Mats Rooth

Cornell University | CU · Department of Linguistics and Faculty of Computing and Information

Pictorial free perception reports are sequences in comics or film of one unit that depicts an agent who is looking, and a following unit that depicts what they see. This paper proposes an analysis in possible worlds semantics and event semantics of such sequences. Free perception sequences are implicitly anaphoric, since the interpretation of the s...

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech “harvested” on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g. the comparative) is sensitive to the...

1 Semantic and phonological scope of focus In "anaphoric" or "givenness" theories of the semantics and pragmatics of intona-tional focus, the first sentence in (1) is in a certain sense the antecedent for the focus in the second sentence. The representation (2) makes the anaphora explicit using an operator "∼" which marks the scope and the antecede...

We describe a methodology for investigating the semantic-grammatical conditioning and phonetic realization of contrastive intonation using a web harvest of particular word strings followed by grammatical and acoustic analysis. A commercial audio web search engine using speech recognition retrieved 179 MP3 files purportedly containing a token of the...

We present an approach for smoothing treebank-PCFG lexicons by interpolating treebank lexical parameter estimates with estimates obtained from unannotated data via the Inside-outside algorithm. The PCFG has complex lexical categories, making relative-frequency estimates from a treebank very sparse. This kind of smoothing for complex lexical categor...

We describe procedures which pool lex-ical information from a treebank with frequency information estimated from an unannotated corpus with the inside-outside algorithm. PCFG parameters for non-lexical productions are obtained purely from the treebank. The procedures produce substantial improvements (upto 20.34%) on the task of determining va-lence...

This article reviews some of the theoretical notions and empirical phenomena which figure in current formal-semantic theories of focus. It also develops the connection between “alternative semantics” and “givenness” accounts of focus interpretation.

We describe the induction of lexical resources from unannotated corpora that are aligned with treebank grammars, providing a systematic correspondence between features in the lexical resource and a treebank syntactic resource. We first describe a methodol ogy based on parsing technology for augmenting a treebank database with linguistic features. A...

We propose that ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment can be resolved on the basis of the relative strength of association of the preposition with noun and verb, estimated on the basis of word distribution in a large corpus. This work suggests that a distributional approach can be effective in resolving parsing problems that apparently call for...

The paper describes an extensive experiment in inside-outside estimation of a lexicalized probabilistic context free grammar for German verb-final clauses. Grammar and formalism features which make the experiment feasible are described. Successive models are evaluated on precision and recall of phrase markup.

In a headed tree, each terminal word can be uniquely labeled with a governing word and grammatical relation.

In this paper we analyze two question answering tasks : the TREC-8 question answering task and a set of reading comprehension exams. First, we show that Q/A systems perform better when there are multiple answer opportunities per question. Next, we analyze common approaches to two subproblems: term overlap for answer sentence identification, and ans...

In this paper we analyze two question answering tasks : the TREC-8 question answering task and a set of reading comprehension exams. First, we show that Q/A systems perform better when there are multiple answer opportunities per question. Next, we analyze common approaches to two subproblems: term overlap for answer sentence identification, and ans...

We propose that many ambiguous prepositional phrase attachments can be resolved on the basis of the relative strength of association of the preposition with verbal and nominal heads, estimated on the basis of distribution in an automatically parsed corpus.

This paper presents the use of probabilistic class-based lexica for disambiguation in targetword selection. Our method employs minimal but precise contextual information for disambiguation. That is, only information provided by the target-verb, enriched by the condensed information of a probabilistic class-based lexicon, is used. Induction of class...

this paper, I speculate that sloppy non-pronominals are impossible in ellipsis because ellipsis is at least partially sensitive to the representation of information, perhaps to syntax. The "the same is true of ---" construction is semantically mediated, and so allows for sloppy nonpronominals. Let us now look at an analogues of the representations...

We present a technique for automatic induction of slot annotations for subcategorization frames, based on induction of hidden classes in the EM framework of statistical estimation. The models are empirically evalutated by a general decision test. Induction of slot labeling for subcategorization frames is accomplished by a further application of EM,...

We present a technique for automatic induction of slot annotations for subcategorization frames, based on induction of hidden classes in the EM framework of statistical estimation. The models are empirically evalutated by a general decision test. Induction of slot labeling for subcatego- rization frames is accomplished by a further ap- plication of...

Introduction This chapter explains the theory underlying the lexicon learning system which was implemented at the University of Stuttgart, and reviews the experiment with the induction of a German lexicon which were performed in the Sparkle project. 1 The problems which motivate our work relate to the complexity and size of the lexicon; to the mass...

this memo. In modeling these intuitions in the semantics, we follow Groenendijk, Stokhof, and Veltman (1996) in assuming that, in the construction of models, the same individuals are used in stating the extension of predicates in different worlds, in a way which is significant for the semantics. For instance, we assume that the Hotel Colbert is a c...

According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflex of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and...

this paper is to develop a mathematical and computationalmodel which captures the notion of a selectional dependency between a set ofverbs and a set of nouns, or more generally two sets of words participating in aasset average bit bond cent cost debt dividend foot interest mark pence point price rate rating security share stake stock tax unit value...

This paper elaborates an approach to how semantic material from various parts ofa sentence gets to serve as the restriction of an adverb of quantification with thatsentence as its scope. This enterprise takes for granted a particular view aboutthe semantics of sentences with adverbs of quantification, the one developed byDavid Lewis, Hans Kamp and...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-227).

this article, I will show that contrary to this line of reasoning, second occurrence phenomena are not evidence for the indirect-anaphoric theory of association with focus. In fact, properly understood, they appear to be evidence against it. The first part of the argument has to do with phonetic data indicating that rather than being phonetically u...

This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issues of the phonetics-phonology and semantics- pragmatics of intonation. The target data are to- kens of fixed word strings like "than I did", where intonation varies in a way which correlates with grammatical and pragmatic context. In a web harvest proced...