Information retrieval using a transportable natural language interface
SIGIR '83 Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Overview of the TACITUS project
HLT '86 Proceedings of the workshop on Strategic computing natural language
Knowledge and natural language processing
Communications of the ACM
An Intelligent Lexicon for Contextual Word Sense Discrimination
Applied Intelligence
Multi-level plurals and distributivity
ACL '88 Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
The interpretation of relational nouns
ACL '88 Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Metonymy and metaphor: what's the difference?
COLING '88 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
An active bilingual lexicon for Machine Translation
COLING '88 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
On the semantic interpretation of nominals
COLING '88 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2
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Theories of semantic interpretation which wish to capture as many generalizations as possible must face up to the manifoldly ambiguous and contextually dependent nature of word meaning. In this paper I present a two-level scheme of semantic interpretation in which the first level deals with the semantic consequences of syntactic structure and the second with the choice of word meaning. On the first level the meanings of ambiguous words, pronominal references, nominal compounds and metonomies are not treated as fixed, but are instead represented by free variables which range over predicates and functions. The context-dependence of lexical meaning is dealt with by the second level, a constraint propagation process which attempts to assign values to these variables on the basis of the logical coherence of the overall result. In so doing it makes use of a set of polysemy operators which map between lexical senses, thus making a potentially indefinite number of related senses available.