Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity pdf

The problem of semantic interpretation is where one user may view d as e, with complete certainty, while another user may view d as e, also with complete certainty. Parallelism and competition in syntactic ambiguity resolution. There are two types of ambiguity syntactic and semantic ambiguities. Yet natural language contains enough redundancy so that, in context, the. Reviewed by salvatore attardo, english department, youngstown state univer sity, youngstown, oh 44555, usa. Cognitive processes in understanding metaphor part 2, empirical studies of the arts 1, 125141. Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are possible. Prosodic resolution of prepositional phrase ambiguity in. A formal inference engine, though important, can be effectively used for representing and solving reasoning tasks only if its basic notions have clear meaning allowing to discern them. Pp attachment ambiguity resolution with corpusbased pattern distributions and lexical signaturese nuria gala1 and mathieu lafourcade2, nonmembers abstract we propose a method mixing unsupervised learning of lexical pattern frequencies with semantic information which aims at improving the resolution of pp attachment ambiguity. Assuming that the correct parse tree is the one made of the most probable constituents to greatly. Pdf carrier phase ambiguity resolution for the global. Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure underlying the word order therein.

Graeme hirst, semantic interpretation and the resolution. The sed in turn uses the polaroid word mechanism to investigate the consequences of tentative decisions. Thus, given d and no semantic ambiguity, we know that the rule if e then h, either will or will not be executed for all users. The word or term communication has also attracted myriad of definitions from experts in variousrelated field hence, little 1983 describes it as a chameleon of a word changing the. Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no difficulty coping with it.

The parser interrogates a process known as the semantic enquiry desk sed to resolve two kinds of structural ambiguity. Binot, disambiguating prepositional phrase attachments by using. Alexander bochman, in handbook of the history of logic, 2007. But it is not infallible, however, as example 1 demonstrates.

The neural underpinnings of semantic ambiguity and anaphora. We saw her duck is offered as an example of semantic ambiguity, with two possible readings. Thus, semantic interpretation does not include the resolu tion in context of anaphors or definite reference, or of deictic or indexical expressions, or the recognition and comprehension of speech acts, irony and. The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with lack of. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity guide books. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. The idea is to have semantic objects that can handle partially resolved ambiguity just as a polaroid picture develops slowly and update their ambiguity resolution on the basis of the surrounding words. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities. In sum, the problem of lexical ambiguity can indeed serve as a touchstone by which theories of language analysis can be assessed.

An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same. These results allow a more precise account of how the neural and cognitive processes that are involved in ambiguity resolution contribute to the appreciation of jokes that depend on semantic ambiguity. Examining semantic processing in sentential contexts. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme. Syntactic ambiguity resolution 531 in sla literature. The paper analyzes some forms of linguistic ambiguity in english in a specific register, i. In fact, the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious.

Various linguists have however, identified lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, phonetic or phonological ambiguity and semantic ambiguity as types of ambiguity. Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Even after the syntax and the meanings of the individual words have been resolved, there are two ways of reading the sentence. Dussias thepennsylvaniastateuniversity this study investigates whether proficient second language l2 speakers of spanish and english use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences con. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful contextdependent interpretations. Lucy owns a parrot that is larger than a cat, a parrot is extenstensionally quantified, a cat is either universally quantified or. In some cases, listener are consciously aware of ambiguity in an expression. Semantic ambiguity is a word that has more than one meaning. Structual ambiguity and conceptural information retrieval. Fifty thousand words of the corpus have been parsed by hand, and this has been used to make a table of the relative frequencies of different syntactic constructions. My claim is that it is the latter, and that the syntactic processing module is a very simple device which blindly and faithfully constructs all possible analyses for the sentence up. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity sciencedirect. Pp attachment ambiguity resolution with corpusbased.

