Abstracts of position statements

Our invitation for presenting position statements has been accepted by Valentina Apresjan (Moscow, Russia; pragmatic factors in disambiguating lexical polysemy, scopes of quantifiers and negation etc.), Tim Baldwin (The University of Melbourne, Australia), Nicoletta Calzolari (Pisa, Italy), Leonid Iomdin (Moscow, Russia; syntax and phraseology: microsyntax, the grammar of idioms), Markéta Lopatková (Prague, Czech Republic; integration of valency lexicon and grammatical rules with regard to changes in valency structure of verbs), Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US; the treatment of multi-word expressions arguing against their special status which is what they enjoy in corpus-based milieu), Joakim Nivre (Uppsala, Sweden; Universal Dependencies from the perspective of annotation standards) and James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, US; semantically driven issues such as semantic representation and lexically-supported inference).

Valentina Apresjan: Pragmatics and other factors in resolving scope ambiguity

Scope ambiguity is a wide-spread phenomenon, which is fairly well described in the studies of semantics-syntax interface. However, in actual communication we rarely experience difficulties in assigning correct scope to operators in the contexts which allow potential ambiguity. Unlike lexical polysemy, which is more frequently resolved by semantic factors, i.e. semantic classes of collocates, one of the crucial factors in resolving scope ambiguity is pragmatics... (see the full abstract)

Timothy Baldwin: Multiword Expressions at the Grammar-Lexicon Interface

In this talk, I will outline a range of challenges presented by multiword expressions in terms of (lexicalist) precision grammar engineering, and different strategies for accommodating those challenges, in an attempt to strike the right balance in terms of generalisation and over- and under-generation.

Leonid Iomdin: Microsyntactic Phenomena as a Computational Linguistics Issue

Microsyntactic linguistic units, such as syntactic idioms and non-standard syntactic constructions, are poorly represented in linguistic resources, mostly because the former are elements occupying an intermediate position between the lexicon and the grammar and the latter are too specific to be routinely tackled by general grammars... (see the full abstract)

Markéta Lopatková, Václava Kettnerová: Alternations: From Lexicon to Grammar And Back Again

Contemporary linguistic theories usually divide a language description into two basic components – a lexicon and a grammar. An excellent example of phenomenon bridging these components is provided by alternations. In this contribution, we deal with selected alternations of verbs, namely diatheses and reciprocity in Czech... (see the full abstract)

Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg: Multiword Expressions = Compositional Expressions + Constraints

We present the Ontological Semantics (OS) method of automating the analysis of multiword expressions. OS is a knowledge-based approach to language understanding aimed at supplying intelligent agents with full, ontologically-grounded semantic and pragmatic analyses of natural language to serve as input to reasoning about action... (see the full abstract)

Joakim Nivre: Universal Dependencies — a lexicalist approach to cross-linguistically consistent grammatical annotation

Universal Dependencies is an initiative to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning and parsing research from a language typology perspective. It assumes a dependency-based approach to syntax and a lexicalist approach to morphology, which together entail that the fundamental units of grammatical annotation are words. Words have properties captured by morphological annotation and enter into relations captured by syntactic annotation. In my position paper, I will discuss how this approach allows us to capture similarities and differences across typologically diverse languages.

James Pustejovsky: The Development of Multimodal Lexical Resources

Human communication is a multi-dimensional activity, involving not only linguistic texts, but intonations, images, gestures, visual clues, and the interpretation of actions through perception. In this position paper, we propose the design and development of a multimodal lexicon that is able to accommodate the diverse modalities that present themselves in NLP applications. My lab has been developing a multimodal semantic representation, VoxML, that integrates the encoding of semantic, visual, and action-based features associated with lexemes.


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