Vagueness, Ambiguity, and Underspecification

Ambiguity, Underspecification and Discourse Interpretation

A formal analysis of ambiguity processing is a necessary prerequisite for the development of a theory of underspecification and discourse interpretation for NLP systems. The analysis presented here is based on a distinction between semantic ambiguity and perceived ambiguity. A sentence is semantically ambiguous if it has a multiplicity of interpretations; a form of underspecified representation...

Vagueness, Ambiguity and Perceptual Bistability

1. Introduction. While vagueness and ambiguity have been opposed in the semantic domain (vagueness is often described as meaning underdetermination, ambiguity as meaning overdetermi-nation, see Fine 1975; moreover, vagueness is fundamentally a property of concepts, ambiguity a property of stimuli or expressions), Raffman has made the suggestion that within soritical series, borderline cases typ...

A Mixture Approach to Vagueness and Ambiguity

When asked to indicate which items from a set of candidates belong to a particular natural language category inter-individual differences occur: Individuals disagree which items should be considered category members. The premise of this paper is that these inter-individual differences in semantic categorization reflect both ambiguity and vagueness. Categorization differences are said to be due ...

23. Ambiguity and Vagueness: An Overview

Dealing with sortal ambiguity of nominalizations by underspecification

Based on data from German -ung nominalizations, I argue that selection restriction tests are not suitable as linguistic tools for ontological disambiguation. Consequently, I question the significance of ontology as a starting point for linguistic theorizing. Instead, I argue for an underspecified account of the ontology of nominalizations, in which disambiguation looses its central role in the ...