Meaning and synonymy in natural languages

This article discusses what kind of entity the proposed semantic Web is, principally by reference to the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation. The concept of the SW has two distinct origins, and this, bifurcation persists in two differing lines of SW research: one closely allied to notions of documents and natural language processing (NLP) and one not. These differences of emphasis or content carry with them different commitments about what it is to interpret a KR and what the interpretation method has to do with meaning in natural language.

The year is 2030. A two-young-child, two-parent household, the Rubensteins, owns and employs a state-of-the-art household robot, Rodney. With the parents out, the children ask Rodney to perform some action \(\alpha \) that violates a Rubensteinian ethical principle \(P_R\). Rodney replies: (\(s_1\)) “Doing that would be (morally) wrong, kids.” The argument the children give Rodney in protest is that another household, the Müllers, also has a robot, Ralph; and the kids argue that he routinely performs \(\alpha \). As a matter of fact, Ralph’s doing \(\alpha \) violates no Müllerian ethical principle \(P_M\). Ralph’s response to the very same request from the children he tends is: (\(s_2\)) “Okay, doing that is (morally) fine, kids.” What is the meaning of the utterances made by Rodney and Ralph? We answer this question by presenting and employing a novel, formal, inferential theory of meaning in natural language: hypergraphical inferential semantics (\(\mathscr {H}\!\! \mathscr {I}\!\! \mathscr {S}\)), which is in the general spirit of proof-theoretic semantics, which is in turn antithetical to Montagovian model-theoretic semantics. \(\mathscr {H}\!\! \mathscr {I}\!\! \mathscr {S}\), applied even to sentences logically simpler than \(s_1\) and \(s_2\), implies that human-level natural language understanding (NLU) is Turing-uncomputable.

Frame semantics is a theory of meaning in natural language, which defines the structure of the lexical semantic resources known as framenets. Both framenets and frame semantics have proved useful for a number of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, in this connection framenets have often been criticized for their limited coverage. A proposed reasonable-effort solution to this problem is to develop domain-specific (sublanguage) framenets to complement the corresponding general-language framenets for particular NLP tasks, and in the literature we find such initiatives covering domains such as medicine, soccer, and tourism. In this paper, we report on building a framenet to cover the terms and concepts encountered in descriptive linguistic grammars (written in English) i.e. a framenet for the linguistic domain (LingFN) to complement the general-language BFN.KeywordsFrame semanticsFramenetsSemantics

There has been extensive debate about the principle of compositionality among philosophers of language and formal semanticists, according to which the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way these parts are combined. Questions about this principle can be broadly divided into three categories: why we want compositionality, what the proper definition of compositionality should be, and how various semantic phenomena can be analyzed compositionally. In this paper, I will focus on the first question. After briefly surveying well-known arguments for compositionality, I will present two methodological arguments and examine their validity.

The paper presents a formal framework to model the fusion of gesture meaning with the meaning of the co-occurring verbal fragment. The framework is based on the formalization of two simple concepts, intersectivity and iconicity, which form the core of most descriptive accounts of the interaction of the two modalities. The formalization is presented as an extension of a well-known framework for the analysis of meaning in natural language. We claim that a proper formalization of these two concepts is sufficient to provide a principled explanation of gestures accompanying different types of linguistic expressions. The formalization also aims at providing a general mechanism (iconicity) by which the meaning of gestures is extracted from their formal appearance.

Chapter 2 - Categorial Type Logics

The project of giving an account of meaning in natural languages goes largely by assigning truth-conditional content to sentences. I will call the view that sentences have truth-conditional content propositionalism as it is common to identify the truth-conditional content of a sentence with the proposition it expresses. This content plays an important role in our explanations of the speech-acts, attitude ascriptions, and the meaning of sentences when they appear as parts of longer sentences. Much work in philosophy of language and linguistics semantics over the last halfcentury has aimed to characterize the truth-conditional content of different aspects of language.

Distributional semantics provides multidimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown by a large body of research in computational linguistics; yet, its impact in theoretical linguistics has so far been limited. This review provides a critical discussion of the literature on distributional semantics, with an emphasis on methods and results that are relevant for theoretical linguistics, in three areas: semantic change, polysemy and composition, and the grammar–semantics interface (specifically, the interface of semantics with syntax and with derivational morphology). The goal of this review is to foster greater cross-fertilization of theoretical and computational approaches to language as a means to advance our collective knowledge of how it works.

