Cognitive Compositional Semantics using Continuation Dependencies

Schuler, William; Wheeler, Adam

doi:10.3115/v1/s14-1018

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 32 publications

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“…2 Dependencies shown here can be interpreted as a shorthand for distributed representations of sentence meanings compatible with cognitive computational neuroscientific models of episodic memory (Schuler and Wheeler, 2014).…”

Section: Grammar Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 93%

Parsing Chinese with a Generalized Categorial Grammar

Duan

Schuler

2015

Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF) 2015 Workshop

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Categorial grammars are attractive because they have a clear account of unbounded dependencies. This accounting is especially important in Mandarin Chinese which makes extensive usage of unbounded dependencies. However, parsers trained on existing categorial grammar annotations (Tse and Curran, 2010) extracted from the Penn Chinese Treebank (Xue et al., 2005) are not as accurate as those trained on the original treebank, possibly because enforcing a small set of inference rules in these grammars leads to large sets of categories, which cause sparse data problems. This work reannotates the Penn Chinese Treebank into a generalized categorial grammar which uses a larger rule set and a substantially smaller category set while retaining the capacity to model unbounded dependencies. Experimental results show a statistically significant improvement in parsing accuracy with this categorial grammar.

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Section: Grammar Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 93%

Parsing Chinese with a Generalized Categorial Grammar

Duan

Schuler

2015

Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF) 2015 Workshop

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Lexicon and Logic: A Corpus-Based Investigation Into a Connection Between Prepositional Senses and Quantifier Scope

Grudzińska,

Siemieniuk,

Leczkowski

2023

Journal of Semantics

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Previous research has indicated that abstract grammatical rules and forms fall short of predicting quantifier scope and that lexical/pragmatic knowledge plays a significant part in quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD). More recent works have argued that world knowledge in the form of relations among objects may be salient to QSD. This paper contributes to this line of research by providing support to the claim that there is a connection between our lexical knowledge about preposition meanings and quantifier scope. More specifically, we propose that certain prepositional senses encode dependency relations that have an effect on scope-taking preferences. For example, the preposition of expressing ‘part-whole sense’ contributes to our choice of the inverse scope reading for the construction a day of every month by introducing a dependency between wholes (months) and their respective parts (days). Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for every month, there is a different day that belongs to it (every month > a day). Furthermore, universal quantification in locative and temporal prepositional phrases tends to support inverse scope. For example, the locative preposition on — as in a store on each side of the street — implies ‘disjointness’ (objects do not occupy more than one place at a time), and hence can be interpreted as a dependency between each side of the street and the respective stores located on them. Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for each side of the street, there is a different store located on it (each side of the street > a store). For studying the connection between prepositional senses and quantifier scope in the wild, we use a scope-disambiguated corpus created by AnderBois et al. ( 2012), additionally annotated with prepositional senses using the Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) scheme proposed in Schneider et al. ( 2018, 2020). The results of the corpus study combined with psycholinguistic experiments support the claim made here that certain prepositional senses are strong predictors of quantifier scope.

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Graded sensitivity to structure and meaning throughout the human language network

Shain

Kean

Lipkin

et al. 2021

Preprint

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How are syntactically and semantically connected word sequences, or constituents, represented in the human language system? An influential fMRI study, Pallier et al. (2011, PNAS), manipulated the length of constituents in sequences of words or pseudowords. They reported that some language regions (in the anterior temporal cortex and near the temporo-parietal junction) were sensitive to constituent length only for sequences of real words but not pseudowords. In contrast, language regions in the inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortex showed the same pattern of increased response to longer constituents—and similar overall response magnitudes— for word and pseudoword sequences. Based on these results, Pallier et al. argued that the latter regions represent abstract sentence structure. Here we identify methodological and theoretical concerns with the Pallier et al. study and conduct a replication across two fMRI experiments. Our results do not support Pallier et al.’s critical claim of distinct neural specialization for abstract syntactic representations. Instead, we find that all language regions show a similar profile of sensitivity to both constituent length and lexicality (stronger responses to real-word than pseudoword stimuli). In addition, we argue that the constituent length effect in these experiments i) is not readily grounded in established theories of sentence processing, and ii) may not actually derive from syntactic structure building, but may instead reflect the temporal receptive window of the human language system.Significance StatementAn influential study (Pallier et al., 2011, PNAS) has been widely interpreted as evidence that inferior frontal and posterior temporal brain regions perform abstract syntactic processing during language comprehension, independent of lexical content. Here we identify theoretical, empirical, and methodological concerns with the original study and conduct a replication across two experiments. Contrary to Pallier et al. (2011), we find evidence that both syntactic and lexical processing are distributed throughout the human language network, consistent with prior arguments for a highly lexicalized and distributed human language processing system.

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Cognitive Compositional Semantics using Continuation Dependencies

Cited by 4 publications

References 32 publications

Parsing Chinese with a Generalized Categorial Grammar

Parsing Chinese with a Generalized Categorial Grammar

Lexicon and Logic: A Corpus-Based Investigation Into a Connection Between Prepositional Senses and Quantifier Scope

Graded sensitivity to structure and meaning throughout the human language network

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