Gilles Col

Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction

AbtractWe would like to propose a new model of meaning construction based on language comprehension considered as a dynamic process during which the meaning of each linguistic unit and the global meaning of the sentence are determined simultaneously. This model, which may be called “gestalt compositionality,” is radically opposed to the classic compositional mechanism advocated by linguistic formalism based on the primacy of syntax. The process considers the syntactic structure of an utterance as the product of meaning construction rather than its source. The comprehension of an utterance is consequently directly based on the interaction between the different basic components of this utterance: lexical units, grammatical markers, positional relations between units, and more generally, basic “constructions” in the sense of Construction Grammar. Thus, meaning is really the result of a gestalt compositional process insomuch as the contribution of each basic component depends on the contribution of the other components present in the utterance. We show a first attempt at modeling from French and English examples.

Continuity in the Interactions Between Linguistic Units

We investigate the notions of continuity and interaction in linguistic models. There is now a quite rich tradition of work based on the hypothesis that natural language is not a discrete model. Instead, continuous models consider word sense, grammar rules and categories as continuous notions: some words are hard to categorize and some rules do not fully apply in certain contexts. Word meaning in context often corresponds to different meanings according to the dictionary. New models have been proposed that provide a more accurate view of these phenomena. Recent advances in natural language processing also support this idea by providing very rich models based on a multi-level representation of the context of use of linguistic items. We describe how these models provide an interesting convergence between linguistic and computational models.