CPE 480 Natural Language Processing
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Presentation Transcript
CPE 480 Natural Language Processing Lecture 6: Semantics--From words to sentences to idioms Asst. Prof. Nuttanart Facundes, Ph.D.
Theories of Meaning • Words have different meaning, depending on the context in which they are used • What is the meaning of a word? • How can we represent the meaning? • What formalisms can be used?
4 Representation Approaches • First-Order Predicate Calculus • Semantic Networks • Conceptual Dependencies • Frame-Based Representations
Correspondences between representations • They all share a common foundation: meaning representation consists of structures composed of sets of symbols Symbol Structures are objects and relations among objects
Meaning structure of language • Various ways by which human language conveys meaning • Form-meaning associations • Word-order regularities • Sense systems • Conjunctions and quantifiers • Predicate-argument structure
Problems with FOPC • Hard to represent beliefs • For example: I believe that Mary ate British food.
Principle of Compositionality (Frege) • The meaning of a sentence is composed by the meaning of its parts
Semantic Augmentations to Context-Free Grammars • Augmenting context-free grammar rules with semantic attachments • Attachments = Instructions that specify how to compute the meaning representation of a construction from the meanings of its consistent parts
Different Sentences • Declarative: Flight 487 serves lunch. • Imperative: Serve lunch. • Yes/No Questions: Does Flight 207 serve lunch? • Wh-Questions: Which flights serve lunch?
The Role of Sentences • Declarative intended to convey factual information • Imperative request for an action • Yes/No Questions request for affirmative/negative answer • Wh-Questions request for information