In Natural Language Processing (NLP), disambiguation is the procedure used to solve name conflicts of polysemic concepts (different meanings); in fact, phrase disambiguation is a problem not totally solved in NLP. Several disambiguation types exist; for instante, noun disambiguation (bank is a word with several meanings) or when a word is both used as a noun and as a preposition. Work herein re...

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reasoning with English sentences featuring temporal prepositions, temporal subordinating conjunctions and the order-denoting adjectives ‘first’ and ‘last’. A fragment of English featuring these constructions, called TPE, is defined by means of a context-free grammar. The phrasestructures which this grammar assigns to the sentences it recog...

Learning spatial prepositions is an important problem in spatial cognition. We describe a model for learning how to classify visual scenes according to what spatial preposition they depict. We use SEQL, an existing model of analogical generalization, to construct relational descriptions from stimuli input as hand-drawn sketches. We show that this model can distinguish between in, on, above, bel...

Many languages allow a pronoun to go unpronounced in the presence of inflectional marking for person and number. This paper explores the hypothesis that inflection may itself be ‘pronominal’ using data from Irish which exhibits a well-known complementary distribution between person/number inflection and pronouns. Such complementarity follows if inflection forms a syntactic chain with a pronoun ...

The bond between England and the UAE date back to over 220 years ago. This article explored interference of Arabic prepositions in English used United Arab Emirates (UAE), their occurrences light gender level education, two important social variables related linguistic behavior. To do so, participants translated 20 sentences into as well filled 30 gaps with missing prepositions. We also experim...