Semantic Interpretation And The Resolution Of Ambiguity

Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. While parsing techniques have been greatly improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally improved in recent years, the approach to semantics has generally been ad hoc and had little theoretical basis. Graeme Hirst offers a new, theoretically motivated foundation for conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of lexical and syntactic ambiguities. His approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on research in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, montague semantics, and cognitive psychology.

Resolving Semantic Ambiguity arrrays the work of leading theorists on the issues surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ambiguous text. The chapters are organized around three major themes: (1) retrieval, (2) representation of words, and (3) text as a context. The book offers a number of new challenges to the role of context in language processing, some striking new evidence on the repetition of homographs in different contexts, and new approaches to resolution capable of being incorporated into either modular or network models. In several papers the problem of ambiguity is extended to include the problem of weak ambiguity and understanding text themes. The book provides a unique starting point for researchers approaching the problems of meaning in cognitive science, psychology, and computational linguistics.

The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself. A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Fremdsprachliche Philologien), course: Proseminar Semantics, language: English, abstract: "Ambiguity is pervasive at all levels of analysis. It has been, is, and is likely to remain the key problem in natural language processing." (Gadzar 1993:161) This statement by Gerald Gadzar expresses the necessity to cope with the challenge of ambiguity resolution. As the phenomenon of ambiguity is widespread in human language, an interesting question would be: How could a machine be able to handle ambiguity while even humans have difficulties in solving such problems? This paper will first define the phenomenon of ambiguity and explain the different types of it. An interesting aspect will be the effect of garden path sentences.

In the winter of 1993-1994, essays were commissioned on the topic of ambiguity and underspecification. All papers received were subjected to a thorough review process. The present volume, comprising ten self-contained papers and an introductory chapter, is the result. Natural language is known for the ambiguity of its expressions. Whereas artificial forms of communication tend to be designed in such a way that ambiguity is reduced to a minimum, natural language is ambiguous at various 'levels' of interpretation. At a low (e.g., speech recognition) level, a signal can be ambiguous between various utterances; at a higher (semantic) level, a fully recognised utterance can be used to express various different propositions; and at an even higher (pragmatic) level, a proposition may be used for various different purposes. The present volume focuses on ambiguities of the second kind, which are sometimes called semantic ambiguities, or mostly just ambiguities, when there is no likelihood of confusion.

This collection of especially commissioned papers presents state of the art research on semantics, pragmatics, presupposition, negation, existence, utterance semantics, metaphor, erotetic reasoning, lexical meaning, the pragmatics of number terms, theories of truth and Moore's Paradox.

Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge provides information pertinent to the theory and applications of semantic networks. This book deals with issues in knowledge representation, which discusses theoretical topics independent of particular implementations. Organized into three parts encompassing 19 chapters, this book begins with an overview of semantic network structure for representing knowledge as a pattern of interconnected nodes and arcs. This text then analyzes the concepts of subsumption and taxonomy and synthesizes a framework that integrates many previous approaches and goes beyond them to provide an account of abstract and partially defines concepts. Other chapters consider formal analyses, which treat the methods of reasoning with semantic networks and their computational complexity. This book discusses as well encoding linguistic knowledge. The final chapter deals with a formal approach to knowledge representation that builds on ideas originating outside the artificial intelligence literature in research on foundations for programming languages. This book is a valuable resource for mathematicians.