tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE INTERPRETATION OF RELATIONAL NOUNS"

This paper 1 decdbes a computational treatment of the semantics of relational nouns. It covers relational nouns such as " "commander; and focuses especially on a particular subcategory of them, called function nouns ('speed; "distance', "rating'). Relational nouns are usually viewed as either requiring non-compositional semantic interpretation, or causing an undesirable proliferation of syntactic rules. In contrast to this, we present a treatment which is both syntactically uniform and semantically compositional. The core ideas of this treatment are: (1) The recognition of different levels of semantic analysis; in particular, the distinction between an English-oriented and a domain-oriented level of. | THE INTERPRETATION OF RELATIONAL NOUNS Jos de Bruin and Remko Scha BBN Laboratories 10 Moulton Street Cambridge MA 02238 USA ABSTRACT This paper1 decribes a computational treatment of the semantics of relational nouns. It covers relational nouns such as sister and commander and focuses especially on a particular subcategory of them called function nouns speed distance rating . Relational nouns are usually viewed as either requiring non-com positional semantic interpretation or causing an undesirable proliferation of syntactic rules. In contrast to this we present a treatment which is both syntactically uniform and semantically compositional. The core ideas of this treatment are 1 The recognition of different levels of semantic analysis in particular the distinction between an English-oriented and a domain-oriented level of meaning representation. 2 The analysis of relational nouns as denoting relation-extensions. The paper shows how this approach handles a variety of linguistic constructions involving relational nouns. The treatment presented here has been implemented in BBN s Spoken Language System an experimental spoken language interface to a database graphics system. 1 relational nouns and their DENOTATIONS When Jean Piaget faced his nine year old subject Hal with the question What s a brother the answer was When there s a boy and another boy when there are two of them. And with a greater degree of formal precision ten year old Bem replied to the same question A brother is a relation one brother to another. 2 8 What these children are beginning to be able to articulate is that there is something wrong with the experimenter s question as it is posed it talks about brothers as if they constituted a natural kind as if there is a way of looking at an individual to find out whether he is a brother. But brother is normally not used that way - a property which it shares with words like co-author commander speed distance and rating . Nouns of this sort are called .