Varying Abstractions: a conceptual vs. distributional view on prepositional polysemy

Regular polysemy: A distributional model

Many types of polysemy are not word specific, but are instances of general sense alternations such as ANIMAL-FOOD. Despite their pervasiveness, regular alternations have been mostly ignored in empirical computational semantics. This paper presents (a) a general framework which grounds sense alternations in corpus data, generalizes them above individual words, and allows the prediction of altern...

On computable abstractions (a conceptual introduction)

Machines operationally equivalent to a Turing machine have fundamental limitations that prevent them from yielding results that are comparable to the results produced by humans when performing intellectual tasks (e.g., processing of natural language, visual object recognition, derivation of the whole of mathematics from first principles). For instance, while these machines can cover only a subs...

Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks : the case of over

An Ontology-Based View On Prepositional Senses

This paper describes ongoing work, aimed at producing a lexicon of prepositions, i.e. relations denoted by prepositions, to be used for information retrieval purposes. The work is ontology based, which for this project means that the ontological types of the arguments of the preposition are considered, rather than the word forms. Thus, sense distinctions are made based on ontological constraint...

Predictable vs. Unpredictable Polysemy

1. SEMANTIC FIELD OF TACTUAL VERBS 1. The sense of touch has always been related to the field of emotions. Expressions such as I'm deeply touched or touching words are widely used in English. Hans Kurath (1921) had already classified sense perception in respect to emotions and stated how 'the kinaesthetic, the visceral, and the tactual perceptions have a relatively stronger tone than those of h...