Abstract not found

The automatic disambiguation of word senses has been an interest and concern since the earliest days of computer treatment of language in the 1950's. Sense disambiguation is an “intermediate task ” (Wilks and Stevenson, 1996) which is not an end in itself, but rather is necessary at one level or another to accomplish most natural language processing tasks. It is

This article proposes a theoretical framework for external representation based problem solving. The Tic-Tac-Toe and its isomorphs are used to illustrate the procedures of the framework as a methodology and test the predictions of the framework as a functional model. Experimental results show that the behavior in the Tic-Tac-Toe is determined by the directly available information in external and internal representations in terms of perceptual and cognitive biases, regardless of whether the biases are consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to the task. It is shown that external representations are not merely inputs and stimuli to the internal mind and that they have much more important functions than mere memory aids. A representational determinism is suggested--the form of a representation determines

A recent report demonstrated that 8-month-olds can segment a continuous stream of speech syllables, containing no acoustic or prosodic cues to word boundaries, into wordlike units after only 2 min of listening experience (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Thus, a powerful learning mechanism capable of extracting statistical information from fluent speech is available early in development. The present study extends these results by documenting the particular type of statistical computation—transitional (conditional) probability—used by infants to solve this word-segmentation task. An artificial language corpus, consisting of a continuous stream of trisyllabic nonsense words, was presented to 8-month-olds for 3 min. A postfamiliarization test compared the infants’ responses to words versus part-words (trisyllabic sequences spanning word boundaries). The corpus was constructed so that test words and part-words were matched in frequency, but differed in their transitional probabilities. Infants showed reliable

. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

round various aspects of the problem of determining which anaphoric elements in a given sentence can refer to which potential antecedents. Ristad takes the reader through five rounds of what he calls a "complexity game," which is a contest between a maximizer, who tries to make natural languages as complex as possible, and a minimizer, who seeks to reduce the complexity to a bare minimum. In the first round, we read an argument purporting to demonstrate the NPhardness of any language whose anaphora are required to agree in features such as number, gender, and so on with their antecedents. In the second round, this argument is refuted by the minimizer, who claims that the standard theory of how agreement works is wrong and proposes a new theory, under which anaphoric agreement is now recognizable in deterministic polynomial time. In the third turn, a new set of data leads to the central argument in the book, according to which the anaphora problem is NP-hard after all. The facts crucia

The modern computational lexical semantics reached a point in its development when it has become necessary to define the premises and goals of each of its several trends. This paper proposes ten choices in terms of which these premises and goals can be discussed. It is argued that the central questions include the use of lexical rules for generating word senses; the role of syntax, pragmatics, and formal semantics in the specification of lexical meaning; the use of a world model, or ontology, as the organizing principle for lexical-semantic descriptions; the use of rules with limited scope; the relation between static and dynamic resources; the commitment to descriptive coverage; the trade-off between generalization and idiosyncracy; and, finally, the adherence to the "supply-side" (method-oriented) or "demand-side" (task-oriented) ideology of research. The discussion is inspired by, but not limited to, the comparison between the generative lexicon approach and the ontologi...

The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in "and-uh"), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.

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Complex words consist of morphemic subunits that can recombine to form other words. Thus midnight is standardly analyzed as consisting of the prefix mid- and stem night, which also occur in words such as midstream and nightly. A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. We investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes. Five cross-modal lexical decision experiments show that the magnitude of priming (e.g., for pairs such as teacher-teach) is affected by the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, items that are only moderately similar produce intermediate facilitation effects (e.g., latelylate) . This pattern is observed both for words standardly treated as morphologically related (e.g., teacher-teach) and for morphologically unrelated words that exhibit similar degrees of semantic and phonological overlap (e.g., snarl-sneer). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models employing distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes. Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology One of the fundamental problems in the study of language is to characterize knowledge of words and how this knowledge is used in comprehension and production. The focus of the present article is on derivational morphology, the aspect of lexical knowledge concerning the structure and formation of complex words. Words such as baker and talking appear to consist of components, traditionally called m...