The paper presents a proof-theoretic semantics for sentences headed by transitive verbs allowing an unexpressed (implicit) object. Such sentences are shown to have the same (proof-theoretic) meaning as the same sentences with an explicit existentially quantified object something. This semantics is contrasted with a model-theoretic semantics based on truthconditions in models. The models used co...

One of the components of a dialog system is the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component. This component accepts natural language text, and returns the meaning of that text, in some formal application-specific meaning representation. One of the difficulties in building NLU components is the variability in natural language the many different ways by which a human can express the same meani...

When irregular verbs are semantically extended or used in novel ways, speakers often find the-ed past tense more natural than the irregular past tense, as in Ross Perot thought he couldn't be sound-bited. Speakers' preference for-ed with denominal verbs like sound-bited is consistent with the predictions of formal grammatical theory. Many theorists regard this as support for the relevance of th...

In this paper, we argue that contemporary approaches of constructionalist syntax in which there is no generative lexicon provide an interface between formal and conceptual semantics with which the gap between formal and conceptual semantics can be bridged. We introduce the framework with the discussion of formal and conceptual aspects of meaning in German spatial denominal prefixand particle ve...

Dependable IT-systems [11] of relevant size can only be built if all dependability attributes have a clear meaning. This meaning must be consistent both with the common understanding of the people building and using the ITsystem, and with the tools they use and the development process they adhere to. Therefore, a formal meaning of all dependability attributes is needed which is compatible with ...

Valency refers to the capacity of verb (or a word belonging to another part of speech) to take a specific number and type of syntactically dependent language units. Valency information is thus related to particular lexemes and as such it is necessary to describe valency characteristics for separate lexemes in the form of lexicon entries. A valency lexicon is indispensable for any complex Natura...

In this paperwe propose away to dealwith natural language inference (NLI) by implementing Modern Type Theoretical Semantics in the proof assistant Coq. The paper is a first attempt to deal with NLI and natural language reasoning in general by using the proof assistant technology. Valid NLIs are treated as theorems and as such the adequacy of our account is tested by trying to prove them. We use...

Manually performed treebanking is an expensive effort compared with automatic annotation. In return, manual treebanking is generally believed to provide higherquality/value syntactic annotation than automatic methods. Unfortunately, there is little or no empirical evidence for or against this belief, though arguments have been voiced for the high degree of subjectivity in other levels of lingui...

Similarity between words is becoming a generic problem for many applications of computational linguistics, and computing word similarities is determined by word representations. Inspired by the analogies between words and lymphocytes, a lymphocyte-style word representation is proposed. The word representation is built on the basis of dependency syntax of sentences and represent word context as ...