Related papers: Deverbal semantics and the Montagovian generative …
Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches to meaning. More specifically, proposals have been put forward to augment formal semantic machinery with…
We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…
Accounts of semantic phenomena often involve extending types of meanings and revising composition rules at the same time. The concept of monads allows many such accounts -- for intensionality, variable binding, quantification and focus --…
This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…
We here explore a ``fully'' lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse that takes the basic elements of a (monologic) discourse to be not simply clauses, but larger structures that are anchored on variously realized discourse cues.…
Categorical compositional distributional semantics is a model of natural language; it combines the statistical vector space models of words with the compositional models of grammar. We formalise in this model the generalised quantifier…
This document describes a sizable grammar of English written in the TAG formalism and implemented for use with the XTAG system. This report and the grammar described herein supersedes the TAG grammar described in an earlier 1995 XTAG…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
While the highly multilingual Universal Dependencies (UD) project provides extensive guidelines for clausal structure as well as structure within canonical nominal phrases, a standard treatment is lacking for many "mischievous" nominal…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
A number of writers(Joseph Halpern and Fahiem Bacchus among them) have offered semantics for formal languages in which inferences concerning probabilities can be made. Our concern is different. This paper provides a formalization of…
Formal semantics offers a complete and rigorous definition of a language. It is important to define different semantic models for a language and different models serve different purposes. Building equivalence between different semantic…
This paper develops a compositional vector-based semantics of subject and object relative pronouns within a categorical framework. Frobenius algebras are used to formalise the operations required to model the semantics of relative pronouns,…
Recursive relational specifications are commonly used to describe the computational structure of formal systems. Recent research in proof theory has identified two features that facilitate direct, logic-based reasoning about such…
We have recently begun a project to develop a more effective and efficient way to marshal inferences from background knowledge to facilitate deep natural language understanding. The meaning of a word is taken to be the entities,…
This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that ``This. The pronoun…
A structural time series model additively decomposes into generative, semantically-meaningful components, each of which depends on a vector of parameters. We demonstrate that considering each generative component together with its vector of…
In this paper we propose a general approach to define a many-valued preferential interpretation of gradual argumentation semantics. The approach allows for conditional reasoning over arguments and boolean combination of arguments, with…
Humans can flexibly extend word usages across different grammatical classes, a phenomenon known as word class conversion. Noun-to-verb conversion, or denominal verb (e.g., to Google a cheap flight), is one of the most prevalent forms of…
How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being…