The Meaning of Syntactic Dependencies

This paper discusses the semantic content of syntactic dependencies. We assume that syntactic dependencies play a central role in the process of semantic interpretation. They are defined as selective functions on word denotations. Among their properties, special attention will be paid to their ability to make interpretation co-compositional and incremental. To describe the semantic properties of dependencies, the paper will be focused on two particular linguistic tasks: word sense disambiguation and attachment resolution. The second task will be performed using a strategy based on automatic acquisition from corpora.

[1]  David R. Dowty.  On the Semantic Content of the Notion of ‘Thematic Role’ , 1989 .

[2]  Todd R. Ferretti,et al.  Thematic Roles as Verb-specific Concepts , 1997 .

[3]  Dekang Lin,et al.  Automatic Retrieval and Clustering of Similar Words , 1998, ACL.

[4]  Matthias Schlesewsky,et al.  On incremental interpretation: Degrees of meaning accessed during sentence comprehension , 2004 .

[5]  Gregory Grefenstette,et al.  Explorations in automatic thesaurus discovery , 1994 .

[6]  Dov M. Gabbay,et al.  Language Understanding: A Procedural Perspective , 1996, LACL.

[7]  Walter Daelemans,et al.  Is Shallow Parsing Useful for Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Clusters? , 2003, CICLing.

[8]  Pablo Gamallo,et al.  Clustering Syntactic Positions with Similar Semantic Requirements , 2005, CL.

[9]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Lexical structure and language comprehension , 1989 .

[10]  David Milward.  Dynamics, Dependency Grammar And Incremental Interpretation , 1992, COLING.

[11]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Semantic Influences On Parsing: Use of Thematic Role Information in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution , 1994 .

[12]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  Logic and Artificial Intelligence , 1991, Artif. Intell..

[13]  James Pustejovsky,et al.  The Generative Lexicon , 1995, CL.

[14]  R. Langacker.  Foundations of cognitive grammar , 1983 .

[15]  Barbara H. Partee,et al.  Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type‐shifting Principles , 2008 .

[16]  Uwe Reyle,et al.  From Discourse to Logic - Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory , 1993, Studies in linguistics and philosophy.

[17]  Giovanni Soda,et al.  Wide Coverage Incremental Parsing by Learning Attachment Preferences , 2001, AI*IA.

[18]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Against lexical generation of syntax , 1989 .

[19]  Uwe Reyle,et al.  From discourse to logic , 1993 .

[20]  Jeroen Groenendijk,et al.  Studies in discourse, representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers , 1987 .

[21]  Lucien Tesnière.  Éléments de syntaxe structurale , 1959 .

[22]  Pablo Gamallo,et al.  Syntactic-Based Methods for Measuring Word Similarity , 2001, TSD.

[23]  Slava M. Katz,et al.  Principled Disambiguation: Discriminating Adjective Senses with Modified Nouns , 1995, CL.

[24]  Anthony Ruiz Davis,et al.  Lexical semantics and linking in the hierarchical lexicon , 1996 .

[25]  Sylvain Kahane,et al.  The Meaning-Text Theory , 2003 .

[26]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Lexical Representation and Process , 1991 .

[27]  Pablo Gamallo Otero.  Cognitive characterisation of basic grammatical structures , 2003 .

[28]  Richard Hudson,et al.  The psychological reality of syntactic dependency relations , 2003 .

[29]  Dov M. Gabbay,et al.  Dynamic syntax - the flow of language understanding , 2000 .