Browsing by Subject "Semantics."

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Open Access
Computational situation theory with baby-sit
(1995) Tin, Erkan
Language is an integral part of our everyday experience and encompasses situated activities such as talking, listening, reading, and writing. These activities are situated because they occur in situations and they are about situations. Their primary function, on the other hand, is to convey information. With this vision, situation theory has been developed over the last decade or so and various versions of the theory have been applied to a number of linguistic issues. However, not much work has been done in regard to its computational aspects. Existing approaches towards 'computational situation theory' incorporate only some of the original features of situation theory and hence show conceptual and philosophical divergence from its ontology. This thesis presents a computational account of situation theory that embodies the essentials of the theory and adopts its ontological features. A medium (called BABY-SIT) which is based on the proposed computational foundation is described and its constructs are formally defined. The features of BABY-SIT are compared to those of the existing approaches. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness of BABY-SIT, some examples from the domain of artifical intelligence are given. Resolution of pronominal anaphora in Turkish , which has been chosen as a linguistic test-bed for BABY-SIT, is also demonstrated.
Open Access
Semantic argument classification and semantic categorization of Turkish existential sentences using support vector learning
(2004) Koca, Aylin
There are three types of sentences that form all existing natural languages: verbal sentences (e.g. “I read the book.”), copulative sentences (e.g. “The book is on the table.”), and existential sentences (e.g. “There is a book on the table.”). Syntactic and semantic recognition of these sentence types are crucially important in computational linguistics although there has not been any significant work towards this end. This thesis, in an attempt to fill this evident gap, is on identifying and assigning semantic categories of Turkish existential sentences in print. Existential sentences in Turkish are minimally characterized by the two existential particles var, meaning there is/are, and yok, meaning there is/are no. In addition to these most basic meanings, other senses of existential particles are possible, which can be categorized into groups such as case existentials and possession existentials. Our system does shallow semantic parsing in defining the predicate-argument relationships in an existential sentence on a word-byword basis, via utilizing Support Vector Machines, after which it proceeds with the semantic categorization of the whole sentence. For both of these tasks, our system produces promising results, in terms of accuracy and precision/recall, respectively. Part of this research contributes to the annotation of the METU-Sabancı Turkish Treebank with semantic information.