ed, namely, the property of being called yesterday by Mary, which can be roughly rendered as λx.yesterday(called x) m. What makes continuations essential? The semantic continuation identified in (2) is what the quantifier everyone takes for its semantic argument, its ‘nuclear scope’. In general, identifying the semantic argument of a scope-taking expression is the same thing as identifying (one...

Can we do text analysis without phrase structure? We think the answer could be positive. In this paper we outline the basics of an underlying theory which yields hierarchical structure as the result of more abstract principles relating to the combinatorial properties of linguistic units. We discuss the nature of these properties and illustrate our model with examples.

The use of examples as the basis for machine translation systems has gained considerable acceptance since the original proposal of Nagao in 1984. In this short book, Jones first reviews the fundamental principles of example-based machine translation (EBMT) in order to then introduce the specific mechanisms of his model. The key characteristic of this model is its purely stochastic processing, w...

This paper introduces a special programming environment for the definition of grammars and for the implementation of corresponding parsers. In natural language processing systems it is advantageous to have linguistic knowledge and processing mechanisms separated. Our environment accepts grammars consisting of binary dependency relations and grammatical functions. Well-formed expressions of func...

Modern conversational user interfaces depend on natural language understanding (NLU) engines, but integrating these capabilities creates a new category of engineering challenges. Developers write verbose, unsafe code to intermediate between NLU services and application logic, and ambiguous parses further complicate handling. We present a DSL for configuring an NLU model that ensures consistency...

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits lin...

We present a formal description of a logical language that is based on a propositional semantic network. Variables in this language are not atomic and have potentially complex structure. We start from the individual components of a semantic network system, atomic nodes and relations that connect nodes, and provide a complete speci cation for the structure of nodes and a subsumption procedure be...

During software maintenance, programmers spend a lot of time on code comprehension. Reading comments is an effective way for programmers to reduce the reading and navigating time when comprehending source code. Therefore, as a critical task in software engineering, code summarization aims to generate brief natural language descriptions for source code. In this paper, we propose a new code summa...

Computer programs for the analysis of human behaviour captured in multimedia data format commonly provide mechanisms to describe the behaviour recorded. Yet these programs do not satisfactorily fulfil the need for a description mechanism which allows the production of rich descriptions of behaviour in a flexible way and which facilitates the correct and complete retrieval of descriptions accord...