25 September: DCLRS -- Harry Bunt, Friday, September 28 16:00 (TCD Lloyd Institute
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of September 2018 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2018 | Full index
On Friday of this week (September 28, 2018), at 16:00, in room LB08 of
the Lloyd Institute (TCD), Prof. Harry Bunt will speak.
Title:
Semantic annotation of quantification in natural language
Abstract:
Quantification is ubiquitous in natural language: it occurs in
virtually every sentence. It occurs whenever a predicate P is applied
to a set S of objects, where it gives rise to such questions as (1) To
how many members of S is P applied? (2) Is P applied to individual
members of S, or to S as a whole, or to certain subsets of S? (3) What
is the size of S? (4) How is S determined by lexical, syntactic and
contextual information? Moreover, if P is applied to combinations of
members from different sets, issues of relative scope arise.
Quantification is a complex phenomenon, both from a semantic point of
view and because of the complexity of the relation between the syntax
and the semantics of quantification, and has been studied extensively
by logicians, linguistics, and computational semanticists. Nowadays it
is generally agreed that quantifier expressions in natural language
are noun phrases, which is why quantification arises in every
sentence.
The International Organization for Standardization ISO has in recent
years started to develop annotation standards for semantic phenomena
with the aim of obtaining interoperable annotated corpora, both in
support of linguistic research and for building semantically more
advanced NLP systems. Standard annotation schemes have been
established for time and events, dialogue acts, discourse relations,
semantic roles, and spatial information; quantification and
coreference will be next. In this talk I will discuss some of the
issues involved in developing an annotation scheme for quantification,
including the definition of (1) an abstract syntax of the annotations,
(2) concrete XML representations, and (3) the semantics of the
annotations.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Harry Bunt is Professor of Language and Artificial Intelligence,
Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He has formal education in
physics and mathematics as well as linguistics, and experience working
at Philips Research Labs before returning to academia. Has worked in
many areas of computational linguistics: parsing, annotation, noun
phrase semantics, pragmatics, dialogue, and more. He has been a leader
in the field in setting up a number of international conference series
that continue to archive leading work in the area. His work in
dialogue analysis, using a framework called Dynamic Interpretation
Theory, is the basis of an international standard for dialogue
annotation (ISO 24617-2).
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The Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar series, hosted
this year by the Trinity Centre for Computing and Language Studies, is
a cooperation among Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University,
University College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Technology, a
long standing collaboration which overlaps with the SFI CNGL/ADAPT
centres.
www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/intelligent_systems/clg/clg_web/DCLRS
Trinity Centre for Computing and Language Studies
www.scss.tcd.ie/CCLS
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of September 2018 | Index of year: 2018 | Full index