Employing Cognitive Notions in Multilingual Summarization of News Reports

The paper presents an approach to automatic text understanding inspired by speech act theory and cognitive semantics, especially by the notion of ‘mental spaces’ (Fauconnier 1985), and by Pustejovsky’s (1991a, 1991b, 1995) notion of ‘qualia’ and his definition of formal and telic hyponymy. This approach is employed in an experimental system for understanding of news reports and multilingual generation of news summaries. The system, aims at analyses of English news reports in the domain of the world’s news and generation of summaries in Swedish, Danish, and Polish. The paper focuses on the understanding component and on the possibility of using WordNet as the main lexical knowledge resource for English. An appropriate semantic analysis requires some modifications of the hyper-/hyponymy and holo-/meronymy relations that are encoded in WordNet. A combination of a cognitive analysis of certain lexical and phrasal categories with qualia-based re-formulations of WordNet hierarchies is proposed and tested.