In this paper, we describe our experiments in preposition disambiguation based on a – compared to a previous study – revised annotation scheme and new features derived from a matrix factorization approach as used in the field of distributional semantics. We report on the annotation and Maximum Entropy modelling of the word senses of two German prepositions, mit (‘with’) and auf (‘on’). 500 occu...

This paper presents a formal semantics for productive iconic and deictic gestures that speakers use in tandem with speech in face-to-face conversation. In contrast to conventionalised, emblematic gestures, the meaning that productive gestures derive from their form is incomplete, and their content can be determined only through links to context, including previous gestures and simultaneous spee...

This paper considers the link between lexical category and lexical semantics, examining variation in the category of property concept (PC) words (Dixon, 1982; Thompson, 1989)—words introducing the descriptive content in translational equivalents of sentences whose main predicate is an adjective in languages with large open classes of them. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) conjecture that nomi...

Unification in Description Logics (DLs) has been proposed as an inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. For the DL EL, which is used to define several large biomedical ontologies, unification is NP-complete. However, the unification algorithms for EL developed until recently could not deal with ontologies containing general concept inclusions (GCIs...

Object-oriented data models are being extended with recursion to gain expressive power. This complicates both the incoherence detection problem which has to deal with recursive classes descriptions and the optimization problem which has to deal with recur-sive queries on complex objects. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework able to face the above problems. In particular, it is able...

Starting from the original formulation of minimal propositional logic proposed by Johansson, this thesis aims to investigate some of its relevant subsystems. The main focus is on negation, defined as a primitive unary operator in the language. Each of the subsystems considered is defined by means of some ‘axioms of negation’: different axioms enrich the negation operator with different properti...

In this paper, we present a deductive object-oriented knowledge base system, called R-DEVICE, which imports RDF data into the CLIPS production rule system as objects and uses a deductive rule language for querying and reasoning about them. In our model properties of resources are not scattered across several triples as in most other RDF storage and querying systems, resulting in increased query...

The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a syst...

Algebraic semantics for some hybrid logics, and a new Sahlqvist Theorem Willem Conradie and Claudette Robinson Hybrid logics extend basic modal logic with special variables, called nominals, which are evaluated to singletons in Kripke models, thus acting as names for states in models. These logics typically also include other operators which utilize the nominals and in so doing take us well bey...

Computing the least common subsumer (lcs) is one of the most prominent non-standard inference in description logics. Baader, Küsters, and Molitor have shown that the lcs of concept descriptions in the description logic EL always exists and can be computed in polynomial time. In the present paper, we try to extend this result from concept descriptions to concepts defined in a (possibly cyclic) E...