We present a transition-based system that jointly predicts the syntactic structure and lexical units of a sentence by building two structures over the input words: a syntactic dependency tree and a forest of lexical units including multiword expressions (MWEs). This combined representation allows us to capture both the syntactic and semantic structure of MWEs, which in turn enables deeper downs...

Classically, semantic theories have assumed that words are endowed with universal, immutable meanings. This assumption is not tenable when modeling natural language dialogue; far from treating word meanings as fixed entities, linguistic agents are constantly coordinating useful semantic conventions. They disambiguate polysemous words, construct ad hoc interpretations particular to their communi...

In this précis of our recent book, Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach (Rogers & McClelland 2004), we present a parallel distributed processing theory of the acquisition, representation, and use of human semantic knowledge. The theory proposes that semantic abilities arise from the flow of activation among simple, neuron-like processing units, as governed by the stren...

The event structure (aktionsart) is a widely discussed issue for the representation of verbal semantics in languages. However, there is still problems for the classification of verbs into state, activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive. It is also not clear where are the differences of them embedded in terms of lexical, semantic or syntactic levels. In this paper, we will give a d...

The Abstract Much effort has been put into computational lexicons over tile years, and most systems give much room to (lexical) semantic data. However, in these systems, the effort put on tile study and representation of lexical items to express the umterlying continuum existing in 1) language vagueness and polysemy, and 2) language gaps and mismatches, has remained embryonic. A sense enumerati...

Natural language questions are interpreted to a sequence of patterns to be matched with instances of patterns in a knowledge base (KB) for answering. A natural language (NL) question answering (QA) system utilizes meaningful patterns matching the syntactic/lexical features between the NL questions and KB. In the most of KBs, there are only binary relations in triple form to represent relation b...

This paper deals with the development of the Semantic Web framework for very large ontologies. The Semantic Web is often associated with specific XML-based standards for semantics, such as RDF and OWL. Application of lexical ontologies such as WordNet and others for different tasks on the Semantic Web requires their representation in RDF and/or OWL formats with possibility of the different onto...

The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Eric Atwell, Bill Whyte for helpful commentary and suggestions and also to Clive Souter, George Demetriou who provided me with LKB dictionary and gave me good suggestions. ...

The Unit Graphs (UGs) framework is a graph-based knowledge representation (KR) formalism that is designed to allow for the representation, manipulation, query, and reasoning over linguistic knowledge of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). This paper introduces the UGs framework, and overviews current published outcomes. It first introduces rationale of thi...