This paper describes a system that resolves prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity in English sentence processing. This attachment problem is ubiquitous in English text, and is widely known as a place where semantics determines syntactic form. The decision is made based on a four-tuple composed of the head verb of the verb phrase, the head noun of the noun phrase, and the preposition and hea...

This paper presents a linguistic-based approach to term extraction from corpora in the biomedical domain. The method is based on an analysis of terms and their context that verify linguistic constraints. It focuses on participles and prepositional complements. The purpose of our approach is to obtain terms that are relevant for knowledge acquisition applications, such as the creation and enrich...

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After read...

I present a descriptive analysis of reference to physical space in the Penn Discourse TreeBank. In particular, I analyze the occurrence of spatial prepositional phrases relative to the discourse relations and semantic senses that hold between two adjacent clauses. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: (1) to better understand how often spatial reference occurs in discourse and (2) to in...

This paper addresses the elaboration of a relation-logical compositional semantics for the meaning content of nominals using formal ontologies as semantic domains. Prepositions are conceived as denoting binary semantic role relations between concepts in the ontology. The ontology comes with ontological affinities specifying the admissible ontological combinations. The key idea is to establish a...

The animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used event-related potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case m...

O'Brien, Braine, and Yang argue that the mental model theory of prepositional reasoning is easy to refute, and they report 3 experiments that they believe falsify the theory. In contrast, Bonatti argues that the model theory is too flexible to be falsified. We show that O'Brien et al.'s experiments do not refute the model theory and that Bonatti's claims are ill founded. Formal rule theories of...