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Some requirements for a VERBMOBIL system capable of processing Japanese dialogue input have been explored. Based on a pilot study in the VERBMOBIL domain, dialogues between 2 participants and a professional Japanese interpreter have been analyzed with respect to a very typical and frequent feature: zero pronouns. Zero pronouns in Japanese texts or dialogues as well as overt pronouns in English texts or dialogues are an important element of discourse coherence. As to translation, this difference in the use of pronouns is a case of translation mismatch: information not explicitly expressed in the source language is needed in the target language. (Verb argument positions, normally obligatory in English, are rather frequently omitted in Japanese. Furthermore, verbs in Japanese are not marked with respect to features necessary for pronoun selection in English.)
The paper focuses on business negotiation in settings in which participants from different mothertongue backgrounds choose French, English andfor German as one of their languages of communication. A general scheme of the action-pattem of buying and selling will be sketched out which allows us to analyze specific Courses of verbal actions according ta their communicative functions within the negotiation process. In particular, the discourse of business communication is to be specified as a decision making process on the part of the buyer which is executed in a step-by-step order, and which is Open to the application of a bundle of the seller's strategies, tactics, and communicative techniques. In international negotiations, effects of unobserved miscommunication are, among others, far-stretched communicative circles, prolongation of negotiation time, non-functional explanations and several other repetitive structures. 1. Languages of trade and commerce - languages of communication 2. Communication in a Buy-Sell-Context is patterned 2.1. Entering the Pattern 2.2. The Main Phase 2.3. The Bidding Phase 2.4. The Specifc Conditions 2.5. Negotiating the Contract 3. The Central Point 3.1. The Buyer's Decision-Making Process 3.2 Decision-Making and Role-Playing 3.3. Intercultural Difference of the Decision-Making Process 4. Bridging the Buyer's Gap of Knowledge 5. The Language of Trade and Commerce 6. The Needs of Further Research: Data References
This paper is a preliminary attempt to reconstruct the consonant system of Proto-East-Cushitic (PEC) , one of the four branches of the Cushitic family. Data are taken from some twenty-odd languages including unpublished material on a variety of hitherto little known languages. After discussing a number of general problems raised by the phonological comparison of the East Cushitic languages, 23 consonants are reconstructed for the inventory of the proto-language and the evidence for the reconstructions is presented in the form of cognate sets and correspondence rules which map the proto-phonemes onto the individual reflexes. The method employed is that of comparative linguistics as traditionally employed in Indo-European linguistics.
The meaning of chains
(1998)
This thesis investigates the mechanisms applying in the interpretation of syntactic chains. The theoretical background includes a translation of syntactic forms into semantic forms and a model theoretic explication of the meaning of semantic forms. Simplicity considerations apply to all three stages of the interpretation process: syntactic derivation, translation into semantic forms, interpretation of semantic forms. Three main results are achieved. The first is that trace positions can have semantic content beyond what is needed for the semantic dependency of trace and binder. This extra content is some or all of the lexical material of the head of the chain, as expected on the copy theory of movement. Two independent arguments support this conclusion. One, discussed in chapter 2, is based on the distribution of Condition C effects, where novel interactions between variable binding, antecedent contained deletion and Condition C are observed. The second, developed in chapter 3, is based on conditions on the identity of traces observed in antecedent contained deletion constructions. Both arguments lead to the same generalizations about what lexical material of the head is interpreted in the trace position. The second main result is that lambda calculus is superior to both standard predicate logic and combinatorial logic as the mathematical model for the semantic mechanism mediating the dependency of trace (or bound pronoun) and binder. Chapter 4 argues this on the basis of the distribution of focus and destressing in constructions with bound pronouns. The third main result is that quantification must be allowed to range over pointwise different choice functions. Chapter 5 shows that quantification over individuals is insufficient, and that pointwise different choice functions are required. The result entails that the syntactic difference of A-chains and A-bar chains predicts a semantic difference in the type of the variable involved, which is argued to explain weak crossover phenomena. Chapters 6 argues that the interpretation procedures developed in the preceeding chapters account for all cases. It is shown that only traces of the type of individuals arise, and that scope reconstruction is a phonological phenomenon. The latter result also supports the T-model of syntax.
