Introduction to

Semantics and Pragmatics

 NLP tends to focus on:
Syntax
Grammars, parsers, parse trees,
dependency structures
Semantics
Subcategorization frames, semantic
classes, ontologies, formal semantics
Pragmatics
Pronouns, reference resolution,
discourse models

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 Semantics and Pragmatics
High-level Linguistics (the good
stuff!)

Semantics: the study of meaning that can

be determined from a sentence, phrase
or word.

Pragmatics: the study of meaning, as it

depends on context (speaker, situation)
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 Language to Logic
John went to the book store.
John , go(John, store1)
store1

John bought a book.

buy(John,book1)
John gave the book to Mary.
give(John,book1,Mary)
Mary put the book on the table.
put(Mary,book1,table1)
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 Semantics
Same event - different sentences
John broke the window with a hammer.

John broke the window with the crack.

The hammer broke the window.

The window broke.

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 Same event - different syntactic
frames
John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

John broke the window with the crack.

SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

The hammer broke the window.

SUBJ VERB OBJ

The window broke.

SUBJ VERB

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 Semantics -predicate arguments
break(AGENT, INSTRUMENT, PATIENT)

AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT

John broke the window with a hammer.

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.

PATIENT
The window broke.
Fillmore 68 - The case for case

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AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT
John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ OBJ
MODIFIER

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.
SUBJ OBJ

PATIENT
The window broke.
SUBJ
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 Natural Language Processing
Applications and Tasks
Machine Translation
Question-Answering
Information Retrieval
Information Extraction

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 Machine Translation

One of the first applications for computers

bilingual dictionary > word-word translation
Good translation requires understanding!
War and Peace, The Sound and The Fury?
What can we do? Sublanguages.
technical domains, static vocabulary
Meteo in Canada, Caterpillar Tractor Manuals,
Botanical descriptions, Military Messages

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 Example translation

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 Machine Translation
The Story of the Stone
=The Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin
1792)
Issues: (Language Divergences)
Sentence segmentation
Zero-anaphora
Coding of tense/aspect
Penetrate -> penetrated
Stylistic differences across languages
Bamboo tip plaintain leaf -> bamboos and plantains
Cultural knowledge
Curtain -> curtains of her bed
 Machine Translation
Chinese gloss: Dai-yu alone on bed top think-of-with-
gratitude Bao-chai again listen to window outside bamboo
tip plantain leaf of on-top rain sound sigh drop clear cold
penetrate curtain not feeling again fall down tears come

Hawkes translation: As she lay there alone, Dai-yus

thoughts turned to Bao-chai Then she listened to the
insistent rustle of the rain on the bamboos and plantains
outside her window. The coldness penetrated the curtains
of her bed. Almost without noticing it she had begun to cry.
Language Families
 Babelfish Demo
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

Old example:
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak.
 Question Answering
What does door mean?
What year was Abraham Lincoln born?
How many states were in the United
States when Lincoln was born?
Was there a military draft during the
Hoover administration?
What do US scientists think about
whether human cloning should be
legal?
 Modern QA systems
Still in infancy
Simple factoid questions beginning to
work OK
Annual government-sponsored
bakeoff called TREC
 QA Demo
UIUC QA Demo

Qualim QA Demo
 Issues in NLP
Ambiguity!

World Knowledge its needed for

understanding, but computers dont
have it

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 Ambiguity
Computational linguists are obsessed
with ambiguity
Ambiguity is a fundamental problem
of computational linguistics
Resolving ambiguity is a crucial goal
 Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this
sentence:
I made her duck
 Ambiguity
Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:
I made her duck
I cooked waterfowl for her benefit (to eat)
I cooked waterfowl belonging to her
I created the (plaster?) duck she owns
I caused her to quickly lower her head or body
I waved my magic wand and turned her into
undifferentiated waterfowl
At least one other meaning thats inappropriate for gentle
company.
 Ambiguity is Pervasive
I caused her to quickly lower her head or body
Lexical category: duck can be a N or V
I cooked waterfowl belonging to her.
Lexical category: her can be a possessive (of her)
or dative (for her) pronoun
I made the (plaster) duck statue she owns
Lexical Semantics: make can mean create or
cook
 Ambiguity is Pervasive
Grammar: Make can be:
Transitive: (verb has a noun direct
object)
I cooked [waterfowl belonging to her]
Ditransitive: (verb has 2 noun
objects)
I made [her] (into) [undifferentiated waterfowl]
Action-transitive (verb has a direct
object and another verb)
I caused [her] [to move her body]
 Ambiguity is Pervasive
Phonetics!
I mate or duck
Im eight or duck
Eye maid; her duck
Aye mate, her duck
I maid her duck
Im aid her duck
I mate her duck
Im ate her duck
Im ate or duck
I mate or duck
 Headlines
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers

Iraqi Head Seeks Arms

Teacher Strikes Idle Kids

Miners Refuse To Work After Death

Juvenile Court To Try Shooting Defendant

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Kinds of knowledge needed?

Consider the following interaction

with HAL the computer from 2001: A
Space Odyssey

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

HAL: Im sorry Dave, Im afraid I
cant do that.
 Knowledge needed to build
HAL?
Speech recognition and synthesis
Dictionaries (how words are pronounced)
Phonetics (how to recognize/produce each sound
of English)
Natural language understanding
Knowledge of the English words involved
What they mean
How they combine (what is a `pod bay door?)
Knowledge of syntactic structure
Im I do, Sorry that afraid Dave Im cant
 Whats needed?
Dialog and pragmatic knowledge
open the door is a REQUEST (as opposed
to a STATEMENT or information-question)
It is polite to respond, even if youre
planning to kill someone.
It is polite to pretend to want to be
cooperative (Im afraid I cant)
What is `that in `I cant do that?
Even a system to book airline flights
needs much of this kind of knowledge
 Eliza: Weizenbaum (1966)
User: You are like my father in some ways.
ELIZA: What resemblance do you see
User: You are not very aggressive but I think you dont
want me to notice that.
ELIZA: What makes you think I am not aggressive
User: You dont argue with me
ELIZA: Why do you think I dont argue with you
User: You are afraid of me
ELIZA: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you
 Modern conversational
agents
Switchboard Receptionists
Implications: need to know how a native or non-native
speaker of English is likely to pronounce a random
American name. Eek.
Airline and other simple dialogue systems
Lots of fabulously fun pragmatic issues
Grounding
Error handling
In general
Now that there are commercial installations
Big incentive to use linguistic or any other kind of
knowledge if it actually improves performance
 Well-understood Semantic
Tasks
Named-entity Recognition

Coreference Resolution

Semantic Role Labeling

Sentiment Classification
 Entities
Named Entity Tagging: Identify all the
proper names in a text
Sally went to see Up in the Air at the local
theater.

Coreference Resolution: Identify all

references (aka mentions) of people,
places and things in text, and determine
which mentions are co-referential.
John stuck his foot in his mouth.
 Semantic Role Labeling
Semantic role labeling is
computational task of assigning
semantic roles to phrases
B-A0 REL B-A1 I-A1 B-AM I-AM I-AM
John broke the window with a hammer.
 Sentiment Classification
Given a review (about a movie, hotel, Amazon
product, etc.), a sentiment classification
system tries to determine what opinions are
expressed in the review.

Coarse-level objective: is the review

positive, negative, or neutral overall?

Fine-grained objective: what are the

positive aspects (according to the reviewer),
and what are the negative aspects?