Semantics

Going beyond syntax

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 Semantics
Relationship between surface form
and meaning
What is meaning?
Lexical semantics
Syntax and semantics

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 What is meaning?
Reference to worlds
Objects, relationships, events,
characteristics
Meaning as truth
Understanding
Inference, implication
Modelling beliefs
Meaning as action
Understanding activates procedures

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 Lexical semantics
Meanings of individual words
Sense and Reference
What do we understand by the word lion ?
Is a toy lion a lion? Is a toy gun a gun? Is a
fake gun a gun?
Grammatical meaning
What do we understand by the lion, lions,
the lions, as in
The lion is a dangerous animal
The lion was about to attack

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 Lexical relations
Lexical meanings can be defined in
terms of other words
Synonyms, antonyms,
broader/narrower terms
synsets
Part-whole relationships (often reflect
real-world relationships)
Linguistic usage (style, register) also
a factor
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 Semantic features
Meanings can be defined (to a
certain extent) in terms of
distinctive features
e.g. man = adult, male, human
Meanings can be defined (to a
certain extent) in terms of
distinctive features

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 Types of representation
1. Syntactic relations
The man shot an elephant with his gun

shot

subj obj adv

man elephant gun

det det mod

the an his
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 Types of representation
2. Deep syntax
The man shot an elephant with his gun
An elephant was shot by the man with his gun
shot

dsubj dobj instr

man elephant gun

qtf qtf poss

the an his
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 Types of representation
3. Semantic roles, deep cases
The man shot an elephant with his gun
An elephant was shot by the man with his gun
shot
The man used his gun to shoot an elephant
agent patient instr

man elephant gun

qtf qtf poss

the an his
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 Types of representation
4. Event representation, semantic network
The man shot an elephant with his gun
An elephant was shot by the man with his gun
shooting
The man used his gun to shoot an elephant
shooter shot- instr
thing
man elephant gun

qtf qtf poss

the man
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 Types of representation
5. Predicate calculus
The man shot an elephant with his gun
An elephant was shot by the man with his gun
The man used his gun to shoot an elephant
The man owned the gun which he used to shoot an elephan
The man used the gun which he owned to shoot an elephan

event(e) & time(e,past) &

pred(e,shoot) & man(A) & the(A)
& (B) & dog(B) & shoot(A,B) &
(C) & gun(C) & own(A,C) &
use(A,C,e) 11/27
 Types of representation
6. Conceptual dependency (Schank)

John punched Mary

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 Types of representation
7. Semantic formulae (Wilks)

((THIS((PLANTSTUFF)SOUR))
((((((THRUPART)OBJE)(NOTUSE*ANI))GOAL)
((MANUSE)(OBJETHING)
)))

door

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 Uses for semantic
representations
As a linguistic artefact (because its there)
To capture the text meaning relationship
Identifying paraphrases, equivalences (e.g.
summarizing a text, searching a text for
information)
Understanding and making inferences (e.g. so
as to understand a sequence of events)
Interpreting questions (so as to find the
answer), commands (so as to carry them out),
statements (so as to update data)
Translating

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 Uses for semantic
representations
Different levels of understanding/meaning
Textual meaning may be little more than
disambiguating
Attachment ambiguities
Word-senses
Anaphora (pronoun reference, coreference)
Conceptual meaning may be much deeper
Somewhere in between a good example
is Wilks preference semantics: especially
good for metaphor

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 Linguistic issues
Words and Concepts
Objects, properties, actions n, adj, v
Language allows us to be vague (e.g. toy gun)
Semantic primitives what are they?
Meaning equivalence when do two things
mean the same?
Grammatical meaning
Tense vs. time
Topic and focus
Quantifiers, plurals, etc.

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 Linguistic issues
There are many other similarly tricky
linguistic phenomena
Modality (could, should, would, must,
may)
Aspect (completed, ongoing, resulting)
Determination (the, a, some, all, none)
Fuzzy sets (often, some, many, usually)

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 Lexical semantics
Lexical relations (familiar to linguists)
have an impact on NLP systems
Homonymy word-sense selection;
homophones in speech-based systems
Polysemy understanding narrow senses
Synonymy lexical equivalence
Ontology structure vocabulary, holds
much of the knowledge used by clever
systems

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 WordNet
Began as a psycholinguistic theory of how
the brain organizes its vocabulary (Miller)
Organizes vocabulary into synsets,
hierarchically arranged together with other
relations (hyp[er|o]nymy, isa, member,
antonyms, entailments)
Turns out to be very useful for many
applications
Has been replicated for many languages
(sometimes just translated!)

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