This paper outlines the main assumptions of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1985, 1995, 1998, 2002, Wilson & Sperber 2002), an inferential approach to pragmatics. Relevance theory is based on a definition of relevance and two principles of relevance: a Cognitive Principle (that human cognition is geared to the maximisation of relevance), and a Communicative Principle (that utterances create expectations of optimal relevance). We explain the motivation for these principles and illustrate their application to a variety of pragmatic problems. We end by considering the implications of this relevance-theoretic approach for the architecture of the mind. 1

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 kinds of ways in which a word's meaning can deviate from its core meaning. An analysis is presented in which word senses are abstractions from clusters of corpus citations, in accordance with current lexicographic practice. The corpus citations, not the word senses, are the basic objects in the ontology. The corpus citations will be clustered into senses according to the purposes of whoever or whatever does the clustering. In the absence of such purposes, word senses do not exist. Word sense disambiguation also needs a set of word senses to disambiguate between. In most recent work, the set has been taken from a general-purpose lexical resource, with the assumption that the lexical resource describes the word senses of English/French/. . . , between whi...

this paper, we'll consider three examples where this occurs: logical metonymy (e.g., enjoy the book means enjoy reading the book), adjectives (e.g., the interpretation of fast in fast car, fast motorway, fast typist etc.), and noun-verb agreement. We'll argue for a new version of default inheritance, which allows default results of lexical generalisations to persist as default beyond the lexicon. We'll show that this persistence can be exploited by the pragmatic component, to reason about when generalisations encoded in the lexicon survive in a discourse context. We'll represent the link between the lexicon and pragmatics via two axioms. These will predict the pragmatic exceptions to lexical generalisations that arise in a discourse context. We thereby explain how words are interpreted in discourse, in a way that neither the lexicon nor pragmatics could achieve on their own.

We propose a unified flamework in which to treat semantic underspecification and parallelism phenomena in discourse. The framework employs a constraint language that can express equality and subtree relations between finite trees. In addition, our constraint language can express the equality up-to relation over trees which captures parallelism between them. The constraints are solved by context unification. We demonstrate the use of our framework at the examples of quantifier scope, ellipsis, and their interaction. 1 I

Several recent theories of linguistic representation treat the lexicon as a highly structured object, incorporating fairly detailed semantic information, and allowing multiple aspects of meaning to be represented in a single entry (e.g. Pustejovsky, 1991; Copestake, 1992; Copestake and Briscoe, 1995). One consequence of these approaches is that word senses cannot be thought of as discrete units which are in one-to-one correspondence with lexical entries. This has many advantages in allowing an account of systematic polysemy, but leaves the problem of accounting for eects such as zeugma and the absence of crossed readings, which have traditionally been explained in terms of multiple lexical entries, but which can also arise in examples where other criteria demand that a single entry be involved. Copestake and Briscoe (1995) claimed that these cases could be explained by discourse coherence, but did not describe how this might work. We remedy this here, by formalising a genera...

lexical rule example.

In this article we investigate logical metonymy, that is, constructions in which the argument of a word in syntax appears to be different from that argument in logical form (e.g., enjoy the book means enjoy reading the book, and easy problem means a problem that is easy to solve). The systematic variation in the interpretation of such constructions suggests a rich and complex theory of composition on the syntax/semantics interface. Linguistic accounts of logical metonymy typically fail to describe exhaustively all the possible interpretations, or they don't rank those interpretations in terms of their likelihood. In view of this, we acquire the meanings of metonymic verbs and adjectives from a large corpus and propose a probabilistic model that provides a ranking on the set of possible interpretations. We identify the interpretations automatically by exploiting the consistent correspondences between surface syntactic cues and meaning. We evaluate our results against paraphrase judgments elicited experimentally from humans and show that the model's ranking of meanings correlates reliably with human intuitions.

. This paper investigates the semantics of mathematical concepts in a type theoretic framework with coercive subtyping. The typetheoretic analysis provides a formal semantic basis in the design and implementation of Mathematical Vernacular (MV), a natural language suitable for interactive development of mathematics with the support of the current theorem proving technology. The idea of semantic well-formedness in mathematical language is motivated with examples. A formal system based on a notion of conceptual category is then presented, showing how type checking supports our notion of well-formedness. The power of this system is then extended by incorporating a notion of subcategory, using ideas from a more general theory of coercive subtyping, which provides the mechanisms for modelling conventional abbreviations in mathematics. Finally, we outline how this formal work can be used in an implementation of MV. 1 Introduction By mathematical vernacular (MV), we mean a mathematical and n...

In this paper we present a methodology for extracting information about lexical translation equivalences from the machine readable versions of conventional dictionaries (MRDs), and describe a series of experiments on semi-automatic construction of a linked multilingual lexical knowledge base for English, Dutch, and Spanish. We discuss the advantages and limitations of using MRDs that this has revealed, and some strategies we have developed to cover gaps where no direct translation can be found.

We reformulate metonymy resolution as a classification task. This is motivated by the regularity of metonymic readings and makes general classification and word sense disambiguation methods available for metonymy resolution.