Glue Semantics

This article aims to generate all theorems of a given size in the implicational fragment of propositional intuitionistic linear logic. It was presented at the 36th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP).

Recent development of logic programming languages based on linear logic suggests a successful direction to extend logic programming to be more expressive and more efficient. The treatment of formulasas-resources gives us not only powerful expressiveness, but also efficient access to a large set of data. However, in linear logic, whole resources are kept in one context, and there is no straight way to represent complex data structures as resources. For example, in order to represent an ordered list and time-dependent data, we need to put additional indices for each resource formula. This paper describes a logic programming language, called TLLP, based on intuitionistic temporal linear logic. This logic, an extension of linear logic with some features from temporal logics, allows the use of the modal operators '?'(next-time) and '?'(always) in addition to the operators used in intuitionistic linear logic. The intuitive meaning of modal operators is as follows: ? B means that B can be used exactly once at the next moment in time; ? B means that B can be used exactly once any time; !B means that B can be used arbitrarily many times (including 0 times) at any time. We first give a proof theoretic formulation of the logic of the TLLP language. We then present a series of resource management systems designed to implement not only interpreters but also compilers based on an extension of the standard WAM model.

Sentences containing quantifiers are often ambiguous, as quantificational DPs interact with one another, and with wh ‐phrases, negation, and adverbials. This kind of ambiguity is an ambiguity with respect to the scope of the quantifiers. However, sentences containing several quantifiers or operators are not always scope ambiguous: compare, for example, the ambiguous Some of us always showed up with the unequivocal Always, some of us showed up . Thus, the scope of quantifiers is not essentially free; there is a complex pattern of ambiguous and unequivocal sentences containing quantifiers and operators. An adequate analysis of scope ambiguities should be able to predict this complex pattern in a principled way, which should encompass a sensible view of the interface between syntax and semantics. According to the dominant view in generative grammar, scope relations can be deduced from the c‐command relations on Logical Form, where quantifiers are assigned scope by quantifier raising. Variants of and alternatives to this dominant view have been proposed, for some partly motivated by the scope facts in languages other than English (in particular, Mandarin Chinese and Hungarian have been taken into consideration), and for some partly motivated by a more thorough look at the (English) data and/or by modification or substitution of the basic framework. It became apparent that quantifier scope relations crucially depend on certain properties of the quantifiers, whose exact nature is not yet settled, however. The interplay of these properties seems to determine the complex pattern of ambiguous and unequivocal sentences containing quantifiers and operators. The challenge is to uncover the nature of these scope‐relevant properties and account for their interplay within a general conception of the interface between syntax and semantics.

For practical research in natural language processing, it is indispensabh . to develop a large scale sentantic dictionary for computers. It is especially important to improve the tecbuiques ibr compiling semantic dictionaries torn natural language texts such as those in existing human dictionaries or in large corpora. 11owever } there are at least two ditIicultics in analyzing existing texts: tbe problem of syntactlc ambiguities and the problem of polysemy. Our approach to solw, these difficulties is to make use of translation exam- pies in two dis[inet languagcs that haw (luitc different sylltactic structures and word mealtings. The reason we took tbis approach is that in many cmcs both syn tactic alrd scnlantic ambiguities arc resolved by comparing analyzed results from botb lauguages. In this paper, we propose a method ibr resolving the syntac tie ambiguities of translation examples of bihngual corpora and a method for acquiring lexical knowledge, sucb a.s case frames of verbs and attribute sets of noutts.

