On Presupposition Projection with Trivalent Connectives

A basic puzzle about presuppositions concerns their projection from propositional constructions. This problem has regained much attention in the last decade since many of its prominent accounts, including variants of the trivalent Strong Kleene connectives, suffer from the so-called *proviso problem*. This paper argues that basic insights of the Strong Kleene system can be used without invoking the proviso problem. It is shown that the notion of *determinant value* that underlies the definition of the Strong Kleene connectives leads to a natural generalization of the filtering conditions proposed in Karttunen's article "Presuppositions of compound sentences" (LI, 1973). Incorporating this generalized  condition into an incremental projection algorithm avoids the proviso problem as well as the derivation of conditional presuppositions. It is argued that the same effects that were previously modelled using conditional presuppositions may be viewed as effects of presupposition suspension and contextual inference on presupposition projection

Atom Predicates and Set Predicates: Towards a General Theory of Plural Quantification

No abstract

Functional Readings and Wide-Scope Indefinites

No abstract

Reciprocal predicates: a prototype model

Many languages have verbal stems like hug and marry whose intransitive realization is interpreted as reciprocal. Previous semantic analyses of such reciprocal intransitives rely on the assumption of symmetric participation. Thus, 'Sam and Julia hugged' is assumed to entail both 'Sam hugged Julia' and 'Julia hugged Sam'. In this paper we report experimental results that go against this assumption. It is shown that although symmetric participation is likely to be preferred by speakers, it is not a necessary condition for accepting sentences with reciprocal verbs. To analyze the reciprocal alternation, we propose that symmetric participation is a typical feature connecting the meanings of reciprocal and binary forms. This accounts for the optionality as well as to the preference of this feature. Further, our results show that agent intentionality often boosts the acceptability of sentences with reciprocal verbs. Accordingly, we propose that intentionality is another typical semantic feature of such verbs, separate from symmetric participation

Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology

cognitive science; semantics; languag

A Semantic Characterization of Locative PPs

No abstract

A Generalized Definition of Quantifier Absorption

No abstract

Generating image captions with external encyclopedic knowledge

Accurately reporting what objects are depicted in an image is largely a solved problem in automatic caption generation. The next big challenge on the way to truly humanlike captioning is being able to incorporate the context of the image and related real world knowledge. We tackle this challenge by creating an end-to-end caption generation system that makes extensive use of image-specific encyclopedic data. Our approach includes a novel way of using image location to identify relevant open-domain facts in an external knowledge base, with their subsequent integration into the captioning pipeline at both the encoding and decoding stages. Our system is trained and tested on a new dataset with naturally produced knowledge-rich captions, and achieves significant improvements over multiple baselines. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is effective for generating contextualized captions with encyclopedic knowledge that is both factually accurate and relevant to the image

A Proof-Based Annotation Platform of Textual Entailment

We introduce a new platform for annotating inferential phenomena in entailment data, buttressed by a formal semantic model and a proof-system that provide immediate verification of the coherency and completeness of the marked annotations. By integrating a web-based user interface, a formal lexicon, a lambda-calculus engine and an off-the-shelf theorem prover, the platform allows human annotators to mark linguistic phenomena in entailment data (pairs made up of a premise and a hypothesis) and to receive immediate feedback whether their annotations are substantiated: for positive entailment pairs, the system searches for a formal logical proof that the hypothesis follows from the premise; for negative pairs, the system verifies that a counter-model can be constructed. This novel approach facilitates the creation of textual entailment corpora with annotations that are sufficiently coherent and complete for recognizing the entailment relation or lack thereof. A corpus of several hundred annotated entailments is currently being compiled based on the platform and will be available for the research community in the foreseeable future