Pdf semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. Introduction mbiguity is, strictly speaking, used to describe a word, phrase, or sentence when it has more than one interpretation. June 2010 153 interpretation, since the quantifier has the same configuration at lf as they do in the surface syntax. File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst department of computer science, university of toronto the right of the university of. A sentencepicture matching task tested the attachment of prepositional phrase pp such as on the chair within an utterance like mary ate the apple on the chair. Jul 12, 2019 lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity. As stated above,it is a type of ambiguity that arises out of the fact that a word may have more than one meaning. Recent constraintbased models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause e. Ambiguity semantic syntactic one word or phrase has more thanthe ambiguity results from the one possible meaninginterpretation, location of phrases or words in the which affects the entire sentence. Resolving ambiguity using latent semantic analysis in a small corpus of text.
Trilinguals performed best in pragmatic and syntactic ambiguity, while bilinguals performed best in semantic ambiguity. Notes on ambiguity there are two types of ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity jennifer rodd department of experimental. The following material is an adapted form of material created by student participants of the project elearning resources for semantics. Because ambiguity is always related to interpretation, real semantic ambiguityishardtoverify. Lexical ambiguity resolution lar, then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. Dussias thepennsylvaniastateuniversity this study investigates whether proficient second language l2 speakers of spanish and english use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences con. Tanenhaus university of rochester abstract this article examines how certain types of semantic and. A collection of the best research on lar available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Genuine ambiguities, where a sentence really can have two different meanings to an intelligent hearer, and computer ambiguities, where the meaning is entirely clear to a hearer but a computer detects more than one meaning. Pdf semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution. Mar 10, 2015 semantic and syntactic ambiguity march 10, 2015 titivillus logic jan sanders cartoons, logic, logical fallacies today i want to talk about two different kinds of ambiguity and i want to explain how each of these different kinds of ambiguity can give rise to fallacies. On the other hand, if an additional operatorraising move raises the negp not to a position higher than every student, as shown in 2b, not is interpreted with wider scope than every student, which leads to the inversescope. The communicative function of ambiguity in language steven t.
The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful contextdependent interpretations. To compare lsa and skipgram semantic representation quality, we performed two tests. Disparate semantic ambiguity effects from semantic. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst.
The analysis of lexica l and structural ambiguity in your letters of the jakarta post, 2009. More than one syntactic alternative, represented by parse contexts, are analyzed together with joint analysis of referents, word senses, relation types, and layout of a semantic representation for each syntactic alternative. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical. Okay, so theres an example, of how the semantic ambiguity of the expression stoned, can give rise to a fallacy. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number. Ambiguity ambiguity semantic syntactic one word or. The fact that ambiguity occurs on so many linguistic levels suggests that a farreaching principle is needed to explain its origins and persistence. Section 5 explores some possible strategies for explaining ambiguity, concluding with pointers to our ongoing research on the subject.
Improving the accuracy of the dependency representation will make the current output of string more appropriate and informationrich for further analysis and processing. Lexical ambiguity is the potential for multiple interpretations of spoken or written language that renders it difficult or impossible to understand without some additional information. For example, the alternative senses of ambiguous senses of ambiguous words are briefly accessed, followed by the words can be spelled and pronounced the same e. Some researchers prefer the term semantic ambiguity as this. Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. Thus, semantic interpretation does not include the resolu tion in context of anaphors or definite reference, or of deictic or indexical expressions, or the recognition and comprehension of speech acts, irony and. Skripsi yang berjudul the analysis of lexical and structural ambiguity in your letters of the jakarta post ini membahas tentang jenis kata yang ambigu secara leksikal dan jenis kalimat frase yang ambigu secara struktural. A framework for structural ambiguity resolution for portuguese. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in. Resolving semantic ambiguity arrrays the work of leading theorists on the issues surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ambiguous text. So one example is, consider the newspaper headline, gandhi stoned in rally in india. The problem of semantic interpretation is where one user may view d as e, with complete certainty, while another user may view d as e, also with complete certainty.
Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution maryellen c. Moreover, the statistical models will be tried to enrich using the parser output of the bosque treebank. Oct 22, 2014 semantic scope ambiguity the ling space. Structual ambiguity and conceptural information retrieval. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. To assess the dynamics of ambiguity resolution, the third part.
