Did John really promise Mary to leave?

This paper contrasts finite and non-finite complement constructions containing the matrix verb promise. Using data from the British National Corpus, I show that when no explicit mention is made of the promissee the non-finite form of complement is overwhelmingly preferred to its finite counterparts. The exact opposite is the case when the promissee is mentioned between the matrix verb and the complement clause. In addition, the promiser in the x promise y to infinitive construction is almost always pronominal. I suggest that these two facts, the dispreference for the to infinitive form of complement when the promissee is mentioned and the pronominal encoding of the promiser in such cases, are both related to the very rarity of this form of construction in English. Data is adduced showing that another rare construction, the so-called possessive -ing construction, also occurs with a disproportionate number of pronominal subjects. It is suggested that the preference for pronominal subjects in these constructions may be related to a wish to reduce the overall processing complexity of the predications in question.

Advances in Kartvelian Morphology and Syntax. Contributions to the festival of languages Bremen, 17 Sep to 7 Oct, 2009

Within the scope of Festival of Languages took place in 2009 the Conference Advances in Kartvelian Morphology and Syntax. Selected presentations are presented in this publication. The authors discuss topics such as anaphora in Svan, intonation in Georgien, pragmatics of subordinating clauses in Georgian, but also research on modern developments as SMS-communication in Georgian language area etc. DEUTSCH: Im Rahmen des Festivals der Sprachen fand im Jahre 2009 an der Universität Bremen die Tagung Advances in Kartvelian Morphology and Syntax statt. Ausgewählte Vorträge werden mit dieser Publikation vorgestellt. Die Autoren behandeln unter anderem Themen wie Ana-pher im Svanischen, Intonation im Georgischen, Pragmatik von Nebensätzen des Georgi-schen, aber auch Forschungen über moderne Entwicklungen wie die SMS-Kommunikation im georgischsprachigen Sprachraum usw. CONTENTS: NINO AMIRIDZE, TAMAR RESECK & MANANA TOPADZE GÄUMANN: Preface; KEVIN TUITE: The Kartvelian suffixal intransitive; MANANA KOBAIDZE: Towards the morphological and syntactical classification of Georgian verbs; RENÉ LACROIX: Origin of Sets I–II suffixes in South Caucasian through reanalysis; STAVROS SKOPETEAS & CAROLINE FÉRY: Prosodic cues for exhaustive interpretations: a production study on Georgian intonation; WINFRIED BOEDER: Anaphora in Svan; YASUHIRO KOJIMA : The position of rom and the pragmatics of subordinate clauses in Georgian; NATIA AMAGHLOBELI : Morphological aspects of Georgian SMS language.

Deixis social : Los valores absolutos y relativos de la deixis en la relación Odiseo/pretendientes

En el canto 22 de Odisea, la deixis social se construye a través de una red signi´Çücante de elementos deícticos aplicados a la relación entre Odiseo y los pretendientes. Esa red signi´Çü cante involucra determinaciones especí´Çücas de la sociedad heroica propuestas como rasgos únicos de los personajes en la ejecución de sus discursos. El presente artículo estudia el valor absoluto y el valor relativo de las expresiones deícticas, las distinciones de los usos pronominales y las elecciones léxicas atribuidas a los caracteres para establecer nuevas conclusiones acerca de la interpretación y del movimiento narrativo del canto 22, en particular y de Odisea, en general.

Dependencias (anti-)locales en latín : Un estudio radicalmente minimalista

El presente trabajo pretende continuar la línea general inaugurada por Krivochen y Luder (2012) en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Tales herramientas, desarrolladas a partir de métodos axiomático-formales, son puestas a prueba con los datos concretos y nos ayudan a comprender mejor no solamente el funcionamiento de una lengua como sistema sino el sustrato cognitivo-biológico que posibilita el desarrollo de tal sistema. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de "localidad" en las derivaciones sintácticas, que ha sido el centro de gran parte de los estudios de orientación chomskyana durante la última década. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa a la ortodoxia chomskyana. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas explícitas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la localidad en la lengua latina

Deixis social : Los valores absolutos y relativos de la deixis en la relación Odiseo/pretendientes

En el canto 22 de Odisea, la deixis social se construye a través de una red signi´Çücante de elementos deícticos aplicados a la relación entre Odiseo y los pretendientes. Esa red signi´Çü cante involucra determinaciones especí´Çücas de la sociedad heroica propuestas como rasgos únicos de los personajes en la ejecución de sus discursos. El presente artículo estudia el valor absoluto y el valor relativo de las expresiones deícticas, las distinciones de los usos pronominales y las elecciones léxicas atribuidas a los caracteres para establecer nuevas conclusiones acerca de la interpretación y del movimiento narrativo del canto 22, en particular y de Odisea, en general.

