This dissertation examines the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Much recent work in argument realization is based on some notion of “prominence preservation,” wherein the morphosyntactic prominence of an argument in the clause (e.g. its grammatical relation) supposedly reflects its prominence in the meaning of the clause. I explore prominence preservation as it applies to crossli...

A hallmark of human language is that we combine lexical building blocks retrieved from memory in endless new ways. This combinatorial aspect of language is referred to as unification. Here we focus on the neurobiological infrastructure for syntactic and semantic unification. Unification is characterized by a high-speed temporal profile including both prediction and integration of retrieved lexi...

The paper presents an expansion of the verb model for plWordNet – the wordnet of Polish. A modified system of constitutive features (register, aspect and verb classes), synset and lexical relations is presented. A special attention is given to the proposed new relations and changes in the verb classification. We discuss also the results of its verification by application to the description of a...

We present a hybrid method for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Chinese restaurant reviews. Two main components are employed so as to extract feature-opinion pairs in the proposed method: domain independent language patterns found in Chinese and a lexical base built for restaurant reviews. The language patterns focus on the general knowledge which is implicit contained in Chinese, thus can be...

A crucial aspect of everyday conversational interactions is our ability to establish and maintain common ground. Understanding the relevant mechanisms involved in such social coordination remains an important challenge for cognitive science. While common ground is often discussed in very general terms, different contexts of interaction are likely to afford different coordination mechanisms. In ...

During monitoring of the discourse, the detection of the relevance of incoming lexical information could be critical for its incorporation to update mental representations in memory. Because, in these situations, the relevance for lexical information is defined by abstract rules that are maintained in memory, a central aspect to elucidate is how an abstract level of knowledge maintained in mind...

After a moderate head injury a 33-year-old woman presented a selective defect in finding verbs and name actions. Objects, colors, body parts, and qualities were named in a normal way. No other associated aphasic defects were observed. It was proposed that the selection and use of verbs in their correct forms implies two different aspects, which eventually can become dissociated: (1) the ability...

Lexical chunks have in recent years become widely recognized as a crucial aspect of second language competence. We address two major sorts of challenge that chunks pose for lexicography and describe computational approaches to addressing these challenges. The first challenge is lexical knowledge discovery, that is, the need to uncover which strings of words constitute chunks worthy of learners’...

Creation of pronunciation lexicons for speech recognition is widely acknowledged to be an important, but labor-intensive, aspect of system development. Lexicons are often manually created and make use of knowledge and expertise that is difficult to codify. In this paper we describe our American English lexicon developed primarily for the ARPA WSJ/NAB tasks. The lexicon is phonemically represent...

Contrasting meaning is a basic aspect of semantics. Recent word-embedding models based on distributional semantics hypothesis are known to be weak for modeling lexical contrast. We present in this paper the embedding models that achieve an F-score of 92% on the widely-used, publicly available dataset, the GRE “most contrasting word” questions (Mohammad et al., 2008). This is the highest perform...