This volume is a selection of papers presented at a workshop entitled Predicative Forms in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases organized in Toulouse in August 1996. A predicate is a named relation that exists among one or more arguments. In natural language, predicates are realized as verbs, prepositions, nouns and adjectives, to cite the most frequent ones. Research on the identification, organization, and semantic representa tion of predicates in artificial intelligence and in language processing is a very active research field. The emergence of new paradigms in theoretical language processing, the definition of new problems and the important evol ution of applications have, in fact, stimulated much interest and debate on the role and nature of predicates in naturallangage. From a broad theoret ical perspective, the notion of predicate is central to research on the syntax semantics interface, the generative lexicon, the definition of ontology-based semantic representations, and the formation of verb semantic classes. From a computational perspective, the notion of predicate plays a cent ral role in a number of applications including the design of lexical knowledge bases, the development of automatic indexing systems for the extraction of structured semantic representations, and the creation of interlingual forms in machine translation.

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A comprehensive theory-based approach to the treatment of text meaning in natural language processing applications.

Presents the state of the technology and points to future directions for semantic computing Semantic computing, a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field, seeks to structure, design, and manipulate computer content to better satisfy the needs and intentions of users and create a more meaningful user experience. This remarkable contributed work examines the art, engineering, technology, and applications of the field. Moreover, it brings together researchers from such disciplines as natural language processing, software engineering, multimedia semantics, semantic Web, signal processing, and pattern recognition in order to provide a single source that presents the state of the technology and points to new breakthroughs on the horizon. Semantic Computing begins with an introduction that explores the concepts, technology, applications, and future of semantic computing. Next, the book is divided into four parts: Part One: Semantic Analysis Part Two: Semantic Languages and Integration Part Three: Semantic Applications Part Four: Semantic Programming and Interface As readers progress through the book, they,ll learn not only the underlying science, but also the fundamental technological building blocks of semantic computing. Moreover, they,ll discover a variety of cross-disciplinary solutions to current computing and communication problems. Throughout the book, references to the primary literature enable further investigation of each individual topic. Semantic Computing is ideal for industrial managers, researchers, and engineers seeking to design the next generation of computing systems in order to better meet user needs. It is also recommended as a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate-level semantic computing courses.

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.

As with many other languages, Mandarin Chinese exhibits a rich variety of ways in expressing the arguments of the predicator in a sentence. Unlike other languages, such variation is typically devoid of any formal marking. Previous attempts in explaining such phenomena usually focus on the syntax as an explanatory tool. This book argues that a large majority of such argument structure phenomena are better accounted for by recourse to enriched representations in lexical semantics. Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, Generative Lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.

The study of the linguistic reflexes of aspect has been an active field of research in various sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as syntax, semantics (including discourse theory) and acquisition studies. However, communication and dissemination of results across these various subfields has often been indirect. This volume solves that problem. The different angles brought together here give us a comprehensive picture of the representation of aspect in the mind/brain of the speaker. The papers in this volume represent the results of a workshop on the syntax, semantics and acquisition of aspect held in 2002 whose purpose was to foment active cross-disciplinary communication. A number of the papers examine the syntactic representation of lexical or situation aspect, while others focus on the syntactic interaction of lexical aspect with grammatical aspect, and of grammatical aspect and tense. Other papers examine the role of aspect in discourse representations, while a third group of papers reports on results of empirical studies on the acquisition of aspect in both first and second language acquisition, and patterns of loss of morphosyntactic reflexes of aspect in language attrition. This volume is of interest to researchers and advanced graduate students in syntax, semantics, discourse representation and language acquisition, particularly those working on tense and aspect.

This book provides a state of the art on work being done with parsed corpora. It gathers 21 papers on building and using parsed corpora raising many relevant questions, and deals with a variety of languages and a variety of corpora. It is for those working in linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language, syntax, and grammar.