Related papers: Pragmatic constraints and pronoun reference disamb…
Flip through any book or listen to any song lyrics, and you will come across pronouns that, in certain cases, can hinder meaning comprehension, especially for machines. As the role of having cognitive machines becomes pervasive in our…
We consider a scenario where an artificial agent is reading a stream of text composed of a set of narrations, and it is informed about the identity of some of the individuals that are mentioned in the text portion that is currently being…
Classical semantics assumes that one can model reference, predication and quantification with respect to a fixed domain of precise referent objects. Non-logical terms and quantification are then interpreted directly in terms of elements and…
Word sense disambiguation algorithms, with few exceptions, have made use of only one lexical knowledge source. We describe a system which performs unrestricted word sense disambiguation (on all content words in free text) by combining…
This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities…
Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can…
Algorithms of inference in a computer system oriented to input and semantic processing of text information are presented. Such inference is necessary for logical questions when the direct comparison of objects from a question and database…
Most research on natural language processing treats bias as an absolute concept: Based on a (probably complex) algorithmic analysis, a sentence, an article, or a text is classified as biased or not. Given the fact that for humans the…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have become ubiquitous. Although they offer a wide range of benefits, their adoption in decision-critical fields is limited by their lack of interpretability, particularly with textual…
Word sense disambiguation has developed as a sub-area of natural language processing, as if, like parsing, it was a well-defined task which was a pre-requisite to a wide range of language-understanding applications. First, I review earlier…
When processing a text, humans and machines must disambiguate between different uses of the pronoun it, including non-referential, nominal anaphoric or clause anaphoric ones. In this paper, we use eye-tracking data to learn how humans…
Entity disambiguation, or mapping a phrase to its canonical representation in a knowledge base, is a fundamental step in many natural language processing applications. Existing techniques based on global ranking models fail to capture the…
Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities. The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and describes the various…
Contextualized word representations are able to give different representations for the same word in different contexts, and they have been shown to be effective in downstream natural language processing tasks, such as question answering,…
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…
Name disambiguation has become one of the main themes in the Semantic Web agenda. The semantic web is an extension of the current Web in which information is not only given well-defined meaning, but also has many purposes that contain the…
Reading a document and extracting an answer to a question about its content has attracted substantial attention recently. While most work has focused on the interaction between the question and the document, in this work we evaluate the…
A Winograd schema is a pair of sentences that differ in a single word and that contain an ambiguous pronoun whose referent is different in the two sentences and requires the use of commonsense knowledge or world knowledge to disambiguate.…