Speech in parts : understanding and modelling the semantic differences between words

• Main Author: Paradis, Michel
• Published: University of Oxford 2012
• Subjects: 410.285
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.568502

This thesis is about the problem of differences in lexical semantics with a special emphasis on antonymy. It explores part-of-speech as a means to formalize semantic differences computationalIy, enhance the performance of computational linguistic tasks and aid in the understanding of lexical semantics more broadly. The thesis begins with an overview of how antonymy has been studied within experimental psychology and the major schools of theoretical linguistics as well as a review of the semantic foundations of part-of-speech. It then turns to computational experiments that use part-of-speech as a primitive organizing principle, including a source cate- gorization task and four automatic antonym identification experiments, which with few exceptions, show results that either meet or exceed human performance. The final chapter presents a computational analysis of semantic markedness and the se- quence preferences that that antonyms often demonstrate when they eo-occur, The theoretical accounts for these observations are evaluated on the basis of corpus statis- tics and the thesis concludes with some general observations about the usefulness of computational linguistics in the analysis of semantic theories