A Compositional Semantics of Temporal Expressions in English

What it is about

The paper gives the temporal semantics of the meaning representation of JANUS, a naval query system. Tense is given narrow scope over the main verb, and times are quantified explicitly. Following Reichenbach, each evaluation has a speech time, an event time and a reference time, so that "Vincent left yesterday" puts the event in the day before the reference time. Quantified noun phrases such as "every admiral" receive a contextually salient restrictor, and a discourse entity built from an earlier sentence can serve as the referent of a later plural pronoun, following Webber. The paper shows that a single-index tense logic gets wrong the readings of sentences with tense and time adverbials, negation, quantified subjects and sequences of events. There are no numerical results; the argument is by worked formulas.

Ideas

• I1. Multi-index time in the world: store event time and reference time as separate fields in world/src/events.rs, so that "yesterday" moves the reference time and not the event. Measure on the temporal questions in the school lessons, run twice.
• I2. A restrictor for quantifiers: attach to each quantified noun phrase the set of entities of the current lesson, and test world/src/qa.rs with and without it. This is a deterministic version of the paper's contextual R.
• I3. A discourse-entity table for plural pronouns: after each sentence, record the plural set its nouns describe, and resolve "they" against that table, as Webber's rule does. Test on the coreference data.
• I4. A negative control: sentences like "every X was once Y" where a simultaneous reading would be wrong. The answer must differ from that reading.

For Mova

Chapters: 13. Verbs (tense), 36. Discourse relations and coherence, 35. Reference and coreference. Code: world/src/events.rs, world/src/qa.rs, coref/src/sieve.rs. Measure: accuracy on temporal and pronoun questions with and without the new fields, run twice.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/981175.981177

@inproceedings{hinrichs1987compositional,
  title = {{A Compositional Semantics of Temporal Expressions in English}},
  author = {Hinrichs, Erhard W.},
  booktitle = {25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1987},
  doi = {10.3115/981175.981177},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/981175.981177}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Aqvist, Lennart (1976). 'Formal Semantics for Verb Tenses as Analyzed by Reichenbach'. In: van Dijk, Teun ed. Pragmatics of Language and Literature. Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 229-236. find
2. Bach, Emmon (1980). "Tenses and Aspect as Functions of Verb Phrases". In Ch. Rohrer ed. Times, Tenses, and Quantifiers. Niemeyer: Tuebingen, W. Germany. find
3. Clark, H. H. and Marshall, C.R. (1981) "Definite Reference and Mutual Knowledge'. In: A. Joshi, B. Webber and I. Sag eds. Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 10-63. find
4. Dowty, David R. (1982). "Tenses, Time Adverbs, and Compositional Semantic Theory'. Linguistics and Philosophy Vol.5, pp. 23-55. find
5. Enc, Murvet (1981). Tense without Scope: A...nn Analysis of Nouns as Indexicals. University of Wisconsin, Madison dissertation. Distributed by IULC. find
6. Enc, Murvet (1986). "Towards a Referential Analysis of Temporal Expressions". Linguistics and Philosophy. Vol. 9.4, pp. 405-426. find
7. Hinrichs, Erhard (1981). Temporale Anaphora irn Encjlischen. unpublished Staatsexamen thesis: University of Tuebingen. find
8. Hinrichs, Erhard (1986). "Temporal Anaphora in Discourses of English". Linguistics an d Philosophy, Vol. 9.1, pp. 63-82. find
9. Hinrichs, Erhard, Damaris Ayuso and Remko Sha (1987). "The Syntax and Semantics of a Meaning Representation Language for JANUS'. In: Research and Development in Natural Language Understanding as Part of th...ee Strategic Computing Program, Annual Technical Report December 1985- December 1986, BBN Technical Report 6522. find
10. Link, Godehard (1983). 'The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms'. In: Baeuerle, Schwat-ze and von Stechow eds. Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 250-269. find
11. Montague, Richard (1973). Formal Philosophy. ed. by Richmond Thomason. Yale University Press: New Haven. find
12. Prior, Arthur (1967). Past, Present and Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
13. Partee, Barbara H. (1973). 'Some Structural Analogies between Tenses and Pronouns'. The Journal of Philosophy 70:18, pp. 601-609. find
14. Reichenbach, Hans (1947). Elements of Symbolic LocJic. Berkeley: University of California Press. find
15. Scha, Remko (1963). Logical Foundations for Question Answering. Philips Research Laboratories M.S. 12.331. Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Sidner, Candace (t983). "Focusing the Comprehension of Definite Anaphora". In Brady, Michael and Robert Berwick eds. Computational Models of Discourse. Boston: MIT Press, pp. 267-330. find
16. Stalnaker, Robert (1973). "Pragmatics". In D. Davidson and G. Harman eds. Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel Publishing: Dordrecht, pp. 380-397. find
17. Stalnaker, Robert (1978). "Assertion". In: P. Cole ed. Syntax and Semantics Vol. 9. New York: Academic Press, pp. 315-332. find
18. Webber, Bonnie (1978). A Forma! Approach to Discourse Anaphora. BBN Technical Report No. 3761. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.: Cambridge, MA. Webber. find
19. Bonnie (1983). "So what can we talk about now?". Brady, Michael and Robert Berwick eds. Computational Models of Discourse. Boston: MIT Press, pp. 331-371 find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hinrichs-1987-compositional-semantics-temporal-expressions-english/