Clarifying Noun Phrase Semantics

Clarifying Noun Phrase Semantics

Abstract Reprise questions are a common dialogue device allowing a conversational participant to request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase. As such they can act as semantic probes, providing us with information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types and thus helping to sharpen the principle of compositionality. This paper ...

Clarifying Noun Phrase Semantics in HPSG

This paper examines reprise questions: questions which request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase.1 As such they can act as semantic probes, providing information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types. We present corpus evidence regarding the meaning of nouns and noun phrases, and argue that this evidence runs contrary to ...

The Semantics of Noun Phrase Anaphora

Noun Phrase Structure

In discussing the structure of noun phrases crosslinguistically, I will assume a rather rough characterization of noun phrases, as syntactic constituents which serve as arguments of verbs. There are a variety of ways in which this is inadequate as a precise definition and there are a number of legitimate questions about exactly what ought to be considered a noun phrase, but these issues are som...

Learning Noun Phrase Query Segmentation

Query segmentation is the process of taking a user’s search-engine query and dividing the tokens into individual phrases or semantic units. Identification of these query segments can potentially improve both document-retrieval precision, by first returning pages which contain the exact query segments, and document-retrieval recall, by allowing query expansion or substitution via the segmented u...