Introduction to

Semantics and Pragmatics

LING 2000 - 2006


NLP

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NLP tends to focus on:
Syntax
Grammars, parsers, parse trees, dependency
structures
Semantics
Subcategorization frames, semantic classes,
ontologies, formal semantics
Pragmatics
Pronouns, reference resolution, discourse
models
LING 2000 - 2006


NLP

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Semantics and Pragmatics
High-level Linguistics (the good stuff!)

Semantics: the study of meaning that can be
determined from a sentence, phrase or word.

Pragmatics: the study of meaning, as it depends
on context (speaker, situation)
LING 2000 - 2006


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Language to Logic
John went to the book store.

John

store1
, go(John, store1)
John bought a book.
buy(John,book1)
John gave the book to Mary.
give(John,book1,Mary)
Mary put the book on the table.
put(Mary,book1,table1)

LING 2000 - 2006


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Semantics
Same event - different sentences
John broke the window with a hammer.

John broke the window with the crack.

The hammer broke the window.

The window broke.
LING 2000 - 2006


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Same event - different syntactic frames

John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

John broke the window with the crack.
SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

The hammer broke the window.
SUBJ VERB OBJ

The window broke.
SUBJ VERB
LING 2000 - 2006


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Semantics -predicate arguments
break(AGENT, INSTRUMENT, PATIENT)

AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT
John broke the window with a hammer.

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.

PATIENT
The window broke.
Fillmore 68 - The case for case
LING 2000 - 2006


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AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT
John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ OBJ MODIFIER

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.
SUBJ OBJ

PATIENT
The window broke.
SUBJ
CIS 8590 Fall 2008


NLP

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Natural Language Processing
Applications and Tasks
Machine Translation
Question-Answering
Information Retrieval
Information Extraction

LING 2000 - 2006


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Machine Translation

One of the first applications for computers
bilingual dictionary > word-word translation
Good translation requires understanding!
War and Peace, The Sound and The Fury?
What can we do? Sublanguages.
technical domains, static vocabulary
Meteo in Canada, Caterpillar Tractor Manuals,
Botanical descriptions, Military Messages

LING 2000 - 2006


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Example translation
Machine Translation
The Story of the Stone
=The Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin 1792)
Issues: (Language Divergences)
Sentence segmentation
Zero-anaphora
Coding of tense/aspect
Penetrate -> penetrated
Stylistic differences across languages
Bamboo tip plaintain leaf -> bamboos and plantains
Cultural knowledge
Curtain -> curtains of her bed

Machine Translation
Chinese gloss: Dai-yu alone on bed top think-of-with-gratitude Bao-chai
again listen to window outside bamboo tip plantain leaf of on-top rain
sound sigh drop clear cold penetrate curtain not feeling again fall down
tears come


Hawkes translation: As she lay there alone, Dai-yus thoughts turned to
Bao-chai Then she listened to the insistent rustle of the rain on the
bamboos and plantains outside her window. The coldness penetrated the
curtains of her bed. Almost without noticing it she had begun to cry.

Language Families
Babelfish Demo
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

Old example:
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Question Answering
What does door mean?
What year was Abraham Lincoln born?
How many states were in the United States
when Lincoln was born?
Was there a military draft during the Hoover
administration?
What do US scientists think about whether
human cloning should be legal?

Modern QA systems
Still in infancy
Simple factoid questions beginning to work OK
Annual government-sponsored bakeoff
called TREC

QA Demo
UIUC QA Demo

Qualim QA Demo


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Issues in NLP

Ambiguity!

World Knowledge its needed for
understanding, but computers dont have it
Ambiguity
Computational linguists are obsessed with
ambiguity
Ambiguity is a fundamental problem of
computational linguistics
Resolving ambiguity is a crucial goal
Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:
I made her duck

Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:
I made her duck
I cooked waterfowl for her benefit (to eat)
I cooked waterfowl belonging to her
I created the (plaster?) duck she owns
I caused her to quickly lower her head or body
I waved my magic wand and turned her into undifferentiated waterfowl
At least one other meaning thats inappropriate for gentle company.
Ambiguity is Pervasive
I caused her to quickly lower her head or body
Lexical category: duck can be a N or V
I cooked waterfowl belonging to her.
Lexical category: her can be a possessive (of her) or dative (for
her) pronoun
I made the (plaster) duck statue she owns
Lexical Semantics: make can mean create or cook

Ambiguity is Pervasive
Grammar: Make can be:
Transitive: (verb has a noun direct object)
I cooked [waterfowl belonging to her]
Ditransitive: (verb has 2 noun objects)
I made [her] (into) [undifferentiated waterfowl]
Action-transitive (verb has a direct object and
another verb)
I caused [her] [to move her body]
Ambiguity is Pervasive
Phonetics!
I mate or duck
Im eight or duck
Eye maid; her duck
Aye mate, her duck
I maid her duck
Im aid her duck
I mate her duck
Im ate her duck
Im ate or duck
I mate or duck
LING 2000 - 2006


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Headlines
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers

Iraqi Head Seeks Arms

Teacher Strikes Idle Kids

Miners Refuse To Work After Death

Juvenile Court To Try Shooting Defendant

Kinds of knowledge needed?
Consider the following interaction with
HAL the computer from 2001: A Space
Odyssey

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
HAL: Im sorry Dave, Im afraid I cant do
that.
Knowledge needed to build HAL?
Speech recognition and synthesis
Dictionaries (how words are pronounced)
Phonetics (how to recognize/produce each sound of English)
Natural language understanding
Knowledge of the English words involved
What they mean
How they combine (what is a `pod bay door?)
Knowledge of syntactic structure
Im I do, Sorry that afraid Dave Im cant


Whats needed?
Dialog and pragmatic knowledge
open the door is a REQUEST (as opposed to a
STATEMENT or information-question)
It is polite to respond, even if youre planning to
kill someone.
It is polite to pretend to want to be cooperative
(Im afraid I cant)
What is `that in `I cant do that?
Even a system to book airline flights needs
much of this kind of knowledge
Eliza: Weizenbaum (1966)
User: You are like my father in some ways.
ELIZA: What resemblance do you see
User: You are not very aggressive but I think you dont want me to notice
that.
ELIZA: What makes you think I am not aggressive
User: You dont argue with me
ELIZA: Why do you think I dont argue with you
User: You are afraid of me
ELIZA: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you
Modern conversational agents
Switchboard Receptionists
Implications: need to know how a native or non-native speaker of
English is likely to pronounce a random American name. Eek.
Airline and other simple dialogue systems
Lots of fabulously fun pragmatic issues
Grounding
Error handling
In general
Now that there are commercial installations
Big incentive to use linguistic or any other kind of knowledge if it
actually improves performance

Well-understood Semantic Tasks
Named-entity Recognition

Coreference Resolution

Semantic Role Labeling

Sentiment Classification
Entities
Named Entity Tagging: Identify all the proper
names in a text

Sally went to see Up in the Air at the local theater.

Coreference Resolution: Identify all references (aka
mentions) of people, places and things in text,
and determine which mentions are co-
referential.

John stuck his foot in his mouth.
Semantic Role Labeling
Semantic role labeling is computational task of
assigning semantic roles to phrases





B-A0 REL B-A1 I-A1 B-AM I-AM I-AM
John broke the window with a hammer.

Sentiment Classification
Given a review (about a movie, hotel, Amazon
product, etc.), a sentiment classification system
tries to determine what opinions are expressed in
the review.

Coarse-level objective: is the review positive,
negative, or neutral overall?

Fine-grained objective: what are the positive
aspects (according to the reviewer), and what are
the negative aspects?