A new approach to semantic interpretation in natural language understanding is. Syntactic ambiguity is the phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or meanings due to different phrase structure analysis. There, the result of semantic interpretation is an expression of an. 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. In this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. Ambiguity ambiguity can bedefined as a word, phrase or sentence that has more than one meaning or interpretation. Semantic interpretation constitutes one of the main components of a viable reasoning system, monotonic or not. The role of verification strategies in semantic ambiguity. Ambiguity and ambiguity resolution in ways of lexical and structural forms, has fascinated the attention of many researchers, especially in the field of psycholinguistics, computational. Pdf semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity.

In particular, the focus of the research is on examples of lexical and syntactic ambiguity that result in sources of voluntary or involuntary humor. Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution maryellen c. Seidenberg ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Moreover, activity in these regions correlated with the subjective ratings of funniness of the presented material. The sed in turn uses the polaroid word mechanism to investigate the. The study is based on a corpus of 5 verbally ambiguous headlines found on web sites presenting humorous bits. Pdf semantic interpretation and ambiguity graeme hirst. In a study of syntactic ambiguity resolution in adult l2 speakers, frenck. One longstanding controversy is which of these two modules bears responsibility for the immediate resolution of ambiguity. Only when participants were required to actively resolve emotionally ambiguous sentences during training did changes in interpretation emerge at test. The role of verification strategies in semantic ambiguity resolution in children and adults stacey conroy this dissertation investigates the contributions of the parser and extralinguistic information in the selection of a final interpretation of scopally ambiguous strings, integrating data from both children and adults into our understanding. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity.

Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical. A more correct approach is due to landsbergen and scha 8 and implemented in the phliqa1 sys tem. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst department of computer science, university of toronto the right of the university of. Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. These findings suggest that cbmi achieves its effects by altering a production rule that aids the selection of a single meaning from alternatives, in line with an ambiguity resolution account. This model predicts no processing disruption due to syntactic ambiguity during the ambiguous region itself, as only a single structure is ever completely built. Reliable information about the coronavirus covid19 is available from the world health organization current situation, international travel. Some researchers prefer the term semantic ambiguity as this makes it. The term ambiguity is used to describe a word, a phrase or a sentence with a multiple meanings. Semantic interpretation an overview sciencedirect topics. However, it departs from the pseudo semantic transfer approach in the sense that contextual information is integrated into both the.

This sentence is perfectly grammatical, as is evident when it appears in the following context. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity department of computer. Mainstream sentenceprocessing research is largely inter. Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no diffculty coping with it. They found that these regions were more active when viewing semantically ambiguous chinese characters than when viewing semantically precise chinese characters. Granting such an organization of knowledge, portability of semantic interpretation schemata across different domains. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity karen sparck. The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. Ambiguity is one of linguistic expressions so,it is not something.

Most studies differentiate between lexical and structural ambiguity, with the former referring to ambiguity conveyed through polysemous wordshomophonous strings and the latter to phenomena of ambiguous word order, referential ambiguity, prepositional phrase attachment e. Scope ambiguity results for sentences that contain more than one quantifier, such as all, every, one, a, and some. The question is whether l2 speakers use the same set of constraints, rules. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in l2 learners some effects of bilinguality on l1 and l2 processing strategies paolae. Lexical ambiguity jennifer rodd department of experimental.

Concerning the semantically referentialcontext effect on ambiguity resolution, the collected data revealed that context played a crucial role in the processing of scope ambiguity since the rts for acontextualized. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, cambridge. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity 3 semantic interpreter. Numerous and frequentlyupdated resource results are available from this search. Oclcs webjunction has pulled together information and resources to assist library staff as they consider how to handle. A generalized probabilistic semantic model for ambiguity resolution article pdf available june 1992 with 53 reads how we measure reads. Hirst, semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, cambridge university press, 1987. Kuno, 1965, much of the structural ambiguity of the sentence stems from the partofspeech ambiguity of the words time, flies, and like, which in turn reflects their semantic ambiguity. However earlier the article has lexical ambiguity is contrasted semantic ambiguity.