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Semantic Underspecification
Author(s) -
Egg Markus
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
language and linguistics compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 44
ISSN - 1749-818X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2010.00188.x
Subject(s) - underspecification , ambiguity , rotation formalisms in three dimensions , representation (politics) , computer science , linguistics , semantics (computer science) , natural language processing , philosophy , mathematics , programming language , political science , geometry , politics , law
Semantic underspecification is a technique to capture several readings of an ambiguous expression in one single representation by deliberately omitting the differences between the readings in the representation. First, underspecification formalisms will be presented to introduce underspecification in general and to outline important properties of these formalisms that allow their classification into subgroups. After expounding the kinds of ambiguity to which underspecification can be applied, the article then presents various motivations for the use of underspecification, and shows how underspecified semantic representations can be further processed.