Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading sciencedirect. We investigated the effect of semantic and phonemic ambiguity on lexical decision and naming performance in the deep hebrew orthography. More than 150 cards in a file to print out and cut out. Lexical ambiguity resolution lar, then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. At least one best path is defined based upon a corresponding cost to generate an output graph 322. Lexical ambiguity resolution 23 these effects were further examined via a priori planned 1tailed compari sons of the probe type condition related vs. Lexical semantic ambiguitythe lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase relates to the word having more than one meaning. Lexical ambiguity and the role of knowledge representation in. The contexts of the word occurrence also make it possible for the meanings to be both interpreted. Surprisinglylittleresearch on lexical ambiguity has been done utilizing brain imaging techniques such as fmri. And structural ambiguity is the result of the two sentences having the same linear order of constituents but a different structure. Pdf lexical and syntactic ambiguity in humor danin. Lexical ambiguity and sentence comprehension sciencedirect.
Incresearch on lexical ambiguity has focused on two general questions. Pdf lexical and structural ambiguity in machine translation. Then we show some data extracted from the iclef log. Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution as.
As oaks 1994 states, lexical ambiguity is a word with more than one possible meaning in a context p. Find powerpoint presentations and slides using the power of, find free presentations research about lexical ambiguity. It reveals and emphasises linguistic peculiarities like homonymy and polysemy in a selfreferential play of language with itself in a kind of mirroring. A method and system for reducing lexical ambiguity in an input stream are described. Ambiguity is pervasive in english lexical ambiguity is extremely common. That is, lexical access is a modular and bottomup lexical ambiguity resolution 25 process, but the fact that cantonese relies on context so heavily forces the pro cessor to choose between the ambiguous meanings faster than it does for italian. The logical analysis of lexical ambiguity citeseerx. A collection of the best research on lar available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists.
Two experiments were carried out using swinneys 1979 crossmodal paradigm. Lexical ambiguity definition and examples thoughtco. Each card contains a block of words, wordcombinations or phrases related to the corresponding lexical. Control probes for each of the ambiguity meaning conditions. To be sure, many of the fine meaning distinctions found in dictionaries reflect lexicographers attempts to deal with the vagueness of most. First, what meaning or meanings are retrieved during the initial lexical access process for an ambiguous word. Processing lexical ambiguity and visual word recognition in a. Pdf 1 one major way which ambiguity occurs in daily communication is in the use of some lexical items which have more than one. In the first, lexical decisions were made to words related to the dominant or the subordinate meanings. Pdf lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading keith. Lexical ambiguity and context effects in spoken word recognition. W e rep ort on an alys i s of lexical am biguit y in inform a t ion retr iev al e st. The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its 647518 ppt. Lexical am biguit y an d inform a t ion retr iev al.
Below are few examples of lexical ambiguities analysis in the jakarta post. Lexical ambiguity in sentence comprehension amazon s3. Our results are quite consistent with other data on lexical ambiguity collected using the crossmodal priming task onifer. Jun 01, 1975 journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 14, 265274 1975 lexical ambiguity and sentence comprehension thomas w. Syntactic ambiguity has three names grammatical, structural or syntactic ambiguity. Some researchers prefer the term semantic ambiguity as this makes it clear that it is the meaning of the word that is ambiguous and not its form or grammatical. Following ambiguous sentences, dominant meanings were retrieved first. Pdf the lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Representing lexical ambiguity in prototype models of. These results suggested that lexical decisions for phonemically and. Categorically ambiguous words are those whose syntactic category may vary. The two broad groups of semantic ambiguity are described thus. Read lexical relations lexical ambiguity online download pdf lexical relations lexical ambiguity.
The paper examines the effects of sentential context and frequency of meaning dominance on the lexical access of ambiguous words. The other sense, the restricted meaning, is concerned with certain lexical and grammatical properties that are. The time course of lexical ambiguity resolution in context core. Lexical ambiguity is generally assumed to be widespread in natural languages but.
View and download powerpoint presentations on lexical ambiguity ppt. In its simplest form, then, the term refers to the phenomenon in language where one linguistic form has a number of different, yet related meanings. Jul 12, 2019 lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. However, this study not only analyzes the kinds of ambiguity arise in the headlines. Resolving lexical ambiguity in tensor regression models of meaning. Resolution of lexical ambiguity by emotional tone of voice. A crude measure of just how common is provided by the number of definitions provided for words in standard dictionaries. Rusche 1980 proposes that ambiguity should be extended to any verbal nuance, which gives room to alternative reactions to the same linguistic element. Lexical ambiguity jennifer rodd department of experimental. In one embodiment, the input stream 302 is broken into tokens 308. There is an instance of lexical ambiguity between two distinct linguistic elements when they are spelled exactly the same way. While lexical ambiguity is described as a word with more than one meaning e. The ambiguity advantage the ambiguity advantageis the.
