My recent and ongoing research is focused on the interpretation of referring expressions (e.g. she, Rosa, that woman, the woman we talked about yesterday) as a window on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Referring expressions have attracted a great deal of interest in fields concerned with linguistic meaning, including semantics, psycholinguistics, and the philosophy of language, because they...

This paper is an attempt to clarify the status of discourse markers. These lexical expressions have been studied under various labels, including discourse markers, discourse connectives, discourse operators, pragmatic connectives, sentence connectives, and cue phrases. Although most researchers agree that they are expressions which relate discourse segments, there is no agreement on how they ar...

This article introduces an unsupervised word sense disambiguation algorithm that is inspired by the lexical attraction models of Yuret (1998). It is based on the assumption that the meanings of the words that form a sentence can be best assigned by constructing an interpretation of the whole sentence. This interpretation is facilitated by a dependency-like context specification of a content wor...

In this study we address the question of how lexical selection is achieved by bilingual speakers during speech production. Speci®cally, we test whether there is competition between the two lexicons of a bilingual during lexical access. In two picture±word interference experiments we explore the performance of two groups of bilinguals, English±Spanish and Spanish±English pro®cient bilinguals whi...

Horizontal redundancy is inherent to lex-ica consisting of descriptions of fully formed objects. This causes an unwelcome expansion of the lexical database and increases parsing time. To eliminate it, direct relations between descriptions of fully formed objects are often deened. These are additional to the (Typed Multiple) Inheritance Network which already structures the lexicon. Many implemen...

Naturalness and flexibility of the dialogue between users and multimodal systems can produce more than one interpretation and consequently ambiguities. This chapter deals the problem to correctly recognize user input for enabling a natural interaction. In particular, it analyses approaches that have to cope with issues connected to the interpretation process, dividing them into recognition-base...

This paper presents an account of the interpretation of unmarked verb forms in which the entries of unmarked forms are uniformly unspecified for agreement features. The entries of impersonal verbs directly sanction agreement-neutral syntagmatic structures. However, the entries of unmarked personal verbs sanction structures with negative agreement values, as a consequence of an inflectional bloc...

General natural dialogue processing requires large amounts of domain knowledge as well as linguistic knowledge in order to ensure acceptable coverage and understanding. There are several ways of integrating lexical resources (e.g. dictionaries, thesauri) and knowledge bases or ontologies at different levels of dialogue processing. We concentrate in this paper on how to exploit domain knowledge ...

It is explicitly or implicitly stated in many scholarly works on proper names that the linguistic status of these lexical items “odd” (étrange). Their odd nature due to several factors, such as their functional propensity correlate with a single referent, lack conceptual meaning, morphological invariability, inability be clearly differentiated from common unambiguous and generally accepted crit...

this article studies the generative grammar approach and some other theories driven from it to lexicon and lexical entries. generative grammar is known as a syntax-based theory, so some aspects of language which have been studied in this theory may have been ignored in other theories. this article shows that more attention has been given to lexicon and lexical entries since 50s. we may claim th...