The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagné & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of semantic categories, rather than individual conce...

In nany la;.RuaRes (e.g. Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish, German) the relationship cf a noun phrase to the rest of a sentence is indicated by altered forms of the noun. The possible relationships are ealleo (surface) "cases". Because (1) it is difficult to specify semantic-free selection rules for the cases, and (?) related phenomena based on prepositions or word order appear in apparently case-...

This paper presents a frame annotation scheme for Danish nouns, with VerbNet-derived frames and semantic roles covering both frame arguments and satellites. The scheme was implemented as a new module for a Danish frame tagger and applied to a 90,000-token Danish treebank with ongoing manual revision. In addition to explicit frames, Constraint Grammar rules are used to map free semantic roles on...

Conceptual combination refers to the cognitive process by which people combine two or more concepts to represent a new conceptual entity. Literature has studied the primary interpretive strategies of a conceptual combination denoted by two nouns (e.g., robin snake): relation-linking (e.g., a robin snake is a snake that eats robins) and property-mapping (e.g., a robin snake is a snake that has r...

This paper describes a workbench system for constructing a dictionary to interpret compound nouns, which integrates the acquisition of semantic information and interpretation of compound nouns. First, we extract semantic information from a machine readable dictionary and corpora using regular expressions. Then, the semantic relation of compound nouns are interpreted based on semantic relations,...

The dialogue system HAM-RPM simulates a person conversing about one of several interchangeable scenes in colloquial German. Attention is currently being focused on a hotel reservation situation in which the system is required to construct and make use of a model of its dialogue partner's goals and beliefs. This situation calls for a semantic representation language which is declarative and whic...

There is a well known tradition in the literature on definite Determiner Phrases (DPs) that concentrates on the asymmetries in the distribution and the anaphoric properties of determiners such as articles and demonstratives. A huge amount of work on the topic has been done on French by linguists like Kleiber, Corblin, Marandin, Maes, Apothéloz, Reichler-Béguelin or De Mulder, and on English by ...

This paper studies the noun phrase structure of Paiwan demonstratives by examining in detail the typology of demonstratives, possessives and numerals in Formosan languages. Four main issues are addressed: in Formosan languages (A) whether the word order variation in nominals may be best accounted for along the lines of the antisymmetry condition in Kayne (1994); (B) whether demonstratives, poss...

The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical) tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words from the...

Sometimes modifiers have a strong effect on core aspects of the meaning of the nouns they are attached to: A parrot is a desirable pet, but a dead parrot is, at the very least, a rather unusual household companion. In order to stimulate computational research into the impact of modification on phrase meaning, we collected and made available a large dataset containing subject ratings for a varie...