Dutch nominalised infinitives have been notoriously difficult to analyse, partly because they seem to show mixed verbal and nominal properties interspersed across the structure. In this paper, it is argued that at least two types of such infinitives should be distinguished, one which contains a high level of verbal functional structure, and one that differs at least in not projecting TP. On the basis of this distinction it is possible to show that Dutch nominalised infinitives have much more predictable properties than could previously be identified. They show evidence of conforming to a model of analysing mixed categories in terms of category switch within the constituent. In order to account for the seemingly interspersed nature of nominal and verbal properties in Dutch nominalised infinitives I propose that Dutch of-phrases (van-phrases) may merge inside the VP, provided they have access to nominal functional structure for feature checking. I will show that if D° is filled by a special type of non-deictic demonstratives van-phrases may even occur in SpecDP.
Plural semantics for natural language understanding : a computational proof-theoretic approach
(2005)
The semantics of natural language plurals poses a number of intricate problems – both from a formal and a computational perspective. In this thesis I investigate problems of representing, disambiguating and reasoning with plurals from a computational perspective. The work defines a computationally suitable representation for important plural constructions, proposes a tractable resolution algorithm for semantic plural ambiguities, and integrates an automatic reasoning component for plurals. My solution combines insights from formal semantics, computational linguistics and automated theorem proving and is based on the following main ideas. Whereas many existing approaches to plural semantics work on a model-theoretic basis using higher-order representation languages I propose a proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics based on a flat firstorder semantic representation language thus showing that a trade-off between expressive power and logical tractability can be found. The problem of automatic disambiguation of plurals is tackled by a deliberate decision to drastically reduce recourse to contextual knowledge for disambiguation but rely instead on structurally available and thus computationally manageable information. A further central aspect of the solution lies in carefully drawing the borderline between real ambiguity and mere indeterminacy in the interpretation of plural noun phrases. As a practical result of my computational proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics I can use my methods to perform automated reasoning with plurals by applying advanced firstorder theorem provers and model-generators available off-the shelf. The results are prototypically implemented within the two logic-oriented natural language understanding applications DRoPs and Attempto. DRoPs provides an automatic plural disambiguation component for uncontrolled natural language whereas Attempto works with a constructive disambiguation strategy for controlled natural language. Both systems provide tools for the automated analysis of technical texts allowing users for example to automatically detect inconsistencies, to perform question answering, to check whether a conjecture follows from a text or to find equivalences and redundancies.
A comprehensive investigation of Japanese particle was missing up to now. General implications were set up without the fact that a comprehensive analysis was carried out. [...] We offer a lexicalist treatment of the problem. Instead of assuming different phrase structure rules we state a type hierarchy of Japanese particles. This makes a uniform treatment of phrase structure as well as a differentiation of subcategorization patterns possible.
In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004).
Das Problem des Transfers in der maschinellen Übersetzung von Japanisch nach Englisch ist fehlende Information über Numerus und Definitheit im Japanischen, die für die Wahl der englischen Artikel und die Nomenmarkierung gebraucht wird. Obwohl dieses Problem signifikant ist, beschäftigt sich die Forschungsliteratur kaum damit. [...] Wir bsaieren unsere Untersuchungen auf experimentell erhobenen Daten aus einem Experiment über deutsch-japanische gedolmetschte Terminaushandlungsdialoge [...]. Auf diese Weise können Phänomene bestimmt werden, die für die Domäne von VERBMOBIL relevant sind. Wir sehen unser Vorgehen in Übereinstimmung mit dem 'Sublanguage'-Ansatz [...].