There has been a surge of interest in Computational Linguistics in word sense disambiguation (WSD). A major catalyst has been the SENSEVAL evaluation exercises which have provided standard datasets for the field over the past decade. Whilst researchers believe that WSD will ultimately prove useful for applications which need some degree of semantic interpretation, the jury is still out on this ...

The variety of interpretations exhibited by sentences with reciprocals is a longstanding challenge for semantic and pragmatic theories. This puzzle is related to some hard questions about the interpretation of plural predicates in general. In this paper we study the implications of relations between reciprocity and plurality for the account of reciprocals in Dalrymple et al. (1994). It will be ...

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms . An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms . Reinte...

This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Nove...

Our interpretation of the information obtainable from a dialogue is beyond that which can be directly derived from the lexical content. Grosz and Sidner (1986) and Hobbs et al (1993) use this in their resprective theories of discourse interpretation where the information expressed in the discourse is modelled using the cognitive states of the discourse participants to capture the processing of ...

(2) a. Sentences are composed by putting their constituents together step by step, with no subsequent rearrangement; b. Not only each lexical item but also each rule of composition is assigned an explicit interpretation; c. Interpretation is given in terms of model theory: the denotation conditions of expressions are defined relative to a mathematical construct which, loosely speaking, models t...

The present paper focuses on the segmentation of two-word phrases containing two closely competing lexical hypotheses. It is hypothesized that the bottom-up information, which also includes a mechanism called the Possible-Word Constraint, is explored first in segmenting these phrases. Non-sensory sentential information influences this process at a later stage and only shows an effect if the bot...

Aptness is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of issues in the interpretation and generation of creative metaphor. In this paper we concentrate on one of these issues – the notion of lexical systematicity – and explore its role in ascertaining the coherence of creative metaphor relative to the structure of the target concept being described. We argue that all else being equal, the most ap...

When deriving the meanings of individual words, children must also discern the relations among words. To ascertain how children interpret such relations, we taught twelve 2-year-olds novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Although we never specified the relations among words, children's interpretation of the relations was mediated by the similarity of the objects. For dissimilar ...

Verbal and compositional lexical aspect provide the underlying temporal structure of events. Knowledge of lexical aspect, e.g., (a)telicity, is therefore required for interpreting event sequences in discourse (Dowty, 1986; Moens and Steedman, 1988; Passoneau, 1988), interfacing to temporal databases (Androutsopoulos, 1996), processing temporal modifiers (Antonisse, 1994), describing allowable a...