The overall goal of our work is to build a dependency grammar-based human sentence processor for Hindi. As a first step towards this end, in this paper we present a dependency grammar that is motivated by psycholinguistic concerns. We describe the components of the grammar that have been automatically induced using a Hindi dependency treebank. We relate some aspects of the grammar to relevant i...

This paper explores the usefulness of a technique from software engineering, code instrumentation, for the development of large-scale natural language grammars. Information about the usage of grammar rules in test and corpus sentences is used to improve grammar and testsuite, as well as adapting a grammar to a specific genre. Results show that less than half of a large-coverage grammar for Germ...

Abstract Construction Semantics (CxS) uses FrameNet frames to capture the semantic properties of grammatical constructions. It closes a gap between Frame and usage-based Grammar as well providing uniform format implement into constructicographic work. This article provides an overview three core features CxS. Starting point is (i) modeling associated with constructions in terms types frames. ma...

Deaf people have serious problems to access information due to their inherent difficulties to deal with spoken and written languages. This work tries to address this problem by proposing a solution for automatic generation and insertion of sign language video tracks into captioned digital multimedia content. Our solution can process a subtitle stream and generate the sign language track in real...

This thesis is two fold. The first part deals with an existence proof of a formal algorithm that takes a narrative discourse and returns its semantic representation in the Event Calculus (EC from now on) [19]. This algorithm uses Discourse Representation Theory, and takes on the form of a translation from Discourse Representation Structures to Scenarios and Integrity Constraints in EC. The seco...

Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a “donor” language to a “recipient” language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and—in contrast to cognate relationships—borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated lang...

Relation between gender and language has been studied by many authors, however, there is still some uncertainty left regarding gender influence on language usage in the professional environment. Often, the studied data sets are too small or texts of individual authors are too short in order to capture differences of language usage wrt gender successfully. This study draws from a larger corpus o...

The proposed thesis research addresses two of the main obstacles to building agents that communicate using natural language: the need for richer representations of linguistic constructions that incorporate aspects of conceptual knowledge, context and goals; and the need for a principled approach to the automatic acquisition of such structures from examples. More generally, it explores the idea ...

We present Embodied Construction Grammar, a formalism for linguistic analysis designed specifically for integration into a simulation-based model of language understanding. As in other construction grammars, linguistic constructions serve to map between phonological forms and conceptual representations. In the model we describe, however, conceptual representations are also constrained to be gro...