Laura Kallmeyer
Fri 25 Nov 2016, 11:00 - 12:30
Informatics Forum (IF-4.31/4.33)

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Diana Dalla Costa (ddallac)

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, we propose to use Hybrid Logic (HL) as a means to combine frame-based lexical semantics with quantification. We integrate this into a syntax-semantics interface using LTAG (Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar) and show that this architecture allows a fine-grained description of lexical structures ranging from polysemous nouns to rich event structures, including their composition, and thereby it can provide an elegant account of various coercion phenomena. As a first case study, we will model the inherent systematic polysemy of dot objects such as "book", which can refer to physical objects or abstract, informational entities, depending on the context of use. We assume a rich frame structure for such objects that contains all relevant components and makes their relations explicit. When combining as an argument with a verbal predicate, the appropriate component is chosen. Our analysis can explain associated coercion phenomena. As a second case study, we provide an analysis of for-adverbials and the aspectual interpretations they induce. The basic idea is that for-adverbials introduce a universal quantification over subevents that are characterized by the predication contributed by the verb. Depending on whether these subevents are bounded or not, the resulting overall event is then an iteration or a progression. We show that by combining the HL approach with standard techniques of underspecification and by using HL to formulate general constraints on event frames, we can account for the aspectual coercion triggered by these adverbials. By pairing the proposed frame-based analyses with syntactic building blocks in LTAG, we provide a working syntax-semantics interface for various coercion phenomena. The work presented here is joint work with William Babonnaud, Rainer Osswald and Sylvain Pogodalla.

BIO:

Education: 2006 Habilitation in General Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, Universit at T ubingen 1999 Doctor of Philosophy, Universit at T ubingen (PhD thesis on model-theoretic characterizations of tree-rewriting grammars) 1995 Diploma in Mathematics, Universit at Hannover, Germany Positions: since 2010 Professor (W3) Computational Linguistics, Universit ät D üsseldorf 2005 - 2010 Head of an Emmy Noether group, Universit ät T ubingen. 2001 - 2005 Postdoc, Universit é Paris 7, France 2000 - 2001 Lecturer and researcher (ATER), Universit é Paris 7 1998 - 2000 Researcher, CRC 441 (DFG), Universit ät T ubingen 1999 Visiting researcher, IRCS, University of Pennsylvania 1995 - 1998 PhD student, Universit ät T ubingen.  

Research interests:

  • Tree Adjoining Grammars, mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms
  • Syntax-Semantics Interface, Underspecification, Semantics of scope
  • Role and Reference Grammar
  • Parsing of mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms: symbolic and probabilistic approaches, data-driven parsing of discontinuous constituency structures
  • Syntax-based statistical machine translation
  • Frame Semantics, decomposition into constructional and lexical meaning components, semantic composition with frames
  • Frame induction, unsupervised machine learning