Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst addeddate 20200402 02. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in. The study is based on a corpus of 5 verbally ambiguous headlines found on web sites presenting humorous bits of information. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. Some researchers prefer the term semantic ambiguity as this makes it. Recently, theoretical accounts of semantic ambiguity resolution have faced two main challenges. As the reference for people who are interested in analyzing lexical and structural ambiguity in. More than one syntactic alternative, represented by parse contexts, are analyzed together with joint analysis of referents, word senses, relation types, and layout of a semantic representation for each syntactic alternative. Pdf semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution. Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution maryellen c. Various linguists have however, identified lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, phonetic or phonological ambiguity and semantic ambiguity as types of ambiguity. Semantic ambiguity and perceived ambiguity citeseerx. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, cambridge.
Results from a series of naming experiments demonstrated that major lexical categories of simple sentences can provide sources of constraint on the interpretation of ambiguous words homonyms. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is defined as words having multiple meanings. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity. Graeme hirst, studies in natural language processing. It differs from syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words. Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. My claim is that it is the latter, and that the syntactic processing module is a very simple device which blindly and faithfully constructs all possible analyses for the sentence up. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst department of computer science, university of toronto the right of the university of. Resolving ambiguity using latent semantic analysis in a small corpus of text. Semantic interpretation, resolution studies in natural language processing. Skripsi yang berjudul the analysis of lexical and structural ambiguity in your letters of the jakarta post ini membahas tentang jenis kata yang ambigu secara leksikal dan jenis kalimat frase yang ambigu secara struktural. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity 3 semantic interpreter.
Lexical ambiguity in sentence comprehension robert a. These results are discussed within a constraintbased framework for ambiguity resolution in which effects of context are determined by the strength and relevance of the contextual constraint and by the. The chapters are organized around three major themes. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences. Thompsonschill university of pennsylvania 3401 walnut street suite 400a philadelphia, pa 19104 corresponding author. Notes on ambiguity there are two types of ambiguity. In some cases, listener are consciously aware of ambiguity in an expression. Thus, given d and no semantic ambiguity, we know that the rule if e then h, either will or will not be executed for all users. Lexical ambiguity and the role of knowledge representation. Because ambiguity is always related to interpretation, real semantic ambiguityishardtoverify. Dussias thepennsylvaniastateuniversity this study investigates whether proficient second language l2 speakers of spanish and english use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences con. Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity and the role of knowledge representation in.
The word or term communication has also attracted myriad of definitions from experts in variousrelated field hence, little 1983 describes it as a chameleon of a word changing the. Us8504355b2 joint disambiguation of syntactic and semantic. This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution. General interest semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme hirst. Nov 10, 2017 ambiguity ambiguity can bedefined as a word, phrase or sentence that has more than one meaning or interpretation. We can usually resolve the ambiguity using context, but sometimes this doesnt work. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity. Seidenberg ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. There are two types of ambiguity syntactic and semantic ambiguities. A example quartet of the spoken sentence stimuli showing the four experimental conditions, which were designed to investigate neural processes occurring at two critical time points during semantic ambiguity.
The idea is to have semantic objects that can handle partially resolved ambiguity just as a polaroid picture develops slowly and update their ambiguity resolution on the basis of the surrounding words. Disparate semantic ambiguity effects from semantic. Previous studies on first language l1 lexical processing have observed that ambiguous words are recognized faster and more accurately than unambiguous words on lexical decision tasks. Characterizing ambiguity ambiguity is a semantic property. However earlier the article has lexical ambiguity is contrasted semantic ambiguity. This problem has been discussed in details by computational linguists as the problem of structural ambiguity, e. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity presents an important advance in computer understanding of natural language. Mar 10, 2015 semantic and syntactic ambiguity march 10, 2015 titivillus logic jan sanders cartoons, logic, logical fallacies today i want to talk about two different kinds of ambiguity and i want to explain how each of these different kinds of ambiguity can give rise to fallacies. Some investigators have endorsed a particularly strong version of this idea. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguityjanuary 1987. Resolving semantic ambiguity arrrays the work of leading theorists on the issues surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ambiguous text. In particular, the focus of the research is on examples of lexical and syntactic ambiguity that result in sources of voluntary or involuntary humor. One longstanding controversy is which of these two modules bears responsibility for the immediate resolution of ambiguity. In this contribution, we focus on the ambiguity of sentences that should be.
Nearly all words in english are polysemous, meaning that many sentences have semantic ambiguity. Manipulation of verb experiment 1 or subject noun experiment 2 specificity produced contexts that were empirically rated as being strongly biased or ambiguous. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful contextdependent interpretations. Ambiguity ambiguity can bedefined as a word, phrase or sentence that has more than one meaning or interpretation. In both cases theres polysemy, but while lexical ambiguity is a specific, finite number of alternative meanings, semantic ambiguity is openended. First, the relatedness of an ambiguous words interpretations, as well as the words total number of interpretations, have been found to modulate semantic ambiguity effects. Pdf ambiguity in psycholinguistics ebooks includes pdf. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in l2 learners some effects of bilinguality on l1 and l2 processing strategies paolae. The existence of ambiguity provides a puzzle for func.
