The treatment of nominal compounds raises several problems for NLP. On the one hand the relationship between the head noun and the modifier can be implicit, such as in petrol gauge, where the gauge is an instrument that measures an amount of fuel. On the other hand this relationship can be ambiguous such as in release signal which can either refer to a signal which is activated when the release...

• Syntactic approaches to word formation erase the distinction between that component of languages which is responsible for the formation of words – the generative lexicon – and that component which is responsible for the formation of sentences – the syntax. • Since syntax as an independent module is needed anway, for reasons of minimal design of the human language faculty and ontological parsi...

Semantic symbols are essential components of Chinese characters. ShuoWenJieZi (Xyu Shen 121), the oldest dictionary of Chinese, is organized according to the radical forms as semantic symbols. Characters are classified according radicals, and their meanings cluster around the basic concept of the semantic symbol. We believe that ShuoWenJieZi radicals systemreflect conventional conceptualization...

Natural and non-natural kinds have significant differences. This paper explores the subclasses of each kind and establishes the type system for event nouns. These nouns are divided into natural types, artifactual types, complex types (including natural complex types and artifactual complex types). This new classification not only enriches the Generative Lexicon theory, but also helps us to capt...

This paper presents a method to automatically acquire a given noun’s telic and agentive roles from corpus data. These relations form part of the qualia structure assumed in the generative lexicon, where the telic role represents a typical purpose of the entity and the agentive role represents the origin of the entity. Our proposed method employs a supervised machine-learning technique which mak...

This paper describes a case study on methods for automatically extracting qualia relations from dictionary glosses in Italian, namely the Senso Comune De Mauro Dictionary (SCDM). The qualia extraction has been addressed by means of a pattern-based approach and lexical match with an Italian generative lexicon based language resource, PAROLE-SIMPLECLIPS (PSC). The evaluation of the extraction app...

This paper describes the publication and linking of (parts of) PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS (PSC), a large scale Italian lexicon, to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud using the lemon model. The main challenge of the conversion is discussed, namely the reconciliation between the PSC semantic structure which contains richly encoded semantic information, following the qualia structure of the Gener...

The paper discusses shallow semantic annotation of Bulgarian treebank. Our goal is to construct the next layer of linguistic interpretation over the morphological and syntactic layers that have already been encoded in the treebank. The annotation is called shallow because it encodes only the senses for the non-functional words and the relations between the semantic indices connected to them. We...

This paper is part of the thesis by Bruno Mery advised by Christian Bassac and Christian Retore in the years 2006-2011, on the topic “Modelling lexical semantics in a type-theoretic framework”. It is a doctoral thesis in computer science, in the area of natural language processing, aiming to bring forth a formal framework that takes into account, in the parsing of the semantics of a sentence, o...

We present two methods for automatically discovering the telic and agentive roles of nouns from corpus data. These relations form part of the qualia structure assumed in generative lexicon theory, where the telic role represents a typical purpose of the entity and the agentive role represents the origin of the entity. The first discovery method uses hand-generated templates for each role type, ...