Syntactic and Semantic Ambiguity Processing in Neural MT from English to French, Spanish and Italian
 Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence, human translators outperform MT for at least three types of tasks: identifying referents in anaphora (especially of the interphrastic kind), resolving semantic ambiguity (which is mainly due to polysemy or homonymy), and resolving syntactic ambiguity (especially with poorly inflected source languages such as English). Using the results obtained by two freely available online machine translation programs, Google Translate and DeepL, we examine how these two types of ambiguity are processed in translation from English into French, Spanish and Italian. Our results show that the two programs perform well overall in resolving the simplest cases of syntactic ambiguity, with difficulties arising more frequently for noun phrases featuring atypical syntactic divisions and rarely used collocations. MT output for ambiguous structures involving verb roots followed by the –ING morpheme (flying planes, growing pains) is studied, as well as syntactic structures in which two or more nouns are preceded by one or more adjectives. MT handles relatively well the longest of those structures (ADJ ADJ N N N N), probably because their subsets are part of the bilingual or target language monolingual corpora that underlie MT systems. Structures involving head modification and coordination (ADJ N AND N) are also known to pose problems for MT and human translators alike. But since many of the most frequent N AND N structures involve cohyponyms (men and women, brothers and sisters), antonyms (rights and duties, costs and benefits) or near- synonyms (aid and advice), their translation as a whole unit generally triggers the choice of correct syntact dependencies in translation. Structures in which the adjective only modifies the first noun (fresh air and exercise, social sciences and humanities) are much less frequent and are also probably translated as a whole unit. Structures involving premodification, coordination and post-modification may give rise to four distinct types of structures depending on whether long-range dependencies apply (detailed [knowledge and understanding] of the IT industry, [ethnic group] and [place of birth], invaluable [context and [source of information], [close friend] and confidant] of Mr Jones. Structures in which both long-range dependencies apply (integrated prevention and control of pollution) are the ones which most frequently cause errors for MT. Semantic ambiguity cases have been processed with increasing success by MT, especially when collocates vary widely for the main two meanings of homonyms (a well-known example is the word pen). Processing polysemy (for instance the medical use of conditions in pre-existing conditions) is a bit more of a challenge for MT. Other cases involving concentration of several polysemic terms in the same sentence (Changing the placement of beams relative to the staff involves changing the direction of the stems in the beam) also create difficulties for MT when the polysemic terms are used without any of their usual collocates (here in the specialised field of musical edition). Homonymy cases involving grammatical category changes (N-to-V or V-to-N conversion) seem to continue to pose the most difficulties to neural MT, despite increasing consideration of intra- and extraphrastic context. Potentially ambiguous word sequences (treatment increase in as the daily dose and duration of treatment increase), which were processed incorrectly before neuronal MT, are now correctly translated. But word sequences in which one word belongs to a part of speech which is not the most commonly used one (e.g. the noun remains in what remains can be considered) may cause occasional errors. Several examples that involve the verb founder are studied, and they frequently trigger translation of the noun in all three Romance languages (or translations of the verbs find or found due to incorrect segmentation).

1.1 Relationship between Petri net and linear logic Petri nets were first introduced by Petri in his seminal Ph.D. thesis, and both the theory and the applications of his model have flourished in concurrency theory (Reisig & Rozenberg, 1998a; Reisig & Rozenberg, 1998b). The relationships between Petri nets and linear logics have been studied by many researchers (Engberg & Winskel, 1997; Farwer, 1999; Hirai, 2000; Hirai 1999; Ishihara & Hiraish, 2001; Kamide, 2004, Kamide, 2006; Kanovich, 1995; Kanovich 1994; LarcheyWendling & Galmiche, 1998; Larchey-Wendling & Galmiche, 2000; Lilius, 1992; Mart -Oliet & Meseguer, 1991; Okada, 1998; Tanabe, 1997). A category theoretical investigation of such a relationship was given by Mart -Oliet and Meseguer (Mart -Oliet & Meseguer, 1991), purely syntactical approach using Horn linear logic was established by Kanovich (Kanovich, 1995; Kanovich 1994), a naive phase linear logic for a certain class of Petri nets was given by Okada (Okada, 1998), a linear logical view of object Petri nets were studied by Farwer (Farwer, 1999), and various Petri net interpretations of linear logic using quantale models were obtained by Ishihara and Hiraishi (Ishihara & Hiraish, 2001), Engberg and Winskel (Engberg & Winskel, 1997), Larchey-Wendling and Galmiche (Larchey-Wendling & Galmiche, 1998; Larchey-Wendling & Galmiche, 2000), and Lilius (Lilius, 1992). Petri net interpretations using Kripke semantics for various fragments and extensions of intuitionistic linear logic were studied by Kamide (Kamide, 2004; Kamide, 2006c). In (Kamide, 2004), Petri net interpretations of various fragments of a spatio-temporal soft linear logic were discussed. In (Kamide, 2006c), Petri nets with inhibitor arcs, which were first introduced by Kosaraju (Kosaraju, 1973) to show the limitation of the usual Petri nets, were described using Kripke semantics for intuitionistic linear logic with strong negation. The approarches using Kripke semantics can obtain a very simple correspondence between Petri net and linear logic.

