In data-oriented language processing, an annotated language corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new sentence is constructed by combining fragments from the corpus in the most probable way. This approach has been successfully used for syntactic analysis , using corpora with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Tree-bank. If a corpus with semantically annotat...

This paper describes AUTOSEM, a robust semantic interpretation framework that can operate both at parse time and repair time. The evaluation demonstrates that AUTOSEM achieves a high level of robustness efficiently and without requiring any hand coded knowledge dedicated to repair. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n In order for an approach to robust interpretation to be practical it must be efficient, ...

The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three...

The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. Minimal Attachment Frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain & Steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution proce...

References included in multi-document summaries are often problematic. In this paper, we present a corpus study performed to derive a statistical model for the syntactic realization of referential expressions. The interpretation of the probabilistic data helps us gain insight on how extractive summaries can be rewritten in an efficient manner to produce more fluent and easy-to-read text.

We present a new approach to learning a semantic parser (a system that maps natural language sentences into logical form). Unlike previous methods, it exploits an existing syntactic parser to produce disambiguated parse trees that drive the compositional semantic interpretation. The resulting system produces improved results on standard corpora on natural language interfaces for database queryi...

The complexity of the subsumption problem in description logics can vary widely with the choice of the syntactic fragment and the semantic interpretation. In this paper we show that the constructive semantics of concept descriptions, which includes the classical descriptive semantics as a special case, offers exponential speed-up in the existentialdisjunctive fragment UL of ALC.

An analysis that defines predicates for Wordnet verb classes and links them to semantic interpretation is presented. The selectional restrictions for the thematic roles defining the predicates are WordNet ontological categories. Thematic roles are also linked to the syntactic relations that realize them. The paper illustrates the methodology by providing a detailed analysis of some major WordNe...

In this paper we put forward a new hypothesis on compositionality of meaning, namely that compositionality is bidirectional optimization. Underspecification approaches to natural language interpretation generally start with an underspecified or weak meaning, which is strengthened by contextual information. In contrast, the bidirectional optimization approach we advocate proceeds from the strong...