This short paper presents a system developed at the Université Paris 13 for the Semeval 2007 Metonymy Resolution Task (task #08, location name track; see Markert and Nissim, 2007). The system makes use of plain word forms only. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of this minimalist approach, compare it to a more complex one which uses both syntactic and semantic features, and discuss its us...

When learning to program, students often mistakenly refer to an element that is structurally related to the element that they intend to reference. For example, they may indicate the attribute of an object when their intention is to reference the whole object. This paper examines these reference-point errors through the context of metonymy. Metonymy is a rhetorical device where the speaker state...

Named entities are frequently used in a metonymic manner. They serve as references to related entities such as people and organisations. Accurate identification and interpretation of metonymy can be directly beneficial to various NLP applications, such as Named Entity Recognition and Geographical Parsing. Until now, metonymy resolution (MR) methods mainly relied on parsers, taggers, dictionarie...

We address the problem of interpretation of logical metonymy using a statistical method. Previous approaches to logical metonymy produce interpretations in the form of verb senses, whereas our definition of the interpretation is a cluster of verb senses. Such a class-based computational model of logical metonymy is novel and more informative than the previous ones. It also complies with the lin...

It is quite common in everyday language to hear sentences like (1)"I am parked out back" or (2)"He has a Picasso in his den". We can also easily imagine a situation where a waitress, speaking about a customer, says: (3)"The ham sandwich is at table 7" or a situation where a customer hands his key to an attendant at a parking lot and says: (4)"This is parked out back". All these expressions, (1)...

Metonymy, like metaphor, has received much attention in cognitive linguistics literature (Croft, 1993; Kövecses & Radden, 1998; Panther & Radden, 1999). Most experimental work focuses on comprehension. However, why a speaker would choose to produce a metonym in some cases and not others is not fully understood. Connectionist models are well-suited to deal with the partialsemantic/partial-syntac...

Most direct reference theorists believe that ‘I’ is a pure indexical. This means that when ‘I’ is uttered, it contributes with the speaker to what is said. But, from some conceptions of metonymy as reference transfer, if ‘I’ is used metonymically, it has an improper meaning and the object referred to is not the speaker. We will show that all theories of metonymy as transfer are inadequate and s...

Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers which offer a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information....