Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity pdf files

Results from a series of naming experiments demonstrated that major lexical categories of simple sentences can provide sources of constraint on the interpretation of ambiguous words homonyms. The independence of combinatory semantic processing. There is a book xsuch that andy didnt read x s dp a book x e s nots dp andy vp v tr read x e. The two different interpretations are two different interpretations, of that one word. Quantification and negation scope ambiguity resolution. A framework for structural ambiguity resolution for. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst. The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness.

Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme. Manipulation of verb experiment 1 or subject noun experiment 2 specificity produced contexts that were empirically rated as being strongly biased or ambiguous. Dussias thepennsylvaniastateuniversity this study investigates whether proficient second language l2 speakers of spanish and english use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences con. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity guide books. Binot, disambiguating prepositional phrase attachments by using. Moreover, the statistical models will be tried to enrich using the parser output of the bosque treebank. Ambiguity our semantic knowledge also tells us when words or phrases have more than one meaning, or are ambiguous syntactic ambiguity arises from multiple syntactic structures corresponding to the same string of words the boy saw the man with the telescope lexical ambiguity arises from. Reviewed by salvatore attardo, english department, youngstown state univer sity, youngstown, oh 44555, usa. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in sentence processing. A conditional sentence is analytic if the semantic interpretation of the consequent is wholly contained in that of the antecedent. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful contextdependent interpretations. So one example is, consider the newspaper headline, gandhi stoned in rally in india. Hirst, semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, studies in natural.

Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. The word hard, for example, can mean not soft or difficult. Even after the syntax and the meanings of the individual words have been resolved, there are two ways of reading the sentence. Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no difficulty coping with it. Which sentential node it adjoins to determines its semantic scope. Semantic ambiguity is a word that has more than one meaning. There are two types of ambiguity syntactic and semantic ambiguities. While parsing techniques have been greatly improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally been ad hoc and had little theoretical basis. The ambiguity in the matching between e and d is referred to here as semantic ambiguity. However, it departs from the pseudo semantic transfer approach in the sense that contextual information is integrated into both the. For each e and d there is a distribution associated. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in. Resolution of ambiguity in chinese and its application to.

A collection of the best research on lar available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. In fact, the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious. To assess the dynamics of ambiguity resolution, the third part. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted although some may not be immediately obvious, whereas with information that is vague, it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity. Well, there are two different interpretations of the verb stoned. Semantic ambiguity is when a particular word has two different interpretations. Section 4 responds to some possible objections to the argument in section 3. But it is not infallible, however, as example 1 demonstrates. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in l2 learners some effects of bilinguality on l1 and l2 processing strategies paolae. Lexical ambiguity resolution lar, then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research.

Ambiguity resolution strategies used in the alice machine translation system are presented in various levels of detail. The analysis of lexica l and structural ambiguity in your letters of the jakarta post, 2009. On the other hand, if an additional operatorraising move raises the negp not to a position higher than every student, as shown in 2b, not is interpreted with wider scope than every student, which leads to the inversescope. The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with lack of. Pdf semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities. Recent constraintbased models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause e. Resolving ambiguity using latent semantic analysis in a small corpus of text. These semantic objects are represented by expressions of an intensional logic. Ambiguity semantic syntactic one word or phrase has more thanthe ambiguity results from the one possible meaning interpretation, location of phrases or words in the which affects the entire sentence. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity. Such a theory provides for the context resolution of ambiguity.

To fill this gap, we compared the lsa and skipgram capabilities to extract semantic word associations in dream reports collections. Cambridge university press but i havnt got any of them yet, are they useful. By contrast, the semantic cues in the sentence suggest a di. General interest semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme hirst. Structual ambiguity and conceptural information retrieval. Semantic ambiguity and perceived ambiguity citeseerx. Ambiguity resolution from interpretation abstract syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no diffculty coping with it. However earlier the article has lexical ambiguity is contrasted semantic ambiguity. Therefore, models of syntactic ambiguity resolution predict that the verb devouring will be perceived to be semantically anomalous, and elicit an n400 e. Pp attachment ambiguity resolution with corpusbased pattern distributions and lexical signaturese nuria gala1 and mathieu lafourcade2, nonmembers abstract we propose a method mixing unsupervised learning of lexical pattern frequencies with semantic information which aims at improving the resolution of pp attachment ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is caused by homonymy and polysemy.

Hirst, semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, cambridge university press, 1987. Examples are shown for each type of ambiguity and sometimes for subtypes. The paper analyzes some forms of linguistic ambiguity in english in a specific register, i. Such an interpretation is semantically anomalous, as inanimate objects do not typically devour things. The federal polytechnic ede osun state, nigeria abstract effective communication is not just about the transmission of ideasmessages from the sender to the receiver. Lucy owns a parrot that is larger than a cat, a parrot is extenstensionally quantified, a cat is either universally quantified or means typical cats. Kuno, 1965, much of the structural ambiguity of the sentence stems from the partofspeech ambiguity of the words time, flies, and like, which in turn reflects their semantic ambiguity. Pp attachment ambiguity resolution with corpusbased. Section 5 explores some possible strategies for explaining ambiguity, concluding with pointers to our ongoing research on the subject. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing. In sum, the problem of lexical ambiguity can indeed serve as a touchstone by which theories of language analysis can be assessed.

In natural language processing, ambiguity resolution is a central issue, and can be regarded as a measure shows substantial improvement in structural disambiguation over a syntaxbased approach. The study is based on a corpus of 5 verbally ambiguous headlines found on web sites presenting humorous bits of information. File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst department of computer science, university of toronto the right of the university of. Lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution 677 ambiguity. In this paper, we present a typology of ambiguity in chinese, which includes morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual ambiguities. In recent years, the notion of ambiguity has come under close crutiny.

Ambiguity is both a central notion in semantic theory and a key problem for natural language processing sytems. The comparison between high ambiguity and low ambiguity phrases reveals the processes that are di. Ambiguity ambiguity can bedefined as a word, phrase or sentence that has more than one meaning or interpretation. For example, the alternative senses of ambiguous senses of ambiguous words are briefly accessed, followed by the words can be spelled and pronounced the same e. In particular, the focus of the research is on examples of lexical and syntactic ambiguity that result in sources of voluntary or involuntary humor. Characterizing ambiguity ambiguity is a semantic property. Ambiguity and ambiguity resolution in ways of lexical and structural forms, has fascinated the attention of many researchers, especially in the field of psycholinguistics, computational. Improving the accuracy of the dependency representation will make the current output of string more appropriate and informationrich for further analysis and processing. The more general format for discourse interpretation principles is as follows.

Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. In some cases, listener are consciously aware of ambiguity in an expression. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. Yet natural language contains enough redundancy so that, in context, the. Introduction over the past three decades, lexical ambiguity resolution has been one of the hot issues in. Sources of sentence constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution. We saw her duck is offered as an example of semantic ambiguity, with two possible readings. Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are possible. Syntactic ambiguity is the phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or meanings due to different phrase structure analysis. Structural ambiguity, on the other hand, occurs when a phrase or a sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases english history teacher, short men and women, the girl hit the boy with a book, etc.