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45
Interpretation as Abduction
, 1990
"... An approach to abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described ..."
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Cited by 687 (38 self)
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An approach to abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described and illustrated. It also suggests an elegant and thorough integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 1
Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
- Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification
, 1994
"... I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles&apo ..."
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Cited by 41 (9 self)
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I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed. 1 The Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle The alternative syntactic readings of a sen...
An Efficient Graph Algorithm for Dominance Constraints
- JOURNAL OF ALGORITHMS
, 2003
"... Dominance constraints are logical descriptions of trees that are widely used in computational linguistics. Their general satisfiability problem is known to be NP-complete. Here we identify normal dominance constraints and present an efficient graph algorithm for testing their satisfiablity in dete ..."
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Cited by 41 (17 self)
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Dominance constraints are logical descriptions of trees that are widely used in computational linguistics. Their general satisfiability problem is known to be NP-complete. Here we identify normal dominance constraints and present an efficient graph algorithm for testing their satisfiablity in deterministic polynomial time. Previously, no polynomial time algorithm was known.
Towards a Logic of Ambiguous Expressions
, 1996
"... this paper is as follows: in section 2 the possibility of a disjunctive approach to the meaning of ambiguous expressions will be discussed. Section 3 will sketch how the approach of this paper compares with other recent work on ambiguity. Sections 4 and 5 will present the semantics of a logical lang ..."
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Cited by 31 (3 self)
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this paper is as follows: in section 2 the possibility of a disjunctive approach to the meaning of ambiguous expressions will be discussed. Section 3 will sketch how the approach of this paper compares with other recent work on ambiguity. Sections 4 and 5 will present the semantics of a logical language containing ambiguous constants. Section 6 evaluates the resulting logics, and section 7 takes up some loose ends.
Indefeasible Semantics and Defeasible Pragmatics
- CWI Report CS-R9441 and SRI Technical Note 544
, 1994
"... An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes ..."
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Cited by 26 (2 self)
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An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes
Identifying Nocuous Ambiguity in Natural Language Requirements
, 2006
"... This dissertation is an investigation into how ambiguity should be classified for authors and readers of text, and how this process can be automated. Usually, authors and readers disambiguate ambiguity, either consciously or unconsciously. However, disambiguation is not always appropriate. For insta ..."
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Cited by 20 (3 self)
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This dissertation is an investigation into how ambiguity should be classified for authors and readers of text, and how this process can be automated. Usually, authors and readers disambiguate ambiguity, either consciously or unconsciously. However, disambiguation is not always appropriate. For instance, a linguistic construction may be read differently by different people, with no consensus about which reading is the intended one. This is particularly dangerous if they do not realise that other readings are possible. Misunderstandings may then occur. This is particularly serious in the field of requirements engineering. If requirements are misunderstood, systems may be built incorrectly, and this can prove very costly. Our research uses natural language processing techniques to address ambiguity in requirements. We develop a model of ambiguity, and a method of applying it, which represent a novel approach to the problem described here. Our model is based on the notion that human perception is the only valid criterion for judging ambiguity. If people perceive very differently how an ambiguity should be read, it will cause misunderstandings. Assigning a preferred reading to it is therefore unwise. In
Ontologically Promiscuous Flat Logical Forms for NLP
, 2000
"... In this paper a flat notation for logical forms is described. This notation allows the logical forms to be easy to build, easy to work with, and able to deal with ambiguity by underspecification. The main mechanism to convert a logical form into the corresponding flat form is the reification of ..."
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Cited by 16 (8 self)
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In this paper a flat notation for logical forms is described. This notation allows the logical forms to be easy to build, easy to work with, and able to deal with ambiguity by underspecification. The main mechanism to convert a logical form into the corresponding flat form is the reification of all the predicates and operators used in an otherwise nested expression. The resulting flat logical forms are convenient for natural language processing applications that require the use of partial logical forms. In particular, it is shown how partial logical forms (encoded in flat notation) can be used to perform answer extraction.
Monotone decreasing quantifiers in a scope-free logical form
- in Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification
, 1996
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Mixed-Depth Representations for Natural Language Text
- TEXT-BASED INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, EDITED BY PAUL JACOBS
, 1992
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Underspecified Semantics
, 1999
"... Ambiguities in natural language can multiply so fast that no person or machine can be expected to process a text of even moderate length by enumerating all possible disambiguations. A sentence containing $n$ scope bearing elements which are freely permutable will have $n!$ readings, if there are no ..."
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Cited by 14 (8 self)
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Ambiguities in natural language can multiply so fast that no person or machine can be expected to process a text of even moderate length by enumerating all possible disambiguations. A sentence containing $n$ scope bearing elements which are freely permutable will have $n!$ readings, if there are no other, say lexical or syntactic, sources of ambiguity. A series of $m$ such sentences would lead to $(n!)^m$ possibilities. Some alternative scopings may boil down to the same reading. The relative order in which we scope two existentially quantified noun phrases, for example, will not matter if no other material intervenes. But all in all the growth of possibilities will be so fast that generating readings first and testing their acceptability afterwards will not be feasible.
