Laure Vieu

Locating adverbials in discourse

This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as un peu plus tard, ce matin, deux kilomplus loin (a little later, this morning, two kilometers further) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

A logical framework for reasoning about space

In this paper, we present a theory of space as a framework for spatial reasoning. We believe this formalism is useful for representing geographic space, at least when two constraints are present: a necessity to reason qualitatively over spatial information, and a lack of precise, homogeneous spatial data. This theory is based on mereology, an axiomatic theory of part-whole relation. It includes a formalization of topological concepts as well as some geometric notions, namely distance and orientation. It can be extended to a theory of space-time.

Une formalisation plus précise pour une annotation moins confuse: la relation d'Élaboration d'entité

Les theories cherchant a capturer la coherence discursive (Mann & Thompson, 1987; Asher & Lascarides, 2003) offrent des cadres theoriques stimulants pour analyser de nombreux phenomenes discursifs. Ils peinent parfois cependant a fournir des definitions de relations combinant precision et robustesse pour des travaux dannotation a grande echelle permettant, par exemple, de constituer des corpus annotes en relations discursives. Le cas des relations d Elaboration et d Arriere-plan constitue une parfaite illustration de ce probleme. La plupart des theories discursives les incluent, parfois sous des noms differents, et lon pourrait penser que leur definition et la maniere de les reconnaitre est maintenant etablie. Cependant, en depit du fait que ce sont les relations les plus courantes dans les corpus, cest a leur sujet que les annotateurs ont le plus de problemes. Elles sont souvent prises lune pour lautre. Dans cet article nous examinons la source de ces problemes et nous proposons une solution basee sur la distinction dune relation d Elaboration dentite , que nous formalisons en SDRT.

Temporal information and discourse relations in narratives: the role of French connectives puis and un peu plus tard

This paper deals with the way temporal connectives affect Temporal Structure as well as Discourse Structure in Narratives. It presents a contrastive study of French connectives puis (then, afterwards) and un peu plus tard (a bit later) within the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. It shows that puis is a marker of the Narration discourse relation, whereas un peu plus tard blocks Narration and licenses only a weaker discourse relation, that can be considered as a weak Narration involving only temporal succession. In addition, puis blocks Result, while un peu plus tard does not.

An open knowledge base for Italian language in a collaborative perspective

In this paper, we describe the architecture and collaborative approach adopted for the development of Senso Comune (SC), an open knowledge base for the Italian language that combines lexicographic, linguistic, ontological and textual data in a web-based collaborative platform. Senso Comune aims at integrating lexicographic data from users and legacy resources with a formally characterized ontology grounded on lexical semantic structures. Senso Comune was conceived as a linguistic knowledge base rather than a dictionary. It is actually based on a conceptual apparatus that is unusual in typical linguistic resources:, each sense is mapped to ontological categories, and is associated with semantic frames. A wiki provides a collaborative platform for editing a basic lexicon of Italian with different access and annotation privileges that dynamically enables crowd-sourced annotations. Senso Comune proposes different levels of interrelated representation layers that differently exploit collaborative annotation.

Distributional semantics for ontology verification

As they grow in size, OWL ontologies tend to comprise intuitively incompatible statements,even when they remain logically consistent. This is true in particular of lightweight ontologies, especially the ones which aggregate knowledge from different sources. The article investigates how distributional semantics can help detect and repair violation of common sense in consistent ontologies, based on the identification of consequences which are unlikely to hold if the rest of the ontology does. A score evaluating the plausibility for a consequence to hold with regard to distributional evidence is defined, as well as several methods in order to decide which statements should be preferably amended or discarded. A conclusive evaluation is also provided, which consists in extending an input ontology with randomly generated statements, before trying to discard them automatically.

ANNODIS and Related Projects: Case Studies on the Annotation of Discourse Structure

In this paper we report on the efforts of three projects to annotate texts and dialogues with discourse structure. We provide a theoretical discussion of various alternatives and then present our approach to discourse structure annotation, along with some applications of the resources that we have developed.

Senso Comune as a Knowledge Base of Italian language: The Resource and its Development

Senso Comune is a linguistic knowledge base for the Italian Language, which accommodates the content of a legacy dictionary in a rich formal model. The model is implemented in a platform which allows a community of contributors to enrich the resource. We provide here an overview of the main project features, including the lexical-ontology model, the process of sense classification, and the annotation of meaning definitions (glosses) and lexicographic examples. Also, we will illustrate the latest work of alignment with MultiWordNet, to illustrate the methodologies that have been experimented with, to share some preliminary result, and to highlight some remarkable findings about the semantic coverage of the two resources.