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Title: La place des connaissances lexicales face aux connaissances du monde dans le processus d'interprétation des énoncés/Study of the Role of Lexical Knowledge versus World Knowledge in the Process of Interpretation of Statements
Author: Kornel Bangha
Email: click here to access email
Degree Awarded: Université de Montréal , Linguistics
Degree Date: 2003
Linguistic Subfield(s): Semantics
Director(s): Alain Polguère

Abstract:

The aim of this research is, on one hand, general, and on the other hand,
specific. The general aim is to study to what extent the process of
interpretation of statements is based on lexical knowledge rather than on
world knowledge. We are particularly interested in knowing to what extent
the knowledge needed for interpretation is part of the language. This
question being too general to be properly researched, it was necessary to
look at it from a more limited angle: the interpretation of definite
expressions - this is our specific aim.

Besides its theoretical interest, this is also an essential issue in
Natural Language Processing where computers need a great deal of knowledge.
In order to provide the necessary knowledge to computers, we first need to
examine what this knowledge consists of, what role it plays. However, from
a computational point of view, the most important point is not to know how
human interpretation works but rather to determine what piece of knowledge
is needed for any linguistic task.

First of all, we make a clear distinction between world knowledge and
linguistic knowledge. After that, we present the framework of this study:
the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. An entire chapter is concerned
about the notion of interpretation. At the end, we conduct a study
dedicated to definite expressions and we analyse a corpus of twelve texts.

The conclusion of our study is that linguistic knowledge (and particularly
lexical functions) together with the information contained in the texts we
analysed, can grant us most of the knowledge needed for the interpretation
of definite expressions.
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