Open AccessNominal Compound Interpretation by Intelligent Agents
Author(s) -
Marjorie McShane,
Stephen Beale,
Petr Babkin
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
linguistic issues in language technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1945-3590
pISSN - 1945-3604
DOI - 10.33011/lilt.v10i.1351
Subject(s) - computer science , natural language processing , lexicon , interpretation (philosophy) , context (archaeology) , ontology , artificial intelligence , semantic interpretation , process (computing) , semantic analysis (machine learning) , intelligent agent , task (project management) , quality (philosophy) , programming language , paleontology , philosophy , management , epistemology , economics , biology
This paper presents a cognitively-inspired algorithm for the semantic analysis of nominal compounds by intelligent agents. The agents, modeled within the OntoAgent environment, are tasked to compute a full context-sensitive semantic interpretation of each compound using a battery of engines that rely on a high-quality computational lexicon and ontology. Rather than being treated as an isolated “task”, as in many NLP approaches, nominal compound analysis in OntoAgent represents a minimal extension to the core process of semantic analysis. We hypothesize that seeking similarities across language analysis tasks reflects the spirit of how people approach language interpretation, and that this approach will make feasible the long-term development of truly sophisticated, human-like intelligent agents. The initial evaluation of our approach to nominal compounds are fixed expressions, requiring individual semantic specification at the lexical level.