Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive science. Each framework could deal with some meaning phenomena, but none of them fulfills all requirements proposed by applications. A unified semantic theory chara...

Graphical specification notations have gained much popularity in software engineering, as witnessed by the widespread adoption of UML throughout the software industry. Graphical notations are generally characterised by being intuitive to understand, i.e. new users of these notation require little training to become familiar with them. However, few of the graphical notations have a formally defi...

Tile most common assumption about intention in discourse is that the primary intention of discourse is to eomlnunicate and receive information. This is a founding assumption of every formal model of discourse meaning that I am aware of. The standard account of meaning is that utterances are functions from contexts to contexts whose pr imary purpose is to describe the world, and whose meaning de...

A semantic parser learning system learns to map natural language sentences into their domain-specific formal meaning representations, but if the constructs of the meaning representation language do not correspond well with the natural language then the system may not learn a good semantic parser. This paper presents approaches for automatically transforming a meaning representation grammar (MRG...

This paper presents a triangular model of concept structure and four developmental levels of physical concepts: primitive, empirical, exact, and formal. The model is built upon Vygotsky’s concept theory and derived from the semantic modeling of concepts. The basic components of the model are: core C, meaning M, meaning layers M1, M2, M3, sense S, and their relationships. This model also disting...

There is a certain consensus on some defining features of collocations (they are frequent, recurrent, conventional, institutionalized, etc.), but there is not much agreement on other characteristics, for example whether or not they constitute binary lexical relations, and, crucially, whether they are arbitrary, and must be stipulated, or should instead be deduced or inferred. I will argue that ...

This article presents the results we obtained on a complex annotation task (that of dependency syntax) using a specifically designed Game with a Purpose, ZombiLingo.1 We show that with suitable mechanisms (decomposition of the task, training of the players and regular control of the annotation quality during the game), it is possible to obtain annotations whose quality is significantly higher t...

The current PASSAGE syntactic representation is the result of 9 years of constant evolution with the aim of providing a common ground for evaluating parsers of French whatever their type and supporting theory. In this paper we present the latest developments concerning the formalism and show first through a review of basic linguistic phenomena that it is a plausible minimal common ground for re...

While the formal properties of reduplication in many languages have aroused the interest of many linguists and much appears to have been done in this area, the same cannot be said about its semantics. It seems that our understanding of the kinds of meaning associated with reduplication processes remains rather limited. This is regrettable, given that language meaning can shed a lot of light on ...

The relatively scant use of formal techniques in software development is the result, in part, of a lack of suitable support tools. Many tools have been developed that provide novel analysis capabilities but lack basic yet commonplace facilities which are essential in production software development. More importantly, many existing tools for the development of formal specifications fail to provi...