Dependencias (anti-)locales en latín : Un estudio radicalmente minimalista

El presente trabajo pretende continuar la línea general inaugurada por Krivochen y Luder (2012) en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Tales herramientas, desarrolladas a partir de métodos axiomático-formales, son puestas a prueba con los datos concretos y nos ayudan a comprender mejor no solamente el funcionamiento de una lengua como sistema sino el sustrato cognitivo-biológico que posibilita el desarrollo de tal sistema. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de "localidad" en las derivaciones sintácticas, que ha sido el centro de gran parte de los estudios de orientación chomskyana durante la última década. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa a la ortodoxia chomskyana. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas explícitas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la localidad en la lengua latina

Dependencias (anti-)locales en latín : Un estudio radicalmente minimalista

El presente trabajo pretende continuar la línea general inaugurada por Krivochen y Luder (2012) en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Tales herramientas, desarrolladas a partir de métodos axiomático-formales, son puestas a prueba con los datos concretos y nos ayudan a comprender mejor no solamente el funcionamiento de una lengua como sistema sino el sustrato cognitivo-biológico que posibilita el desarrollo de tal sistema. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de "localidad" en las derivaciones sintácticas, que ha sido el centro de gran parte de los estudios de orientación chomskyana durante la última década. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa a la ortodoxia chomskyana. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas explícitas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la localidad en la lengua latina

Deixis social : Los valores absolutos y relativos de la deixis en la relación Odiseo/pretendientes

En el canto 22 de Odisea, la deixis social se construye a través de una red signi´Çücante de elementos deícticos aplicados a la relación entre Odiseo y los pretendientes. Esa red signi´Çü cante involucra determinaciones especí´Çücas de la sociedad heroica propuestas como rasgos únicos de los personajes en la ejecución de sus discursos. El presente artículo estudia el valor absoluto y el valor relativo de las expresiones deícticas, las distinciones de los usos pronominales y las elecciones léxicas atribuidas a los caracteres para establecer nuevas conclusiones acerca de la interpretación y del movimiento narrativo del canto 22, en particular y de Odisea, en general.

Autonomous Acquisition of Natural Situated Communication

An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to communicate. We learn how to communicate, and maintain our communicative skills, in a society of communicators – a highly effective way to reach and maintain proficiency in this complex skill. Principles that might allow artificial agents to learn language this way are in completely known at present – the multi-dimensional nature of socio-communicative skills are beyond every machine learning framework so far proposed. Our work begins to address the challenge of proposing a way for observation-based machine learning of natural language and communication. Our framework can learn complex communicative skills with minimal up-front knowledge. The system learns by incrementally producing predictive models of causal relationships in observed data, guided by goal-inference and reasoning using forward-inverse models. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime TV-style interview, using multimodal communicative gesture and situated language to talk about recycling of various materials and objects. S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, a vocabulary of 100 words forming natural sentences with relatively complex sentence structure, including manual deictic reference and anaphora. S1 is seeded only with high-level information about goals of the interviewer and interviewee, and a small ontology; no grammar or other information is provided to S1 a priori. The agent learns the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex utterances spoken and gestures from scratch, by observing the humans compare and contrast the cost and pollution related to recycling aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspaper, plastic, and wood. After 20 hours of observation S1 can perform an unscripted TV interview with a human, in the same style, without making mistakes.

Autonomous Acquisition of Natural Language

An important part of human intelligence is the ability to use language. Humans learn how to use language in a society of language users, which is probably the most effective way to learn a language from the ground up. Principles that might allow an artificial agents to learn language this way are not known at present. Here we present a framework which begins to address this challenge. Our auto-catalytic, endogenous, reflective architecture (AERA) supports the creation of agents that can learn natural language by observation. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime mock television interview, using gesture and situated language. Results show that S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, using a vocabulary of 100 words with numerous sentence formats, by observing unscripted interaction between the humans, with no grammar being provided to it a priori, and only high-level information about the format of the human interaction in the form of high-level goals of the interviewer and interviewee and a small ontology. The agent learns both the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex sentences spoken by the human subjects on the topic of recycling of objects such as aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic, and wood, as well as use of manual deictic reference and anaphora.

Linguistic aspects of speech synthesis.

The conversion of text to speech is seen as an analysis of the input text to obtain a common underlying linguistic description, followed by a synthesis of the output speech waveform from this fundamental specification. Hence, the comprehensive linguistic structure serving as the substrate for an utterance must be discovered by analysis from the text. The pronunciation of individual words in unrestricted text is determined by morphological analysis or letter-to-sound conversion, followed by specification of the word-level stress contour. In addition, many text character strings, such as titles, numbers, and acronyms, are abbreviations for normal words, which must be derived. To further refine these pronunciations and to discover the prosodic structure of the utterance, word part of speech must be computed, followed by a phrase-level parsing. From this structure the prosodic structure of the utterance can be determined, which is needed in order to specify the durational framework and fundamental frequency contour of the utterance. In discourse contexts, several factors such as the specification of new and old information, contrast, and pronominal reference can be used to further modify the prosodic specification. When the prosodic correlates have been computed and the segmental sequence is assembled, a complete input suitable for speech synthesis has been determined. Lastly, multilingual systems utilizing rule frameworks are mentioned, and future directions are characterized.

