generally, it is claimed that a representation in three levels (geometric, functional and pragmatic) is required to account for spatial expressions' semantics. To analyze the semantics of some of these expressions, this work systematically looks for valid reasoning schemata involving them; this approach also enables the testing of the proposed formal system as well as the evaluation of the definitions obtained for the studied lexemes

Distributional analysis of copredication: towards distinguishing systematic polysemy from coercion

National audienceIn this paper we argue that the account of the notion of complex type based on copredication tests is problematic,because copredication is possible,albeit less frequent, also with expressions which exhibit polysemy due to coercion.We show through a distributional and lexico-syntactic pattern-based corpus analysis that the variability of copredication contexts is the key to distinguish complex types nouns from nouns subject to coercion

On the compositionality of temporal locating adverbial modification

International audienceSemantic puzzles raised by temporal locating adverbials have been less focused on than those involving temporal quanti cational or duration adverbials. But these adverbials, whose semantics amounts to the location of a single eventuality with respect to a time or another eventuality, are involved in phenomena apparently jeopardizing the compositionality of adverbial modification. In this paper, we focus on French data for which we propose an account in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. The compositionality issue we are interested in here appears for our approach to locating adverbials, which assumes that the location relation is contributed by the adverbial itself. This is against the standard view which assumes that the adverbial simply qualifies a temporal referent systematically introduced along with the location relation by the tense. Our approach assumes a unique semantics for the adverbials and the tenses, and acknowledges the contribution of IP-level composition in discourse representation construction

La représentation formelle des concepts spatiaux dans la langue

In this chapter, we assume that systematically studying spatial markers semantics in language provides a means to reveal fundamental properties and concepts characterizing conceptual representations of space. We propose a formal system accounting for the properties highlighted by the linguistic analysis, and we use these tools for representing the semantic content of several spatial relations of French. The first part presents a semantic analysis of the expression of space in French aiming at describing the constraints that formal representations have to take into account. In the second part, after presenting the structure of our formal system, we set out its components. A commonsense geometry is sketched out and several functional and pragmatic spatial concepts are formalized. We take a special attention in showing that these concepts are well suited to representing the semantic content of several prepositions of French ('sur' (on), 'dans' (in), 'devant' (in front of), 'au-dessus' (above)), and in illustrating the inferential adequacy of these representations

Les entités spatiales dans la langue : étude descriptive, formelle et expérimentale de la catégorisation

While previous linguistic and psycholinguistic research on space has mainly analyzed spatial relations, the studies reported in this paper focus on how language distinguishes among spatial entities. Descriptive and experimental studies first propose a classification of entities, which accounts for both static and dynamic space, has some cross-linguistic validity, and underlies adults' cognitive processing. Formal and computational analyses then introduce theoretical elements aiming at modelling these categories, while fulfilling various properties of formal ontologies (generality, parsimony, coherence...). This formal framework accounts, in particular, for functional dependences among entities underlying some part-whole descriptions. Finally, developmental research shows that language-specific properties have a clear impact on how children talk about space. The results suggest some cross-linguistic variability in children's spatial representations from an early age onwards, bringing into question models in which general cognitive capacities are the only determinants of spatial cognition during the course of development

Trimming a consistent OWL knowledge base, relying on linguistic evidence

International audienceIntuitively absurd but logically consistent sets of statements are common in publicly available OWL datasets. This article proposes an original and fully automated method to point at erroneous axioms in a consistent OWL knowledge base, by weakening it in order to improve its compliance with linguistic evidence gathered from natural language texts. A score for evaluating the compliance of subbases of the input knowledge base is proposed, as well as a trimming algorithm to discard potentially erroneous axioms. The whole approach is evaluated on two real datasets, with automatically retrieved web pages as a linguistic input

Ontological Analysis For Description Logics Knowledge Base Debugging

International audienceFormal ontology provides axiomatizations of domain independent principles which, among other applications,can be used to identify modeling errors within a knowledge base. The Ontoclean methodology is probably the best-known illustration of this strategy, but its cost in terms of manual work is often considered dissuasive. This article investigates the applicability of such debugging strategies to Description Logics knowledge bases, showing that even a partial and shallow analysis rapidly performed with a top-level ontology can reveal the presence of violations of common sense, and that the bottleneck, if there is one, may instead reside in the resolution of the resulting inconsistency or incoherence