BiblioVault

Collaborative Language Engineering

A Case Study in Efficient Grammar-Based Processing

Stephan Oepen

CSLI, 2001

Following high hopes and subsequent disillusionment in the late 1980s, the past decade of work in language engineering has seen a dramatic increase in the power and sophistication of statistical approaches to natural language processing, along with a growing recognition that these methods alone cannot meet the full range of demands for applications of NLP. While statistical methods, often described as 'shallow' processing techniques, can bring real advantages in robustness and efficiency, they do not provide the precise, reliable representations of meaning which more conventional symbolic grammars can supply for natural language. A consistent, fine-grained mapping between form and meaning is of critical importance in some NLP applications, including machine translation, speech prosthesis, and automated email response. Recent advances in grammar development and processing implementations offer hope of meeting these demands for precision.

This volume provides an update on the state of the art in the development and application of broad-coverage declarative grammars built on sound linguistic foundations - the 'deep' processing paradigm - and presents several aspects of an international research effort to produce comprehensive, re-usable grammars and efficient technology for parsing and generating with such grammars.

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A Computational Introduction to Linguistics

Describing Language in Plain Prolog

Almerindo E. Ojeda

CSLI, 2014

In this book, Almerindo E. Ojeda offers a unique perspective on linguistics by discussing developing computer programs that will assign particular sounds to particular meanings and, conversely, particular meanings to particular sounds. Since these assignments are to operate efficiently over unbounded domains of sound and sense, they can begin to model the two fundamental modalities of human language—speaking and hearing. The computational approach adopted in this book is motivated by our struggle with one of the key problems of contemporary linguistics—figuring out how it is that language emerges from the brain.

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Linguistic Individuals

Almerindo E. Ojeda

CSLI, 1993

The goal of semantics is the insightful identification of the set of meanings that human language can express- the contruction of what has been called the metaphysics of natural language. A formal attempt to contruct such a metaphysics has generally involved identifying a set of individuals referred to as the universe of discourse. Until recently, however, semanticists have had little to say about the structure of this set. Ojeda argues that the structure of the set of linguistic individuals is a mereology, that is, the domain of discourse is made up of kinds and the instantiations of kinds. His argument forms the four main slections of this work. The first examines the semantics of countability (countable stems, number inflection, adjectives of measure, and determiners); the second explores the semantics of uncountability (the individuation of reference, and non-Boolean mass predicates); the third takes up the semantics of nominality (the mereological homogenetiy of mouns and the constraints on nouns in classifier languages); and the last investigates the semantics of the conceptional neauter, a pronominal category discussed by Otto Jesperson. Ojeda's investigations contribute to the characterization of linguistiv individuals and proide for a new basis for the semantics of individuation. Almerindo E. Ojeda is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Davis. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 7

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An Essay on Facts

Kenneth Russel Olson

CSLI, 1987

The notion of fact, as a metaphysical category, is of fairly recent vintage. As a result, perhaps, it has not received the attention that has been accorded more traditional concepts. The present study, which integrates historical exposition with philosophical analysis, aims to help rectify this situation. The first chapter delimits the subject matter by distinguishing the metaphysical sense of the word "fact" from various epistemic and semantic ones, in the process distinguishing facts from propositions. Chapter Two is chiefly historical. The pressures that led to the positing of facts in the latter half of the nineteenth century are discussed in the context of the history of the the doctrine of relations, beginning with Aristotle and the Scholastics. Chapter Three takes up what the author considers the main argument in favor of admitting facts, which is due to F. H. Bradley. The fourth and final chapter considers several versions of a well-known argument against facts due originally to Frege and Church and examines the pros and cons of various ways of getting around it.

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Morphology and the Web of Grammar

Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe

C. Orhan Orgun

CSLI, 2003

This collection presents papers in memory of Steven G. Lapointe, a distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis, at the time of his death in 1999. Lapointe's work on morphology and its connection to other linguistic subfields was the basis of a workshop held at UC Davis in 2000. This selection of papers from that workshop discusses the relationship of morphology to phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as the details of modern morphological theory—forming a natural continuation of the intellectual developments in Lapointe et al.'s Morphology and Its Relation to Phonology and Syntax.

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