Abstract

This paper describes in brief the proposal called ‘QuantML’ which was accepted by the International Organisation for Standards (ISO) last February as a starting point for developing a standard for the interoperable annotation of quantification phenomena in natural language, as part of the ISO 24617 Semantic Annotation Framework. The proposal, firmly rooted in the theory of generalised quantifiers, neo-Davidsonian semantics, and DRT, covers a wide range of quantification phenomena. The QuantML scheme consists of (1) an abstract syntax which defines ‘annotation structures’ as triples and other set-theoretic constructs; (b) a compositional semantics of annotation structures; (3) an XML representation of annotation structures.

Highlights

  • Quantification is widespread in spoken and written language; it can be found in nearly every sentence, since it occurs whenever a predicate is applied to one or more argument sets

  • This paper presents an annotation scheme, called ‘QuantML’, where a range of aspects of natural language quantification are captured by a relatively small number of features, distributed over the components of annotation structures in a way that allows a compositional semantic interpretation

  • The QuantML semantics specifies a recursive interpretation function IQ that translates annotation structures into Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) in a compositional way: the interpretation of an annotation structure is obtained by combining the interpretations of its component entity structures and participation link structures, in a way that is determined by scope link structures

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Summary

Introduction

Quantification is widespread in spoken and written language; it can be found in nearly every sentence, since it occurs whenever a predicate is applied to one or more argument sets (rather than single arguments) This commonly happens in two of the linguistically most prominent units: clauses and noun phrases. Quantification is the main source of structural ambiguity in natural langue; applications of natural language processing for which semantic information is important, such as information extraction, and question answering, need effective ways of interpreting quantification expressions. This calls for a flexible and interoperable way of indicating aspects of quantification. The QuantML scheme is based on a number of preliminary studies including Bunt (2017), Bunt et al (2018), and Bunt (2018), and has recently been accepted as the basis for developing Part 12 of the ISO Semantic annotation framework (ISO 24617)

Related work
Ambiguity and lack of specificity
Precision and distributivity
Individuation
Theoretical background
Annotation scheme architecture
Abstract syntax
Concrete syntax
Semantics
Using QuantML
Conclusions and Further Work
Full Text
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