Cristina Grisot

How Do Empirical Methods Interact with Theoretical Pragmatics? The Conceptual and Procedural Contents of the English Simple Past and Its Translation into French

One major theoretical issue that has dominated the field of theoretical pragmatics for the last twenty years is the conceptual vs. procedural distinction and its application for verb tenses. In this chapter, we address this distinction from both theoretical and empirical perspectives following a multifaceted methodology: work on parallel corpora, contrastive analysis methodology and offline experimentation with natural language processing applications. We argue that the conceptual/pro- cedural distinction should be investigated under the aegis of empirical pragmatics. In the case study, we bring evidence from offline experimentation for the proce- dural and conceptual contents of the English Simple Past and we use this informa- tion for improving the results of a machine translation system.

Temporal Coherence in Discourse: Theory and Application for Machine Translation

Temporal coherence in discourse is provided through several temporal cohesive ties, such as tense, aspect and discourse connectives. In the relevance theoretic framework and more specifically in the Geneva school of pragmatics, these cohesive ties are considered as encoding procedural information important for guiding the hearer towards the intended interpretation of the discourse. Jacques Moeschler and his team studied temporal cohesive ties and proposed original theoretical models that have been validated with human and automatic annotation experiments, as well as in language acquisition studies (Zufferey and Popescu-Belis, this volume). In this paper, I show that Jacques Moeschler’s model for inferring temporal discourse relations and his description of tenses expressing past time in French is cross-linguistically valid and can be modelled for improving the results of statistical machine translation systems.

Formal Models in the Study of Language: Introduction

The present book focuses on the application of formal models in the study of language. The construction and application of formal models in linguistics have proved their descriptive and explanatory power for building robust theoretical accounts as well as empirical testing, validation and adjustment of the theories. Thus, the innovative, empirically motivated theoretical models and their application to various linguistic phenomena in the domains of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and their interfaces as well as human and computational processing of natural language are proposed. The volume is composed of three parts, each of them focusing primarily on one of the three types of models presented: linguistic, cognitive and computational. One of the greatest strengths of these models, as illustrated throughout the book, is that they allow concrete empirical testing, which in turn allows the re-adjustment of the initial theoretical model.