Semantic acquisition
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Morphosemantically ambiguous constructions pose interesting puzzles for the acquisition of natural language.
Studying their acquisition path in children reveals properties of the different structures associated with the constructions, and their meanings
(see handout below). I am currently modeling the problem computationally to see how machine learning algorithms
deal with morphosemantic ambiguities.
- Handout of talk at UUSLAW 2008
- pdf
Reciprocity
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An investigation of the denotations of reciprocal verbs and the semantic foundations in which they are grounded.
- Paper to appear in the proceedings of NELS 38
- pdf
Tense and aspect
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Does Chinese, a morphologically poor language, altogether lack tense in the grammar?
What would a language, any language, look like without tense?
Sequence of tense phenomena in Mandarin Chinese may provide answers to these questions.
Computation and linguistics
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Irony (yes, irony!) can be modeled and tested with computational tools. I used Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a model of knowledge and similarity, to measure (dis)similarity in ironic sentences.
- Paper presented at CL2003 workshop
- pdf
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Tools.
