Natural Language Understanding: Integrating Syntaz, Semantics, and Discourse

Integrating Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse Darpa Natural Language Understanding Program R&d Status Report Sdc - a Burroughs Company

Integrating Natural Language Subtasks with Bayesian Belief Networks

The development of automatic natural language understanding systems remains an elusive goal. Given the highly ambiguous nature of the syntax and semantics of natural language, it is often impossible to develop rule{based approaches to understanding even very limited domains of text. The diiculty in specifying rules and their exceptions has led to the rise of probabilistic approaches where model...

What’s behind meaning?

The paper addresses the main questions to be dealt with by any semantic theory which is committed to provide an explanation of how meaning is possible. On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structur...

Varieties of update

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates intro...

Dynamic Categorization of Semantics of Fashion Language: A Memetic Approach

Categories are not invariant. This paper attempts to explore the dynamic nature of semantic category, in particular, that of fashion language, based on the cognitive theory of Dawkins’ memetics, a new theory of cultural evolution. Semantic attributes of linguistic memes decrease or proliferate in replication and spreading, which involves a dynamic development of semantic category. More specific...