Pdf lexical sources of ambiguity in english and daily. The effect of using gesture on resolving lexical ambiguity in l2. Donald hindle and mats rooth structural ambiguity and lexical relations table 1 a sample of np heads, preceding verbs, and following prepositions derived from the parsed corpus. Ambiguity occurs where there is lack of clarity or when there is uncertainty about the application of a term. Meaning dominance and semantic context in the processing of. Shultz and pilon 1973 conducted a study on the development of the ability to detect linguistic ambiguity and found a steady, almost linear improvement across students in. One type of ambiguity is lexical or referential ambiguity which is rooted in one word that may result in a ridiculous, funny sense bach, 2009. Oct 22, 20 lexical ambiguity resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in ai, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics. Lexical ambiguity in crosslanguage image retrieval. Lexical ambiguity residual difficulties with lexical tagging result from the massive density of lexical ambiguity in all natural languages. Another very common position is to narrow down the scope to lexical ambiguity and describe it as a property of. Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.
Eye movement data were used to test two models of lexical ambiguity resolution. In analyzing the lexical ambiguity, the writer doesnt just want to find the ambiguous word, but also classifies the word based on the class of word. Finally we extract some preliminary results and future work. In one embodiment, the input stream is broken into tokens. Lexical ambiguity is one of the chief sources of ambiguity in language, so the problem is undeniably important. Similarly, taraban and mcclelland found that lexical content was key in explaining peoples behavior. Focus on structural and lexical ambiguity in english. Exercise sheet ambiguity lexical resource semantics. Experiment 1 revealed that lexical decisions for ambiguous consonant strings are faster than those for any of the high or lowfrequency voweled alternative meanings of the same strings. Pdf on jan 1, 2002, cyma van petten published lexical ambiguity resolution. Jan 01, 1988 lexical decisions to targets related to either meaning of the ambiguity were faster than responses to the control word, regardless of the sentential bias. Lexical ambiguity and the role of knowledge representation. The tokens are used to create a connection graph comprising a number of paths.
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. Lexical ambiguity can be either polysemy or homonymy. Processing lexical ambiguity and visual word recognition. This study examined the influence of phonemic and semantic ambiguity on lexical decision and naming performance in hebrew. Beaver 2004 believes that words are stored in a mental dictionary or lexicon. Lexical am biguit y i s a p erv as iv e problem in n a t ural lan guage pro ce ss in g. Sentential context and lexical access sciencedirect.
At least one best path is defined based upon a corresponding cost to generate an output graph. Lexical ambiguity is caused by homonymy and polysemy. Theodes of semantic interpretation which wish to capture as many generalizations as possible must face up to the manifoldly ambiguous and contextually. Ppt lexicalambiguity download powerpoint presentations. This ambiguity is classified into lexical ambiguity, because the dual interpretations are cause by the multiple meanings of the lexeme saw. Pdf lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Provide definitions for two of the meanings of the words. Ho w ev er, lit le quan t it a iv e inform ion i s a v aila ble a b ou t t h e ext en t of t e problem, or a e impact t h a t it as on inform ion retr iev al syst ems. Ambiguity is a notion important, not only to linguists, but also to philosophers. The aim of this paper is to assess the two descriptively controversial cases of lexical ambiguity known as polysemy and homonymy in an attempt to illustrate a practical solution to the lexicographic treatment. Under the theoretical assumption that lexical ambiguity is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but. Yet, in spite of its importance, it has yet to receive a. Show and hide more table of contents product information. Pdf semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution.
Trueswellthe role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution journal of memory and language, 35 1996, pp. Some instances of lexical ambiguity come from imperfections in writing. This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. The analysis of lexica l and structural ambiguity in your letters of the jakarta post, 2009. What little we know of the brain activity during the processing of lexical ambiguities in context comes from only a tiny number of studies e. This paper sets out some of the linguistic ambiguities for both syntactic and lexical provided with examples for each. Aug 01, 1988 journal of memory and language 27, 429446 1988 lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading susan a. It is this sense of ambiguity that generally is meant within the law. Lexical ambiguity of words used in english text springerlink. The sentential contexts were constructed in such a way as to make salient the most characteristic features of either the dominant experiment 1 or the secondary experiment 2 meaning. Lexical ambiguity resolution and spoken word recognition.
In other words, it concerns words having more than one definition hudson, 2000. Lexical ambiguity and semantic analysiswe have seen that syntactic analyzers, alone, cannot be expected to do very much about lexical ambiguity it is, after all, primarily a question of wordsense ambiguity rather than just partofspeech ambiguity, and so primarily a semantic problem rather than a syntactic one. Us20040167771a1 method and system for reducing lexical. Wo2001029697a1 a method and system for reducing lexical. Lexical ambiguity and context effects in spoken word. Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity.
Lexical ambiguity resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in ai, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing. Download fulltext pdf download fulltext pdf read fulltext. On homonymy and polysemy alina preda, assistant professor, phd, babesboyai university of clujnapoca abstract. These definitions differ from one another in accordance with which theoretical concepts are taken to be basic. This results both in a more elegant and economical treatment of homonymy and in a more general account of lexical ambiguity. Difference between lexical and structural ambiguity compare. It differs from syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words. Various previous proposals for guid ing attachment disambiguation by the lexical content of specific words have appeared e. Early reports of an ambiguity advantage came from rubenstein, gar. Morris and keith rayner university of massachusetts, amherst readers eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words or unambiguous control words. The research indicated that lexical ambiguity mostly occurred in the usage of the noun and verb in the sentence. Perfetti university of pittsburgh previous models of the computation of word meanings in sentence context have claimed either that context causes only one meaning of an ambiguous word to be processed or that all meanings are processed regardless of.
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