Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity

Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language understanding because they may not handle ambiguities at the level that humans naturally do in communication. Additionally, different types of ambiguity may serve different purposes and require different approaches for resolution, and we aim to i...

Intelligent systems that aim at mastering language as humans do must deal with its semantic underspecification, namely, the possibility for a linguistic signal to convey only part of the information needed for communication to succeed. Consider the usages of the pronoun they, which can leave the gender and number of its referent(s) underspecified. Semantic underspecification is not a bug but a crucial language feature that boosts its storage and processing efficiency. Indeed,...

In this introductory article we present the basics of an approach to implementing computational interpreting of natural language aiming to model the meanings of words and phrases. Unlike other approaches, we attempt to define the meanings of text fragments in a composable and computer interpretable way. We discuss models and ideas for detecting different types of semantic incomprehension and choosing the interpretation that makes most sense in a given context. Knowledge repre...

Psychological investigations have led to considerable insight into the working of the human language comprehension system. In this article, we look at a set of principles derived from psychological findings to argue for a particular organization of linguistic knowledge along with a particular processing strategy and present a computational model of sentence processing based on those principles. Many studies have shown that human sentence comprehension is an incremental and in...

Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language, yet humans have no difficulty coping with it. In fact, the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious. But it is not infallible, however, as example 1 demonstrates. 1. The horse raced past the barn fell. This sentence is perfectly grammatical, as is evident when it appears in the following context: 2. Two horses were being shown off to a prospective buyer. One was raced past a meadow. and the other was r...

Standard models of multi-agent modal logic do not capture the fact that information is often \emph{ambiguous}, and may be interpreted in different ways by different agents. We propose a framework that can model this, and consider different semantics that capture different assumptions about the agents' beliefs regarding whether or not there is ambiguity. We examine the expressive power of logics of ambiguity compared to logics that cannot model ambiguity, with respect to the d...

The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations and different consequence relations are judged on the basis of intuitive correctness. Finally inference patterns are presented that operate directly on these underspecified structures, i.e. do not rely on any translation into the set of the...

Semantic feedback is an important source of information that a parser could use to deal with local ambiguities in syntax. However, it is difficult to devise a systematic communication mechanism for interactive syntax and semantics. In this article, I propose a variant of left-corner parsing to define the points at which syntax and semantics should interact, an account of grammatical relations and thematic roles to define the content of the communication, and a conflict resolu...

The paper addresses the problem of representing ambiguities in a way that allows for monotonic disambiguation and for direct deductive computation. The paper focuses on an extension of the formalism of underspecified DRSs to ambiguities introduced by plural NPs. It deals with the collective/distributive distinction, and also with generic and cumulative readings. In addition it provides a systematic account for an underspecified treatment of plural pronoun resolution.

Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics, for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human disambiguation processes. These studies are empirical and based on eye-tracking measurements. Here we take first steps towards formalizing these processes for semantic ambiguities where we identified the presence of two features: (1) joint plausibility degre...