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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 ...
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 ...
Contextual and semantic factors influence processing at a later stage and can induce re-analysis of the syntactic parse. Re-analysis is costly and leads to an observable slowdown in reading. When the parser encounters an ambiguity, it is guided by two principles: late closure and minimal attachment.
Only rewriting the sentence, or placing appropriate punctuation can resolve a syntactic ambiguity. [5] For the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in artificial, formal languages (such as computer programming languages), see Ambiguous grammar. Usually, semantic and syntactic ambiguity go hand in hand.
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 generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from phonetic form , the structure which corresponds to a sentence's pronunciation.
Demonstrations of ambiguity between alternative syntactic structures underlying a sentence. I made her duck. [9] [10] One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know. [11] Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Eats shoots and leaves
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1] Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]