Miscellaneous Issues in NLP Syntax and Semantics That We Don't Have Time For So Will Just Gloss Over in a Superficial Way

Disambiguation

Word sense ambiguity
John put the pot in the dishwasher. following
- The guests were on their way so ...
- The instructions said the soil should be dry so ...
- The police were on their way so ...
An approach to disambiguation: Activation spreads in parallel through a network of nodes representing concepts (and possibly also syntactic structures), converging on the interpretation (node) with the most support.

Compositionality: the meaning of a linguistic expression is a combination (specified by the syntax-semantics interface) of the meanings of the parts of the expression
Context-free and context-dependent meaning
- Words: red hair/bricks/blood, a (fake) gun
- Sentences: I like your hair
Idiomaticity, figurative language, metonymy, etc.: deviations from compositionality for particular patterns
- She spilled the beans.
- The mushroom omelet left without paying.
- If you're thirsty, there's some beer in the refrigerator.

The same syntactic case (for example, subject) can signal a variety of different semantic cases.
Phyllis {likes, detests, trusts, envies, respects} Harold. Phyllis {pleases, sickens, inspires, moves, bores} Harold.
Martha {saw, heard, smelled, tasted, felt} the squid. Martha {looked at, listened to, smelled, tasted, felt} the squid.
In different languages, the same semantic role may correspond to different syntactic roles (for example, direct object in English, subject in German).
I like you. Du gefällst mir. (German)
The same verb may be associated with different case frames, that is, different patterns of associations between syntactic and semantic roles.
The vase shattered. The ball shattered the vase. Terry shattered the vase with the ball.
Hal smeared peanut butter on the wall. Hal smeared the wall with peanut butter.
Some ambiguity concerns semantic case.
Jimmy pushed the truck under the table.
What semantic cases?

Last updated: 24 April 1996
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~gasser/Q351/nlp_misc.html
Comments: gasser@salsa.indiana.edu
Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University