These semantic objects are represented by expressions of an intensional logic. Ambiguity, arabic, translation, structural ambiguity, lexical ambiguity. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities. Ambiguities in a natural language expression are interpreted by jointly disambiguating multiple alternative syntactic and semantic interpretations. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. A framework for structural ambiguity resolution for. Ambiguity and ambiguity resolution in ways of lexical and structural forms, has fascinated the attention of many researchers, especially in the field of psycholinguistics, computational. Lexical ambiguity in machine translation archive ouverte hal.
Us8504355b2 joint disambiguation of syntactic and semantic. First published in 1930, seven types of ambiguity has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of english literary criticism. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences. Lexical ambiguity is defined as words having multiple meanings. Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure underlying the word order therein. However earlier the article has lexical ambiguity is contrasted semantic ambiguity. The qr account provides a natural explanation for the ambiguity of sentences with quantifiers and negative operators. Binot, disambiguating prepositional phrase attachments by using. Lexical ambiguity is sometimes used deliberately to create puns and other types. Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical ambiguity.
Seidenberg ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in sentence processing. The chapters are organized around three major themes. Discourse and semantic influences in parsing reduced relative clauses michael j. This afforded us the opportunityto examine meaning resolution processes under circumstances in which syntactic information could influence semantic resolution i.
Semantic ambiguity is when a particular word has two different interpretations. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Syntactic ambiguity resolution is influenced by multiple constraints. Examples are shown for each type of ambiguity and sometimes for subtypes.
Semantic ambiguity is a word that has more than one meaning. First, the relatedness of an ambiguous words interpretations, as well as the words total number of interpretations, have been found to modulate semantic ambiguity effects. Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. Yet natural language contains enough redundancy so that, in context, the. Syntactic ambiguity is the phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or meanings due to different phrase structure analysis. Lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution 677 ambiguity. Hirst, semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, cambridge university press, 1987. Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. One longstanding controversy is which of these two modules bears responsibility for the immediate resolution of ambiguity. We can usually resolve the ambiguity using context, but sometimes this doesnt work.
To fill this gap, we compared the lsa and skipgram capabilities to extract semantic word associations in dream reports collections. Syntactic and semantic ambiguity are frequent enough to present a substantial challenge to natural language processing. Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. General interest semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme hirst.
The existence of ambiguity provides a puzzle for func. There are two types of ambiguity syntactic and semantic ambiguities. Penulis mengetahui bahwa ambigu bisa terjadi di situasi apa pun baik di dalam. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity guide books. Characterizing ambiguity ambiguity is a semantic property. Semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution article pdf available in the american journal of psychology 1144. Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical. Section 4 responds to some possible objections to the argument in section 3. Ambiguity resolution strategies used in the alice machine translation system are presented in various levels of detail.
Most studies differentiate between lexical and structural ambiguity, with the former referring to ambiguity conveyed through polysemous wordshomophonous strings and the latter to phenomena of ambiguous word order, referential ambiguity, prepositional phrase attachment e. Right, an argument that superficially seems valid, but it seems that way superficially, only because were assigning the wrong interpretation to the word stoned. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity 3 semantic interpreter.
Syntactic ambiguity resolution in l2 learners some effects of bilinguality on l1 and l2 processing strategies paolae. Quantification and negation scope ambiguity resolution. Nearly all words in english are polysemous, meaning that many sentences have semantic ambiguity. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing. As the reference for people who are interested in analyzing lexical and structural ambiguity in. Syntactic ambiguity resolution of cantoneseenglish. Lexical ambiguity is caused by homonymy and polysemy.
The ambiguity typically results from the fact that words can mean different things. Resolution of ambiguity in chinese and its application to. Recently, theoretical accounts of semantic ambiguity resolution have faced two main challenges. In most cases, the intended meaning is made clear by the context. We saw her duck is offered as an example of semantic ambiguity, with two possible readings. The semantic distances between two words d v 1, v 2 was calculated as 1 minus the semantic similarity d v 1, v 2 1s v 1, v 2. My claim is that it is the latter, and that the syntactic processing module is a very simple device which blindly and faithfully constructs all possible analyses for the sentence up.
It differs from syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words. The two different interpretations are two different interpretations, of that one word. Thus, given d and no semantic ambiguity, we know that the rule if e then h, either will or will not be executed for all users. The term ambiguity is used to describe a word, a phrase or a sentence with a multiple meanings. When a word has multiple meanings, this is called polysemy. Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Some investigators have endorsed a particularly strong version of this idea. The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Generally, two types of ambiguity are distinguished, lexical and structural ambiguity. Well, there are two different interpretations of the verb stoned. Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the.