Meaning Representation and Meaning Instantiation for Chinese Nominals

Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing vol. 3, no. 1, February 1998, pp. 45-60 �Computational Linguistics Society of R.O.C. Meaning Representation and Meaning Instantiation for Chinese Nominals1 Kathleen Ahrens*, Li-li Chang+, Ke-jiann Chen+, Chu-Ren Huang+ Abstract The goal of this paper is to explicate the nature of Chinese nominal semantics, and to create a paradigm for nominal semantics in general that will be useful for natural language processing purposes. We first point out that a lexical item may have two meanings simultaneously, and that current models of lexical semantic rep- resentation cannot handle this phenomenon. We then propose a meaning rep- resentation that deals with this problem, and also discuss how the meanings involved are instantiated. In particular we posit that in addition to the traditional notion of sense differentiation, each sense may have different meaning facets. These meaning facets are linked to their sense or to other meaning facets through one of two ways: meronymic or metonymic extension. 1. Introduction Lexical ambiguity resolution is a central concern of natural language processing [Small et al., 1988]. The traditional way of looking at the problem is to list the various meanings that a word has, and write a rule-based program to pick the appropriate meaning for the context. Both Categorical Grammar and Montague Semantics, for example, assume that meanings are discrete and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a lexical item and its meaning translation. The discrete meaning hypothesis provides the con- ceptual basis for most of the previous literature on ambiguity resolution and semantic resolution. In short, ambiguity resolution is viewed as trying to choose from several discrete meanings that share the same linguistic form (i.e. lexical form). While this approach can provide an algorithm to identify an appropriate meaning in a given context, it cannot account for novel uses of lexical items. * National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. E-mail: ahrens@ms.cc.ntu.edu.tw + Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. 1. This paper is jointly authored. The names of the authors are listed in alphabetical order. 45 More recent work addresses this problem. Pustejovsky's [1995] Generative Lexicon provides a framework (i.e. qualia structure) for possible meanings, and discusses under what conditions which meaning will be chosen (i.e semantic coercion). His account is especially useful in dealing with the creative use of words in novel contexts, an area that had been previously ignored due to the assumption that either a) the novel usage could be listed if necessary, and b) often it was deemed not necessary to list these novel meanings because they occurred so rarely. However, one issue that Pustejovsky and others have yet to account for is the fact that lexical meaning can be actively complex. All models of lexical ambiguity resolution assume that only one solution exists in a given context. In fact, what we will show is that more than one meaning can co-exist in the same context. A lexical item is actively complex if it allows simultaneous multiple interpretations. We will propose a meaning representation for …

Content truncated to 500 words