Related papers: Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language…
The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
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…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
Intelligent systems that aim at mastering language as humans do must deal with its semantic underspecification, namely, the possibility for a linguistic signal to convey only part of the information needed for communication to succeed.…
Handling ambiguity and underspecification is an important challenge in natural language interfaces, particularly for tasks like text-to-SQL semantic parsing. We propose a modular approach that resolves ambiguity using natural language…
Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive…
This paper deals with classifying ambiguities for Multimodal Languages. It evolves the classifications and the methods of the literature on ambiguities for Natural Language and Visual Language, empirically defining an original…
Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics, for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human disambiguation…
Question processing is a fundamental step in a question answering (QA) application, and its quality impacts the performance of QA application. The major challenging issue in processing question is how to extract semantic of natural language…
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…
When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…
Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
One major deficiency of most semantic representation techniques is that they usually model a word type as a single point in the semantic space, hence conflating all the meanings that the word can have. Addressing this issue by learning…
The paper defends the notion that semantic tagging should be viewed as more than disambiguation between senses. Instead, semantic tagging should be a first step in the interpretation process by assigning each lexical item a representation…
Despite the frequent challenges posed by ambiguity when representing meaning via natural language, it is often ignored or deliberately removed in tasks mapping language to formally-designed representations, which generally assume a…