Dr. Tristan Miller
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence(OFAI)
RECOGNIZING AND INTERPRETING WORDPLAY WITH COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS
How do computers determine the meaning of individual words in a text,
and what challenges do they face with deliberately ambiguous usages such
as puns?
Machine learning approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD) depend on
the availability of large numbers of training examples, which can be
expensive or impractical to obtain. This is a particular problem for
processing the sort of lexical-semantic anomalies employed for
deliberate effect in humour and wordplay. In contrast to machine
learning systems are knowledge-based techniques, which rely only on
pre-existing lexical-semantic resources (LSRs) such as dictionaries and
thesauri. In this talk, we treat the task of improving the performance
and applicability of knowledge-based WSD, both generally and for the
particular case of wordplay. In the first part of the talk, we present
two approaches for bridging the “lexical gap” problem and thereby
improving WSD coverage and accuracy. In the first approach, we
supplement the word’s context and the LSR’s sense descriptions with
entries from a distributional thesaurus. The second approach enriches
an LSR’s sense information by aligning and clustering the senses to
those of other, complementary LSRs. In the second part of the talk, we
describe how these techniques, along with evaluation methodologies from
traditional WSD, can be adapted for the “disambiguation” of puns, or
rather for the automatic identification of their double meanings. We
conclude with a sketch of how this and other techniques from
computational semantics could be used to help translate puns from one
language to another.
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Time: Thursday, 13th of June 2019, 6:30 p.m. sharp
Location: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut
fuer Artificial Intelligence, OFAI
Freyung 6, Stiege 6, 1010 Wien
OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Univ.-Prof. Ing. Dr. Robert Trappl
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