This paper describes ROSA, a software reuse system based on the processing of the natural language descriptions of software artifacts. Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of software descriptions is performed to automatically extract both verbal and nominal phrases from descriptions and use this information to create frame-based indexing units for software components. Retrieval similarity ...

Since the adoption of Abney’s (1987) influential proposal that noun phrases are (at most) DPs, the hypothesis that not all noun phrases in all languages are DPs has been widely debated. A particularly interesting case in this respect is presented by Slavic languages lacking overt articles such as Russian or Serbo-Croatian: are noun phrases in such languages ever DPs, always DPs, or sometimes DP...

We report three eye-movement experiments and an antecedent choice task investigating the interpretation of reflexives in different syntactic contexts. This included contexts in which the reflexive and a local antecedent were coarguments of the same verbal predicate (John heard that the soldier had injured himself), and also so-called picture noun phrases, either with a possessor (John heard abo...

In his recent article Deutscher (2009: 199) suggests that “nominalization is an unsung hero in the story of subordination”. He goes on to say that “[t]he ability to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is the core of subordination”. While Deutscher (2009) believes that the relevant nominalization for his study is “deri...

Different functions can be performed by probability phrases such as: ‘it is probable/possible/likely that x.’ Mainly, speakers may communicate a vague judgment about the likelihood of event x, or they may wish the recipient to focus on reasons for the occurrence of event x. We argue that there is another communicative function which has yet to be documented, namely, the facemanagement function....

Recent considerations in opinion mining, oriented by real applicative tasks, require creating lexical and semantic resources quantitatively and qualitatively rich. In this context, we present a method to automatically enhance a lexicon of subjective terms. The method relies on the indexing of Web documents by a search engine and large number of requests automatically sent. The construction of t...

Statistically-based phrase extractors are fundamental tools for the improvement of Natural Language Processing applications designed for the new languages of the emerging countries. In this context, we will present a new architecture called SENTA (Software for the Extraction of N-ary Textual Associations) that identifies verbal phrases from lemmatized corpora. In particular, SENTA proposes a so...