Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
(Non)maximality and Distributivity: A Decision Theory Approach – Malamud (2006)
A solution for incorporating packaging and hearer goals into interpretations for distributive over definite plurals. Uses Decision Theory to provide a formal framework for hearer goals and shows that we choose a distributivity reading based on the these goals and how the interpretations help us choose between actions. Interpretations which allow us to restrict the action choices the most are preferred. The decision problem is contextually determined.
Monday, November 9th, 2009
Selectional Constraints: an Information-theoretic Model and its Computational Realization – Resnik (1996)
Resnik proposes an information-theoretic model of verb selection restriction. Uses WordNet to model noun conceptual classes and then shows how the Relative Entropy between the noun class and the noun class given the verb is a good measure of how specific a selectional constraint the verb has. Shows that this measure of selectional restriction correlates with human judgments of plausibility and can predict which verbs undergo inferred object alternations and when an speaker may choose to use an inferred object construction. Overall the strength of the correlations with human judgments were weaker than expected. Resnik argues that this may be due to the minimal nature of the model and the fact that it does not distinguish between verb or noun senses. He argues that this is an advantage in corresponding to the information available to the language learner. It could indicate that sense disambiguation happens early in language learning and is not reliant on selectional constraints. In all likelihood both selectional constraint information and sense disambiguation are learned together and reinforce each other.
Monday, November 9th, 2009
The ZPG Letter: Subject, Definiteness, and Information-status – Prince (1998)
Prince gives an analysis of Subject/Nonsubject NPs in a letter. She annotates the letter for Hearer Old/New, Discourse Old/New, Inferable, Pronominal/Nonpronominal, and Definiteness. She shows that the only reliable predictor of Subject/Nonsubject was Discourse Old/New. She argues we could count saliency as another factor if we take the distinction between Pronominal/Nonpronominal NPs to be representative of salience. All this research claims is that the letter conforms to genre tendencies for Subjects to be old information, specifically discourse old information. It would be nice to see this work extended to a large dataset so generalizations could be made.