(Re)construing Meaning in NLP

Sean Trott, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Nancy Chang, Nathan Schneider


Abstract
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.462
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5170–5184
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.462
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.462
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sean Trott, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Nancy Chang, and Nathan Schneider. 2020. (Re)construing Meaning in NLP. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5170–5184, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
(Re)construing Meaning in NLP (Trott et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.462.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928895