Sentences that are syntactically quite different can often have similar or same meaning. The SemEval 2012 task of Semantic Textual Similarity aims at finding the semantic similarity between two sentences. The semantic representation of Universal Networking Language (UNL), represents only the inherent meaning in a sentence without any syntactic details. Thus, comparing the UNL graphs of two sent...

This paper aims to investigate the polysemy and multifunctionality of the expression “最好是”. It has been observed in recent years that “最好是” has two different meanings and semantic-pragmatic functions. The first function is to express speaker’s suggestion or expectation to the hearers to reach the optimal outcome. It is noted as the deontic optative meaning by Bybee (Bybee et al. 1994). As this ...

The constituents of English compounds (e.g., butter and fly for butterfly) and two-character Chinese words may differ in meaning from the whole word. Furthermore, the meanings of the words containing the same constituent (e.g., butter in “butterfingers”, or “buttermilk”) may or may not be consistent. Estimating semantic transparency of a constituent is usually difficult and subjective because o...

A three layer back propagation neural net is set up to determine the dependence between the semantic class of a bisyllabic Chinese word and its two characters. Simulations were performed using a three–layer back–propagation neural net (BPNN) with various combinations of inputs. The inputs are (1) semantic classes of the characters, (2) Entropy of the characters and (3) semantic strengths [1] of...

There is a rise in interest in the evaluation of meaning in real-life applications, e.g., for assessing the content of short answers. The approaches typically use a combination of shallow and deep representations, but little use is made of the semantic formalisms created by theoretical linguists to represent meaning. In this paper, we explore the use of the underspecified semantic formalism LRS...

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation language used to capture the meaning of English sentences. In this work, we propose an AMR parser based on dependency parse rewrite rules. This approach transfers dependency parses into AMRs by integrating the syntactic dependencies, semantic arguments, named entity and co-reference information. A dependency parse to AMR graph a...

What is needed to enable communication about observation and measurement results in information systems? Information system ontologies make a certain conceptualization explicit and partially account for the meanings of symbols associated with this conceptualization. Yet, the meaning of symbols denoting observation results such as /100m/, /328ft/ or /deep/ cannot be specified with currently avai...

The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared, formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected) semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned translations...

I argue that there are two ways of construing Wittgenstein’s slogan that meaning is use. One accepts the view that the notion of meaning must be explained in terms of truth-theoretic notions and is committed to the epistemic conception of truth. The other keeps the notion of meaning and the truth-theoretic notions apart and is not committed to the epistemic conception of truth. I argue that Dum...

Arabic language is very rich in derivations, vocabulary, and grammatical structures. The problem of determining the correct meaning of a word in a non-vowelized Arabic sentence is not a trivial task since Arabic is very rich in the polysemy phenomena. This paper attempts to reveal the word sense ambiguity, by building a semantic parser powered by a statistical semantic analyzer, which may aid i...