Da tradução ou não de pronomes e partículas pronominais do Italiano ao Português: algumas escolhas feitas por dois tradutores

Este estudo é movido pela curiosidade quanto a como se resolvem, nas traduções do italiano para o português, questões de colocação pronominal. Encontramos, normal e frequentemente, na língua italiana, principalmente na língua falada, pronomes cujos equivalentes em português existem em gramáticas normativas da língua portuguesa, mas que, na prática, não são utilizados pelos falantes e escritores brasileiros. Encontramos, também, na língua italiana, um significativo número de verbos pronominais (como esserci, volerci, averne etc.) e um considerável número de verbos pronominais múltiplos (como andarsene, farcela, fregarsene etc.) que, juntamente com esses pronomes, constituem, para os professores brasileiros de italiano língua estrangeira (LE), elementos difíceis de trabalhar na sala de aula. Além disso, tais elementos também podem dificultar o trabalho dos tradutores, que devem fazer determinadas escolhas ao traduzi-los para o português. Como são traduzidos os pronomes combinados do italiano nas versões brasileiras? Será que os portugueses, que possuem, por exemplo, tais pronomes utilizam-nos em todos os casos em que os encontramos nos textos de partida? E as partículas pronominais são simplesmente eliminadas no texto de chegada ou são substituídas? Tais aspectos, se observados e organizados, podem levar a uma melhor compreensão das duas línguas em contato e dar subsídios a estudantes, professores e tradutores. Pensando nessa dificuldade, esta pesquisa buscou e listou alguns autores e obras disponíveis para consulta e analisou um corpus com cento e sessenta e três ocorrências de pronomes no italiano, mais sete acréscimos de pronomes no português brasileiro (PB) e/ou português europeu (PE), partindo do romance Uno, nessuno e centomila de Luigi Pirandello e suas respectivas traduções em PB e PE. Nosso objetivo consiste em encontrar respostas úteis à diminuição do estranhamento, por parte de um italiano, que escuta, de um brasileiro, frases sem pronomes (ainda que o italiano as entenda) e/ou a sensação de inadequação e, até mesmo, de desconforto, por parte de um brasileiro, ao produzir frases com todos os pronomes. No corpus analisado, temos uma amostra das escolhas e respectivas traduções propostas pelos tradutores para casos de pronomes reflexivos, de pronomes pessoais do caso reto, de pronomes pessoais do caso oblíquo, de pronomes combinados e de partículas pronominais ne, ci e vi, com manutenções, omissões, trocas por outros pronomes (possessivos, retos, oblíquos, demonstrativos) e, até mesmo, uma espécie de compensação numérica com a inclusão de palavra inexistente no texto de partida.

The OpAL System at NTCIR 8 MOAT

The present is marked by the availability of large volumes of heterogeneous data, whose management is extremely complex. While the treatment of factual data has been widely studied, the processing of subjective information still poses important challenges. This is especially true in tasks that combine Opinion Analysis with other challenges, such as the ones related to Question Answering. In this paper, we describe the different approaches we employed in the NTCIR 8 MOAT monolingual English (opinionatedness, relevance, answerness and polarity) and cross-lingual English-Chinese tasks, implemented in our OpAL system. The results obtained when using different settings of the system, as well as the error analysis performed after the competition, offered us some clear insights on the best combination of techniques, that balance between precision and recall. Contrary to our initial intuitions, we have also seen that the inclusion of specialized Natural Language Processing tools dealing with Temporality or Anaphora Resolution lowers the system performance, while the use of topic detection techniques using faceted search with Wikipedia and Latent Semantic Analysis leads to satisfactory system performance, both for the monolingual setting, as well as in a multilingual one.

A proposal of algorithm for solving definite descriptions through dialogue structure

En este trabajo proponemos un algoritmo para la resolución de las descripciones definidas en español a través de la estructura del diálogo, mediante la definición de un espacio de accesibilidad anafórico. Este algoritmo está basado en la hipótesis de que la resolución de la anáfora está relacionada con la estructura del diálogo. Así, la resolución de la anáfora mejora si se especifica un espacio de accesibilidad para cada tipo descripción definida según la estructura del diálogo. La utilización de este espacio de accesibilidad anafóico reduce tanto el tiempo de procesamiento como la posibilidad de obtener un antecedente erróneo. Además, la definición de este espacio de accesibilidad depende únicamente de la propia estructura textual del diálogo.

Grammar specification for the recognition of temporal expressions

This paper tells about the recognition of temporal expressions and the resolution of their temporal reference. A proposal of the units we have used to face up this tasks over a restricted domain is shown. We work with newspapers' articles in Spanish, that is why every reference we use is in Spanish. For the identification and recognition of temporal expressions we base on a temporal expression grammar and for the resolution on a dictionary, where we have the information necessary to do the date operation based on the recognized expressions. In the evaluation of our proposal we have obtained successful results for the examples studied.