tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "ASSIGNING A SEMANTIC SCOPE TO OPERATORS"

I propose that the characteristics of the scope disamhiguation process observed in the literature can be explained in terms of the way in which the model of the situation described by a sentence is built. The model construction procedure I present builds an event structure by identifying the situations associated with the operators in the sentence and their mutual dependency relations, as well as the relations between these situations and other situations in the context. | ASSIGNING A SEMANTIC SCOPE TO OPERATORS Massimo Poesio University of Rochester Department of Computer Science Rochester NY 14627-0226 USA poesio@ Abstract I propose that the characteristics of the scope disambiguation process observed in the literature can be explained in terms of the way in which the model of the situation described by a sentence is built. The model construction procedure I present builds an event structure by identifying the situations associated with the operators in the sentence and theữ mutual dependency relations as well as the relations between these situations and other situations in the context. The procedure takes into account lexical semantics and the result of various discourse interpretation procedures such as definite description interpretation and does not requứe a complete disambiguation to take place. THE PROBLEM Because new ways of obtaining semantically distinct interpretations for sentences are continuously discovered coming to grips with ambiguity is becoming more and more of a necessity for developers of natural language processing systems linguists and psychologists alike 9 31 7 2 . In this paper I am concerned with the scopal ambiguity of operators 31 33 . The attention of both psycholinguists and computational linguists interested in ambiguity has concentrated on the problem of combinatorial explosion. If the number of readings of an utterance were to actually grow with the factorial of the number of operators even a simple sentence like 1 with 4 operators the modal should tense an indefinite and a definite would have 4 24 scopally different readings. Two distinct questions thus must be answered how can listeners and how should machines deal with the combinatorial explosion of readings Do we really use the brute-force strategy of considering all of the available readings and then choose among them And if we do choose among several readings how is that done 1 We should hook up an engine to the boxcar. To my .