1. The main question: The nature of real-time semantic interpretation. The main question we will address in this talk is whether meaning representations of the kind that are pervasive in formal semantics are built up incrementally and predictively when language is used in real time, in much the same way that the real-time construction of syntactic representations has been argued to be (Steedman...

We propose a model of computational semantic interpretation of comparatives which is based on a mechanism for semantic copying. While the treatment of phrasal and clausal forms of comparatives we give is in line with previous approaches to their semantic description, our model also incorporates the analysis of textual phenomena that interact with the interpretation of comparatives, viz. metonym...

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After read...

The paper presents the module of interactive word sense disambiguation and syntactic ambiguity resolution used within a machine translation system, ETAP-3. The method applied consists in asking the user to identify a word sense, or a syntactic interpretation, whenever the system lacks reliable data to make the choice automatically. In lexical disambiguation, part of man-machine dialogue refers ...

Spontaneous language contains many discontinuities caused by unusual order, false starts, repairs, repetitions, pauses, etc. Since data-driven artificial neural networks possess an inherent fault tolerance we use this property for dealing with such forms of “sequential noise”. We describe an approach for a flat syntactic and semantic interpretation of ill-formed utterances in spontaneous dialog...

We have shown elsewhere how to introduce a concept of syntactic unification when terms are taken as the elements in a free module and established the link between both unification concepts showing that, under certain reasonable hypotheses, they are completely equivalent. Here we show how syntactic unification of terms may be viewed as the intersection of certain subsets in a free module, which ...

A categorial semantics for Lexical-khmctional Grammar provides a means for semantic interpretation of sentences of natural language that is appropriately constrained both syntactically and semantically. The f-structure of LFG provides a cross-lingnistically uniform format for representing syntactic information; constraining a derivation with respect to the f-structure rather than a phrase struc...

Question Answering research has long recognised that the identification of the type of answer being requested is a fundamental step in the interpretation of a question as a whole. Previous strategies have ranged from trivial keyword matches, to statistical analyses, to well-defined algorithms based on shallow syntactic parses with userinteraction for ambiguity resolution. A novel strategy combi...

Morphological analyses and lemma information are an important auxiliary resource for any treebank, especially for morphologically rich languages since such information is a useful precondition for any task that needs to link surface forms to semantic interpretation (either through wordnets or distributional measures). In contrast to common practice in parsing, the method used in the TüBaD/Z tre...

The results of several self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies (e.g., Pickering and Traxler, 2003) have been interpreted to suggest that readers do not use verb subcategorization preference as an early means for completing unbounded dependencies. Subsequent papers (e.g., Arai and Keller, 2013) have hypothesized that this finding may actually be due to the frequency of larger syntactic confi...