Summary form only given. As the fear of semantics is declining, let's formalize the unformalizable! The address is focusing on the feasibility and necessity of accessing directly the comprehensive meaning of natural language texts, data, images, etc., to emulate human understanding by the computer. It is based on the premise that, without such understanding, no real-life application can reach the precision that human users of computational systems require. Moreover, meaning access and processing goes well beyond natural language applications, even as the scope of those keeps growing. The main obstacle for this seemingly reasonable goal is the widespread prejudice against meaning as unknowable in principle because it is “subjective,” context-sensitive, complex, messy, etc. This has not been our experience, and it is worth talking, both practically and theoretically, about the know-how that a research group should acquire to approach the processing tasks semantically. A convincing case can be made for the feasibility and affordability of the approach as well, especially in the light of our planning to make our resources Open Source, a plan that may be followed by other computational semanticists. It is hoped, therefore, that this address will further reduce the fear of, and prejudice against semantics. It will focus on our Ontological Semantic Technology, a mature formal theory of meaning that has long overcome the crippling fixation on first-order logic as the only possible formalism for everything. This fixation has prevented generations of researchers to access natural language meaning to the grain size that makes meaning representation usable, both theoretically and in practical applications. A small set of predicates using a smaller number of variables as arguments may work well for formal languages but natural language defeats such an approach. The fear of semantics is based on the faulty conclusion that, therefore, natural language meaning is not formalizable. Throw away an insufficient method, and the task becomes feasible!

The relationship between meaning and phonetic form in natural language is a complicated one. For the linguist doing fieldwork on an unwritten language, arriving at a sufficiently precise translation of even simple phrases is often a difficult task. Occasionally, the same grammatical feature or category (such as tense, aspect, person, number, case, etc.) will be represented by different phonetic sequences (allomorphy). The linguist is thus faced with the double problem of deciding whether different appearing forms are manifestations of the same grammatical feature and whether similar appearing forms might represent different grammatical features. It is not enough, of course, to rely totally on translated meanings since differences can be obscured quite easily by inadequate translations. We must, rather, look at glosses as but one piece of evidence in our analysis. It is the contention of this article that the determination of the phonological rules in a grammar (in the generative framework) can be a great help in determining more precisely the form and nature of the grammatical features and categories of a particular language. An excellent case demonstrating how phonological considerations elucidate grammatical features can be found in Lummi, a (Straits) Salish language formerly spoken along northern Puget Sound around Bellingham Bay in northwestern Washington State.2

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Understanding how -ing forms are rendered is crucial for maintaining the demand for accurate, contextualized translations in journalism. This study examines the complexities involved in translating the -ing form in English (SL) into the Indonesian language (TL), highlighting the grammatical, syntactic, and contextual nuances that influence translation choices. The -ing form, which may function as a present participle, gerund, or adjective, often lacks a direct equivalent in the TL, necessitating adaptations based on syntactic role and meaning. This study explores the linguistic features and classify the various translation techniques used to transfer the messages of the English -ing forms in The Jakarta Post's editorial text into the TL. Three important findings can be drawn from a close examination of the data gathered. First, it is observed that six English terms with the suffix -ing are used to represent nouns; these are then translated into six different adjectives in Indonesian. Second, there are five instances of English -ing forms that function as gerunds, or nouns in the context of a sentence. Third, the present participle is used in continuous tenses to indicate ongoing acts in five different cases. The study, which uses Molina & Albir's translation techniques for analysis, reveals that techniques like literal translation amplification, equivalent, and reduction are especially good at retaining the meaning and sense of natural language in the TL. By providing practical guidelines for translators engaged in English– Indonesian language pair work, this study makes a significant contribution to the field of translation studies.

Before the advent of symbolism, i.e. before the end of the 16th Century, algebraic calculations were made using natural language. Through a kind of metaphorical process, a few terms from everyday life (e.g. thing, root) acquired a technical mathematical status and constituted the specialized language of algebra. The introduction of letters and other symbols (e.g. “+”, “=”) made it possible to achieve what is considered one of the greatest cultural accomplishments in human history, namely, the constitution of a symbolic algebraic language and the concomitant rise of symbolic thinking. Because of their profound historical ties with natural language, the emerging syntax and meanings of symbolic algebraic language were marked in a definite way by the syntax and meanings of the former. However, at a certain point, these ties were loosened and algebraic symbolism became a language in its own right. Without alluding to the theory of recapitulation, in this paper, we travel back and forth from history to the present to explore key passages in the constitution of the syntax and meanings of symbolic algebraic language. A contextual semiotic analysis of the use of algebraic terms in 9th century Arabic as well as in contemporary students' mathematical activity, sheds some light on the conceptual challenges posed by the learning of algebra.

Anaphora in natural language processing and information retrieval

In this paper, we present a contribution to solve the problem of organizing the representation of experience in computational systems which are able to generate relevant linguistic descriptions of data for specific users and contexts. We claim, that, typically, the expert knowledge modeled in these systems is limited to one of the dimensions of the meaning of natural language. Here, we model the experience base distinguishing among three types of meaning, namely, Ideational meaning concerning with the technical, impersonal description of the specific phenomenon; Interpersonal meaning concerning with the role of the partners involved in the communication process and Textual meaning concerning with the contribution to the meaning of the specific realization with natural language of both previous types of meaning. In order to organize these types of meaning (also called components of experience base) in a practical computational representation, we have built an ontology that will help designers to model their experience in the application domain. Using this ontology, the computational system is able of identifying the most suitable linguistic descriptions for describing the input data. Our approach is presented with the support of a practical example in the domain of the maintenance of comfort in a room.