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Resolving Plural Ambiguities by Type Reconstruction

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Formal Grammar (FG 2010, FG 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7395))

Abstract

We describe a type reconstruction algorithm for a fragment of natural language. It is based on Hindley’s algorithm for simple types, but extends it with subtyping and overloading. We extend one of Montague’s fragments of English by plural noun phrases which may have several types and by overloaded verbs to allow for distributed and non-distributed readings of noun phrases and verb arguments. We demonstrate how type reconstruction can select suitable meanings of subject noun phrases depending on the meaning of verb phrases. Thus, type reconstruction enables us to handle some violations of Frege’s compositionality principle.

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Leiß, H. (2012). Resolving Plural Ambiguities by Type Reconstruction. In: de Groote, P., Nederhof, MJ. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2010 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7395. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32024-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32024-8_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32023-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32024-8

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