Supervisors
Claire Gardent (Director of Research, CNRS) and Laurent Romary (Director of Research, INRIA).
Description
In order to develop applications including semantic reasoning (such as Question/Answering, or Information Extraction), adequate linguistic resources are needed. An example of such resources is a grammar. Basically, a grammar associates a syntactic structure (and optionnaly a semantic one) with a sentence of a natural language. Such a structure may be given to a parser, which produces a syntactic structure that can be the basis for a semantic construction process.
Introduced by Joshi in the 70s, Tree Adjoining Grammars have attractive properties, such as:
- mildly context-sensitivity
- parsability in polynomial time
- linguistic adequacy (extended domain of locality)
At the time of the PhD, there was no wide-coverage TAG allowing for the annotation of a sentence with not only a syntactic structure but also a semantic representation (i.e. a representation of the meaning of the sentence, usually a logic formula).
In this context, this PhD subject aimed at specifying, developping, and evaluating computational tools allowing a semantic construction process based on TAG. More precisely, we developed an architecture allowing to:
- produce semi-automatically a TAG with semantics information for French,
- validate the correctness of the grammar,
- build automatically, from this grammar, a semantic representation of the meaning of natural language sentences.
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Progress reports (in French)
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Manuscript (in French)
SemTAG: an architecture for semantic calculus with Tree Adjoining Grammar (defended on April 2007, 6).
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Supervisors
Bertrand Gaiffe (Research Fellow, CNRS) and
Claire Gardent (Director of Research, CNRS)
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Abstract
In our work, we aimed at introducing the concept of meta-grammar, which makes possible the production of wide-coverage Tree Adjoining Grammars. Different approaches have been studied, especially in the area of semi-automatic generation of wide-coverage TAG for French. In this report, we focus on the integration of semantic calculus into two implementations of meta-grammar compilers : the MGC and the coloured descriptions-based Solver. This work follows the ideas developped in the "GenI" project (Action de Recherche Concertée INRIA "Génération et Inférence").
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Manuscript (in French)
Méta-grammaire et calcul sémantique pour les grammaires d'arbres adjoints (Meta-grammar and semantic construction in Tree Adjoining Grammars)
Slides (in French)
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