Pragmatic identification of the witness sets

Livio Robaldo, Jakub Szymanik


Abstract
Among the readings available for NL sentences, those where two or more sets of entities are independent of one another are particularly challenging from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Those readings are termed here as ‘Independent Set (IS) readings'. Standard examples of such readings are the well-known Collective and Cumulative Readings. (Robaldo, 2011) proposes a logical framework that can properly represent the meaning of IS readings in terms of a set-Skolemization of the witness sets. One of the main assumptions of Robaldo's logical framework, drawn from (Schwarzschild, 1996), is that pragmatics plays a crucial role in the identification of such witness sets. Those are firstly identified on pragmatic grounds, then logical clauses are asserted on them in order to trigger the appropriate inferences. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental analysis that appears to confirm Robaldo's hypotheses concerning the pragmatic identification of the witness sets.
Anthology ID:
L12-1158
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
81–87
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/334_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Livio Robaldo and Jakub Szymanik. 2012. Pragmatic identification of the witness sets. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 81–87, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Pragmatic identification of the witness sets (Robaldo & Szymanik, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/334_Paper.pdf