Lexical Semantics And Knowledge Representation In Multilingual Sentence Generation Microform

In knowledge-based natural language generation, issues of formal knowledge representation meet with the linguistic problems of choosing the most appropriate verbalization in a particular situation of utterance. Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation in Multilingual Text Generation presents a new approach to systematically linking the realms of lexical semantics and knowledge represented in a description logic. For language generation from such abstract representations, lexicalization is taken as the central step: when choosing words that cover the various parts of the content representation, the principal decisions on conveying the intended meaning are made. A preference mechanism is used to construct the utterance that is best tailored to parameters representing the context. Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation in Multilingual Text Generation develops the means for systematically deriving a set of paraphrases from the same underlying representation with the emphasis on events and verb meaning. Furthermore, the same mapping mechanism is used to achieve multilingual generation: English and German output are produced in parallel, on the basis of an adequate division between language-neutral and language-specific (lexical and grammatical) knowledge. Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation in Multilingual Text Generation provides detailed insights into designing the representations and organizing the generation process. Readers with a background in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, knowledge representation, linguistics, or natural language processing will find a model of language production that can be adapted to a variety of purposes.

Natural Language is not only the most important means of communication between human beings, it is also used over historical periods for the pres- vation of cultural achievements and their transmission from one generation to the other. During the last few decades, the ?ood of digitalized information has been growing tremendously. This tendency will continue with the globali- tion of information societies and with the growing importance of national and international computer networks. This is one reason why the theoretical und- standing and the automated treatment of communication processes based on natural language have such a decisive social and economic impact. In this c- text, the semantic representation of knowledge originally formulated in natural language plays a central part, because it connects all components of natural language processing systems, be they the automatic understanding of natural language (analysis), the rational reasoning over knowledge bases, or the g- eration of natural language expressions from formal representations. This book presents a method for the semantic representation of natural l- guage expressions (texts, sentences, phrases, etc. ) which can be used as a u- versal knowledge representation paradigm in the human sciences, like lingu- tics, cognitive psychology, or philosophy of language, as well as in com- tational linguistics and in arti?cial intelligence. It is also an attempt to close the gap between these disciplines, which to a large extent are still working separately.

This book conveys the fundamentals of Linked Lexical Knowledge Bases (LLKB) and sheds light on their different aspects from various perspectives, focusing on their construction and use in natural language processing (NLP). It characterizes a wide range of both expert-based and collaboratively constructed lexical knowledge bases. Only basic familiarity with NLP is required and this book has been written for both students and researchers in NLP and related fields who are interested in knowledge-based approaches to language analysis and their applications. Lexical Knowledge Bases (LKBs) are indispensable in many areas of natural language processing, as they encode human knowledge of language in machine readable form, and as such, they are required as a reference when machines attempt to interpret natural language in accordance with human perception. In recent years, numerous research efforts have led to the insight that to make the best use of available knowledge, the orchestrated exploitation of different LKBs is necessary. This allows us to not only extend the range of covered words and senses, but also gives us the opportunity to obtain a richer knowledge representation when a particular meaning of a word is covered in more than one resource. Examples where such an orchestrated usage of LKBs proved beneficial include word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling, semantic parsing, and text classification. This book presents different kinds of automatic, manual, and collaborative linkings between LKBs. A special chapter is devoted to the linking algorithms employing text-based, graph-based, and joint modeling methods. Following this, it presents a set of higher-level NLP tasks and algorithms, effectively utilizing the knowledge in LLKBs. Among them, you will find advanced methods, e.g., distant supervision, or continuous vector space models of knowledge bases (KB), that have become widely used at the time of this book's writing. Finally, multilingual applications of LLKB's, such as cross-lingual semantic relatedness and computer-aided translation are discussed, as well as tools and interfaces for exploring LLKBs, followed by conclusions and future research directions.

"Recent work on formal methods in computational lexical semantics has had theeffect of bringing many linguistic formalisms much closer to the knowledge representation languages used in artificial intelligence. Formalisms are now emerging which may be more expressive and formally better understood than many knowledge representation languages. The interests of computational linguists now extend to include such domains as commonsense knowledge, inheritance, default reasoning, collocational relations, and even domain knowledge. With such an extension of the normal purview of "linguistic" knowledge, one may question whether there is any logical justification for distinguishing between lexical semantics and commonsense reasoning. This volume explores the question from several methodologicaland theoretical perspectives. What emerges is a clear consensus that the notion of the lexicon and lexical knowledge assumed in earlier linguistic research is grossly inadequate and fails to address the deeper semantic issues required for natural language analysis."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.

This volume is a selection of papers presented at a workshop entitled Predicative Forms in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases organized in Toulouse in August 1996. A predicate is a named relation that exists among one or more arguments. In natural language, predicates are realized as verbs, prepositions, nouns and adjectives, to cite the most frequent ones. Research on the identification, organization, and semantic representa tion of predicates in artificial intelligence and in language processing is a very active research field. The emergence of new paradigms in theoretical language processing, the definition of new problems and the important evol ution of applications have, in fact, stimulated much interest and debate on the role and nature of predicates in naturallangage. From a broad theoret ical perspective, the notion of predicate is central to research on the syntax semantics interface, the generative lexicon, the definition of ontology-based semantic representations, and the formation of verb semantic classes. From a computational perspective, the notion of predicate plays a cent ral role in a number of applications including the design of lexical knowledge bases, the development of automatic indexing systems for the extraction of structured semantic representations, and the creation of interlingual forms in machine translation.

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, and computer algorithms and architecture. Research programs whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored. Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerized lexicons for the automatic treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects.