A Compositional Treatment of Polysemous Arguments in Categorial Grammar

We discuss an extension of the standard logical rules (functional application and abstraction) in Categorial Grammar (CG), in order to deal with some specific cases of polysemy. We borrow from Generative Lexicon theory which proposes the mechanism of {\em coercion}, next to a rich nominal lexical semantic structure called {\em qualia structure}. In a previous paper we introduced coercion into the framework of {\em sign-based} Categorial Grammar and investigated its impact on traditional Fregean compositionality. In this paper we will elaborate on this idea, mostly working towards the introduction of a new semantic dimension. Where in current versions of sign-based Categorial Grammar only two representations are derived: a prosodic one (form) and a logical one (modelling), here we introduce also a more detaled representation of the lexical semantics. This extra knowledge will serve to account for linguistic phenomena like {\em metonymy\/}.Comment: LaTeX file, 19 pages, uses pubsmacs, pubsbib, pubsarticle, leqn

Disjunctive Gender Features - A Comparison between HPSG and CG

Certain pronouns in Dutch as well as in German show a tendency to shift from grammatical gender to natural gender. In order to account for this vagueness, we need to be able to shift from one kind of feature to another when checking the agreement in gender. The clash in gender information that may occur when combining different kinds of gender-bearing constituents poses additional demands to the mechanisms we use. We will discuss two techniques: one that is common in HPSG, one from Categorial Grammar. 1 Introduction The introduction of feature structures that enables us to describe linguistic properties in an efficient manner was a major breakthrough, and its usefulness is even increased if we introduce some extra techniques. In this paper we describe two techniques that follow from the use of feature logic. One is the use of disjunction (an attribute has either value A or value B), the other is the use of distributive disjunction (if attribute X has value A, then attribute Y has valu..

Bridging as Coercive Accommodation

[Van der Sandt, 1992] introduces [Lewis, 1979] ’ notion of accommodation in Discourse Representation Theory [Kamp and Reyle, 1993] as a tool to account for gaps in the discourse. His theory of presupposition projection takes presuppositions to behave like anaphora

A Coreference Corpus and Resolution System for Dutch

We present the main outcomes of the COREA project: a corpus annotated with coreferential relations and a coreference resolution system for Dutch. We discuss the annotation of the corpus: the type of annotated relations, the guidelines, the annotation tool and interannotator agreement. We also show a visualization of the annotated relations. The standard approach to evaluate a coreference resolution system is to compare the predictions of the system to a hand-annotated gold standard test set (cross-validation). A more practically oriented evaluation is to test the usefulness of coreference relation information in an NLP application. We present results of both types of evalutation. We run experiments with an Information Extraction module for the medical domain, and measure the performance of this module with and without coreference relation information. In a separate experiment we also evaluate the effect of coreference information produced by a simple rule-based coreference module in a Question Answering application. 1

COVID-19, impact on myeloma patients

To the Editor: The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be a devastating infection in patients with chronic hematological disorders. So far, no data have been reported in multiple myeloma (MM), a disease characterized by a severe humoral and cellular immune deficiency that exposes patients to infectious complications. [...

Predictive factors of positive circumferential resection margin after radiochemotherapy for rectal cancer: The French randomised trial ACCORD12/0405 PRODIGE 2

International audienceCircumferential resection margin (CRM) appears as a new powerful prognostic factor of survival after surgery for rectal cancer. We aimed to evaluate predictive factors of positive CRM following preoperative radiochemotherapy in a French trial. Patients with rectal cancer were randomised in long course preoperative radiotherapy 45 Gy plus capecitabine versus 50 Gy plus capecitabine and oxaliplatin. Mesorectal excision was performed 6 weeks after treatment. Impact of clinical, pathological and surgical variables on positive CRM (≤1 mm) were analysed by multivariate analysis. Of 565 randomised patients, CRM was recorded in 390 cases and was positive in 8% (30/390). Patients with 50 Gy plus capecitabine and oxaliplatin had a 6% rate of positive CRM while those treated by 45 Gy plus capecitabine had a 10% rate (p=0.128). Three independent predictive factors of positive CRM were identified: abdominoperineal resection (APR) (odds ratio OR=3.24; p=0.004), vascular tumour invasion (OR=2.78; p=0.026) and poor histological response (modified Dworak 0-2) (OR=9.01; p=0.003). Significant predictive factors of positive CRM are related to type of surgery, especially APR, and poor histological prognostic factors. Intensification of neoadjuvant radiochemotherapy does not seem to have a major role in this study