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Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context -dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning.
The ambiguity ends at was enlightening, which determines that the second alternative is correct. When readers process a local ambiguity, they settle on one of the possible interpretations immediately without waiting to hear or read more words that might help decide which interpretation is correct (the behaviour is called incremental processing ).
Part-of-speech tagging (which resolves some semantic ambiguity) is a related problem, and often a prerequisite for or a subproblem of syntactic parsing. Syntactic parses can be used for information extraction (e.g. event parsing, semantic role labelling, entity labelling) and may be further used to extract formal semantic representations.
In formal semantics, semantic interpretation is viewed as a mapping from syntactic structures to denotations.There are several formal views of the syntax–semantics interface which differ in what they take to be the inputs and outputs of this mapping.
In 1973, Richard Montague argued that a grammar for a small fragment of English contains the logicosyntactic and semantic devices to handle practically any scope phenomenon. [5] The tool that he mainly relied on is a categorial grammar with functional application; in terms of recent formulations, it can be considered Minimalist syntax with ...
In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted as having different syntactic structures. In contrast, in semantic ambiguity the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently. [15] [16] Controlled natural languages are often designed to be unambiguous so that they can be parsed into a logical ...
In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not.