Countability and semi-uniformities

Abstract Nouns and Countability

Nouns and Countability

Countability: Individuation and Context

Much of the recent countability research agrees on the idea that a satisfactory account of individuation in terms of what counts as “one” unit for counting is highly relevant for characterizing a semantics of the mass/count distinction. (What counts as “one” is not necessarily a formal atom in a Boolean algebra or a natural unit associated with natural kinds like cat.) Taking the most parsimoni...

Reinforcing English Countability Prediction with One Countability per Discourse Property

Countability of English nouns is important in various natural language processing tasks. It especially plays an important role in machine translation since it determines the range of possible determiners. This paper proposes a method for reinforcing countability prediction by introducing a novel concept called one countability per discourse. It claims that when a noun appears more than once in ...

Contextual Uniformities

Countability: Individuation and Context

We agree with recent countability research that a satisfactory account of individuation in terms of what counts as ‘one’ unit for counting is highly relevant for characterizing a semantics of the mass/count distinction. However, we argue that an account that rests on individuation alone does not suffice to cover all the relevant mass/count data, in particular the puzzling mass/count variation d...