A Logical Form (LF) is a syntactic structure that is interpreted by the semantic component. For a particular structure to be a possible LF it has to be possible for syntax to generate it and for semantics to interpret it. The study of LF must therefore take into account both assumptions about syntax and about semantics, and since there is much disagreement in both areas, disagreements on LF have been plentiful. This makes the task of writing a survey article in the field fairly difficult, a difficulty that is amplified by the amount of material that needs to be covered if the result is going to be in any way representative. My response to this difficulty is to limit my objectives. As a start, I will confine myself to issues relating to the syntactic positions of Quantificational Noun Phrases (QNPs) at LF and to various interpretive consequences. But even within these relatively narrow confines, I will not attempt anything close to a comprehensive survey. Instead my goal will be restricted to the presentation of one leading idea and to the discussion of some evidence that might bear on it. Much research on the nature of LF has consisted in attempts to account for the meaning of sentences containing QNPs:

The neural underpinnings of semantic ambiguity and anaphora

A graph-theoretic characterization theorem for multiplicative fragment of non-commutative linear logic

AUNT: A Universal netlist translator

Polysemy has been considered in terms of sense relations where each sense of a polysemous expression is represented individually in the lexicon. Siswati and other African languages accounted for in African Wordnet do not differ in the characterisation of this phenomenon. Polysemy is relevant in linguistic debates because of its inherent lexical meaning representation and compositional semantics. Because polysemy proliferates in natural languages, it is distinguished from monosemy and homonymy, despite the fact that they may seem clear at an intuitive level. However, they have proven difficult to draw from practice to some extent. This article explores polysemy and its role in lexical sense relations in African languages, specifically Siswati. It further examines the inherent aspects of word meaning and the semantic relations between words, as well as the ways in which word meaning is related to syntactic structure, given that syntactic structure is the basis upon which the synsets and usage examples are formulated. The article further demonstrates aspects that make the Siswati language system susceptible to polysemy. It further considers the pragmatic approach in accounting for lexical semantics as this provides the basis for a unified account of the role of polysemy in numerous domains, and for the amplification that motivates its proliferation in natural languages.

Accepting Jackendoff ‘s (1987c, 1990) proposal that the semantic correlate of an NP-occurrence is not a single thematic role (as claimed in Chomsky ‘s 1981 ‘Theta-criterion ‘), but a set of co-indexed argument positions in conceptual structure (the ‘Revised theta-criterion ‘), this chapter seeks to establish a non-arbitrary basis for this type of co-indexation (called ‘conceptual indexing ‘). It is proposed that, on the one hand, the presence or absence of conceptual co-indexing reflects lexical meaning, and on the other, a difference in compositional semantics according to whether, when two predicative items (such as a verb and a directional adverb) combine, one item fits into the semantic structure of the other (called ‘conservative combination ‘), or the two items fit into a structure inherent in neither of them ( ‘radical combination ‘). Conceptual indexing is distinguished from referential indexing (relevant in discourse structure) and from ‘binding indexing ‘ (relevant in the syntactic representation of anaphora).

Within linguistic theory, very little effort has been devoted so far to a comprehen­sive theory of the syntax and semantics of modifiers. It is predominantly assumed that modifiers make a constant semantic contribution to the meaning of the constituent that is modified, irrespective of any conceivable syntactic differentiations. This account cannot cope with a multitude of empirical data and should therefore be replaced by a theory of modification that pays more attention to the exact nature of a given syntactic configuration and its impact on semantic composition. The approach advocated here is illustrated with locative modifiers of verb phrases. It will be shown that these expressions have a large range of meaning variability. Using German data, it is argued that differences in meaning can be correlated with diffe­rences in syntactic structure. On this basis, a compositional semantics for locative modifiers is proposed.

Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead, it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting ‘discontinuous’ modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian, which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that, despite these syntactic differences, both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally, and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.

This study focuses on the linguistic abilities of preschool children in the autistic spectrum. The objectives were to identify and evaluate the approaches to language in the most frequently used therapeutic approaches for ASD in the speech therapy practice, in a sample collected in Rio de Janeiro, and to propose an instrument to assess ADS children's language skills, by tracking specific difficulties in comprehension tasks. The instrument aims to evaluate syntactic structures (simple sentences varying in transitivity and tense/aspect of the verb; interrogative sentences; coordinate sentences; completive clauses; and relative clauses), morphosyntactic distinctions (gender and grammatical number) and aspects pertaining to the syntax-semantic interface (reflexive and referential pronouns), by avoiding the cost of thematic reversibility. In addition, reversible sentences were included to continue the evaluation of children whose performance on irreversible sentences did not present difficulties. A pilot study was developed with 12 autistic children. 3 groups were characterized based on their oral linguistic performance in speech therapy sections, from the less developed (group 1) to the most developed ones (group 3). The results are in line with the literature that distinguishes ALN (language normal) and ALI (language impaired) ASD children. Difficulties in all aspects investigated were identified in children with low production. However, children from all groups revealed difficulties in the syntax-semantic interface and in grammatical number. Children in the intermediate group had greater difficulty in complex sentences and reversible sentences.