CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

Semantic representation and world knowledge

While general knowledge of the world plays a role in language use, language processing in humans is also guided by formal intuitions about linguistic representation. In this talk, I discuss research results in finding the boundaries between world knowledge and formalism-driven intuitions and situate them in the context of a larger research program in computational psycholinguistics.

The first result focuses on the semantics of predicates and their arguments and how they are interpreted by the human processor. English-speaking human raters judge doctors as more appropriate givers of advice than recipients and lunches as much more appropriate objects of “eat” than subjects. One of my recent projects resulted in the development of vector-space and neural network models of predicate-argument relations that model that succeed in achieving high correlations with human ratings.

The second result is about the interaction of world knowledge with higher order semantics. English-speakers tend to judge that the sentence “every child climbed a tree” refers to more than one tree, while “every jeweller appraised a diamond” is comparatively more likely to refer to a single diamond, based on their knowledge of trees and diamonds. Recent experimental results in the literature are ambivalent on the extent to which formal structure affects the power of world knowledge to influence these judgements. In response to this, I describe a recent judgement study I conducted using German scrambling that suggests a significant effect of formal representation on the plural interpretation of an object argument given a universally-quantified subject.

Both of these research efforts reveal underlying questions about the influence of world knowledge on linguistic representations and suggest ways to answer them.