We present the semantics component of a speech understanding and dialogue system that is developed at our institute. Due to pronunciation variabilities and vagueness of the word recognition process, semantics in a speech understanding system has to resolve additional problems. Its main task is not only to build up a representation structure for the meaning of an utterance, as in a system for wr...

1.1 The Task D o m a i n Here we address the problem of mapping phrase meanings into their conceptual representations. Figurative phrases are pervasive in human communication, yet they are difficult to explain theoretically. In fact, the ability to handle idiosyncratic behavior of phrases should be a criterion for any theory of lexical representation. Due to the huge number of such phrases in t...

The explication of the semantics of geospatial concepts is a crucial research priority which affects various aspects of information representation, formalization, integration, and exchange. The aim of the present paper is twofold. Firstly, it proposes a methodology for the semantic definition of geospatial concepts. The proposal is based on an analysis of the semantics of geospatial concepts de...

Semantic inference is an important component in many natural language understanding applications. Classical approaches to semantic inference rely on logical representations for meaning, which may be viewed as being “external” to the natural language itself. However, practical applications usually adopt shallower lexical or lexical-syntactic representations, which correspond closely to language ...

In this paper, we present a computational approach to bilingual speakers’ non-native (L2) lexical-semantic representations. Specifically, based on detailed analyses of the error patterns shown in our previous simulation results ( Zhao and Li Int. J. Bilingual. Educ. Bilingual., 2010, 13, 505–524 ; Li, Bilingualism, 2013, 16, 288–303 ), aim at revealing underlying learning factors that may affec...

We present an approach to combining distributional semantic representations induced from text corpora with manually constructed lexical-semantic networks. While both kinds of semantic resources are available with high lexical coverage, our aligned resource combines the domain specificity and availability of contextual information from distributional models with the conciseness and high quality ...