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Università degli studi di Udine Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica
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Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory
Semantic pragmatic computational models of utterances Group
Goals
The linguistic phenomena of temporal presuppositions and
counterfactuals, situated on the boundary line between semantics and
pragmatics, are studied. These phenomena are interesting since:
- they are common to many languages;
- the computational treatment of such phenomena is difficult
because of their nonmonotonic aspect;
- they reveal interesting information on how human beings perceive
the time.
In this research:
- a corpus of examples illustrating the phenomena of temporal
presuppositions and counterfactuals is collected;
- the phenomena are studied emphasizing the various types of
knowledge underlying them;
- the fragment of language that encloses such phenomena is defined
in a way not dependent from a specific language.
- Recursive Models, a formalism for modeling the semantics of
utterances containing temporal presuppositions and counterfactuals,
are proposed, described from both functional (by formal
specifications) and structural points of view, and compared with
related work.
- the adequacy of Recursive Models is empirically verified: TOBI
(Temporal presuppositions and counterfactuals: an Ontological Based
Interpreter), a system that interacts with the user in natural
language using the recursive models, is illustrated. TOBI is not based
on a deductive system, but uses the more primitive and flexible notion
of model-based evaluation.
Results
These are the main publications on this topic. You can read a
text-only abstract or (for most of them) download a
postscript-gzipped version. Email mizzaro@dimi.uniud.it
for a paper copy.
- S. Mizzaro, 1992. "Elaborazione del linguaggio naturale: analisi
e inferenze a livello pragmatico." Master's thesis, Università
degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy, December 1992 (In Italian; the
English translation of the title is "Natural language processing:
analysis and inferences at a pragmatic level").
- S. Mizzaro, 1994. "TOBI - An Ontological Based Interpreter for
Temporal Presuppositions and Counterfactuals". In R. Trappl editor,
"Cybernetics and Systems '94", volume 2, pages 1879-1886, Singapore,
World Scientific. Proceedings of the Twelfth European Meeting on
Cybernetics and System Research, organized by the Austrian Society for
Cybernetics Studies, held at the University of Vienna, Austria, 5-8
April 1994. Text-only
abstract here Postscript-gzipped
version here
- S. Mizzaro, 1997. "Towards Recursive Models---A Computational
Formalism for the Semantics of Temporal Presuppositions and
Counterfactuals in Natural Language." to appear in "Informatica - An
International Journal of Computing and Informatics". Text-only abstract here Postscript-gzipped version here
- S. Mizzaro, 1996. "Recursive Models: A Computational Tool for the
Semantics of Temporal Presuppositions in Natural Language." In
"Proceedings of the 5th meeting of the AI*IA", Workshop "Natural
Language Processing", Napoli, September 26-28, 1996, pages 43-46. Text-only abstract
here Postscript-gzipped version
here
Principal Investigators
Prototype
- The TOBI system has been implemented in LPA Prolog on a Macintosh.
Research Partnership
This research started during my Master Thesis work, supervised by Marco
Colombetti. After my degree, I have continued to work by myself on
these issues. I am looking for collaboration: volunteers? (mizzaro@dimi.uniud.it)
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