Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Friday, November 09, 16:15, Building 17, Seminar Room
NOTE UNUSUAL DAY

Norms and Exploitations: Linking Word Meaning to Word Use

How are we to distinguish one sense of a word from another, or to know which of two close synonyms is the more appropriate term to express a particular meaning?

In this talk, I develop the idea that a word in isolation does not really have meaning at all (although it may have a meaning potential). When words are put together to form clauses, the context tends to activate a particular interpretation of the words used. Among the contextual clues that activate interpretations for words are:

• Immediate syntagmatic context
• Collocations
• Domain
• Stipulation by the author (generally, near the beginning of a document)

The talk focuses on immediate syntagmatic analysis, which makes the greatest contribution to the interpretation of words in text. Norms of linguistic behaviour (syntagmatic patterns) are associated with norms of meaning and belief. Corpus analysis shows that, as a general rule, the majority of uses of each word fall into just one or two broad patterns, associated with just one or two broad senses. At the same time, there are often several more rare or minor patterns, which are normally

Having replaced meaning-in-isolation by meaning-in-context, I propose replacing "disambiguation" with the notion of contextually generated implicatures. Corpus-based examples will be shown.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Matt Crocker.