In my opinion, the ultimate goal of NLP is to create a computer that really understands the meaning and information conveyed by a Natural Language (NL) text or speech. From a practical point of view, we would like computers to read and understand information in texts so that they could answer correctly questions about that information.2 From a scientific perspective, if a computer is able to un...

It has become nearly axiomatic (and even likely true) to hold that inference generation during language comprehension is a function of two things: (1) the nature of the inference under consideration and (2) the conditions under which the inference is examined. Thus, in the first case, we find the literature rife with observations that while there is little evidence of "automatic" generation of ...

To study false memories in older adults, a lot of experiments used the DRM paradigm (Deese, Roediger et McDermott). Most of the time, the results showed that older adults make more false memories than young adults. To test this hypothesis with a more ecological material, we used a situation of text reading. When we read a text, we activate predictive inferences, which are anticipations of what ...

Much of the recent research on discourse comprehension has centered on the readers’ ability to construct coherent mental representations of texts. In order to form a unifi ed representation of a given text, a reader must be able to join the information presented in the text with his/her background knowledge to construe the meaning that may not be explicitly stated, through the generation of inf...

Blanco & Moldovan (Blanco and Moldovan, 2011) have empirically demonstrated that negated sentences often convey implicit positive inferences, or focus, and that these inferences are both human annotatable and machine learnable. Concentrating on their annotation process, this paper argues that the focusbased implicit positivity should be separated from concepts of scalar implicature and negraisi...

The analysis of natural-language text involves many different kinds of processes that might be described in multiple ways. One way to describe these processes is in terms of the semantics of their requirements and results. Such a description makes it possible to view these processes as analogous to inference rules in a theorem-proving system. This analogy is useful for metacognition because the...

Interpreting causal relations plays an important role in everyday life, for example in scientific inquiries and text comprehension. Errors in causal reasoning can be a recipe for disaster. Despite vast literature on the psychology of human causal reasoning, there are few investigations into preferred inferences in relational three-term problems. Based on a previous formal investigation about re...