Semantic interpretation and ambiguity sciencedirect. Syntactic ambiguity resolution 531 in sla literature. Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Section 5 explores some possible strategies for explaining ambiguity, concluding with pointers to our ongoing research on the subject.
The paper analyzes some forms of linguistic ambiguity in english in a specific register, i. In a study of syntactic ambiguity resolution in adult l2 speakers, frenck. The following material is an adapted form of material created by student participants of the project elearning resources for semantics. The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. The parser interrogates a process known as the semantic enquiry desk sed to resolve two kinds of structural ambiguity. Semantic and syntactic ambiguity march 10, 2015 titivillus logic jan sanders cartoons, logic, logical fallacies today i want to talk about two different kinds of ambiguity and i want to explain how each of these different kinds of ambiguity can give rise to fallacies. The term ambiguity is used to describe a word, a phrase or a sentence with a multiple meanings. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number.
Lexical ambiguity jennifer rodd department of experimental. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity studies in natural language processing graeme hirst in this particularly well written volume graeme hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation conceptual analysis by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical. Implications for the neural basis of sentence processing. Implications for the neural basis of sentence processing david january, john c. Nov 02, 2016 robert kiyosaki 2019 the speech that broke the internet keep them poor. Introduction over the past three decades, lexical ambiguity resolution has been one of the hot issues in. When a word has multiple meanings, this is called polysemy. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in sentence processing. Semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution article pdf available in the american journal of psychology 1144. This afforded us the opportunityto examine meaning resolution processes under circumstances in which syntactic information could influence semantic resolution i.
Colocalization of stroop and syntactic ambiguity resolution in brocas area. Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure underlying the word order therein. The sed in turn uses the polaroid word mechanism to investigate the consequences of tentative decisions. A generalized probabilistic semantic model for ambiguity resolution. The fact that ambiguity occurs on so many linguistic levels suggests that a farreaching principle is needed to explain its origins and persistence. Mainstream sentenceprocessing research is largely inter. Pdf semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity. This process becomes particularly interesting at a. The question is whether l2 speakers use the same set of constraints, rules. The influence of syntactic category and semantic constraints.
First published in 1930, seven types of ambiguity has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of english literary criticism. Section 4 responds to some possible objections to the argument in section 3. Thus, relative to unambiguous controls, studies often. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity by graeme.
Effects of syntactic category assignment on lexical. The communicative function of ambiguity in language. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. We saw her duck is offered as an example of semantic ambiguity, with two possible readings. Syntactic ambiguity is the phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or meanings due to different phrase structure analysis.
A new approach to semantic interpretation in natural language understanding is. Colocalization of stroop and syntactic ambiguity resolution. Sources of sentence constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution. In this research, l1 and l2 speakers of english were asked whether a letter string on a computer screen. Robert kiyosaki 2019 the speech that broke the internet keep them poor. A collection of the best research on lar available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with lack of. As with these previous studies, our finding that semantic ambiguity resolution activates posterior and not anterior temporal cortex is broadly consistent with neurocognitive models of speech comprehension in which posterior temporal regions support lexical and semantic access in the form of a soundtomeaning interface hickok and. These studies have found that relative clausemain clause ambiguity, which the frequency of the different meanings of an is the ambiguity used in the present experiambiguous word affects the time course with ments. Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are possible. In this example the list of relevant meanings is strictly two items. Lexical ambiguity resolution lar, then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. Recent constraintbased models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause e.
Examining semantic processing in sentential contexts. The problem of semantic interpretation is where one user may view d as e, with complete certainty, while another user may view d as e, also with complete certainty. Ambiguities in a natural language expression are interpreted by jointly disambiguating multiple alternative syntactic and semantic interpretations. Semantic interpretation and ambiguity department of computer. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity graeme hirst.
Syntactic and semantic ambiguity are frequent enough to present a substantial challenge to natural language processing. The present study examined the ambiguity effects in second language l2 word recognition. Semantic categorization test performance silhuouette score, in left graphs, and wordsim353 test performance correlation, in right graphs, in function of the corpus size for lsa and skipgram model. Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity guide books. Dissociating frontotemporal contributions to semantic. The neural time course of semantic ambiguity resolution in. They found that these regions were more active when viewing semantically ambiguous chinese characters than when viewing semantically precise chinese characters. Lexical ambiguity is sometimes used deliberately to create puns and other types. Penulis mengetahui bahwa ambigu bisa terjadi di situasi apa pun baik di dalam. Thus, semantic interpretation does not include the resolu tion in context of anaphors or definite reference, or of deictic or indexical expressions, or the recognition and comprehension of speech acts, irony and. Genuine ambiguities, where a sentence really can have two different meanings to an intelligent hearer, and computer ambiguities, where the meaning is entirely clear to a hearer but a computer detects more than one meaning.