Plausible Reasoning and the Resolution of Quantifier Scope Ambiguities

Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting that quantifier scope is a phenomenon that must be treated at the pragmatic level, most computational treatments of scope ambiguities have thus far been a collection of syntactically motivated preference rules. This might be in part due to the prevailing wisd...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inStudia logica Vol. 67; no. 2; pp. 271 - 289
Main Authors Saba, Walid S., Corriveau, Jean-Pierre
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Kluwer Academic Publishers 01.03.2001
Subjects
Ambiguity
Computational linguistics
Lexical quantifiers
Logical form
Natural language
Pragmatics
Reasoning
Semantics
Syntactic ambiguity
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Summary:Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting that quantifier scope is a phenomenon that must be treated at the pragmatic level, most computational treatments of scope ambiguities have thus far been a collection of syntactically motivated preference rules. This might be in part due to the prevailing wisdom that a commonsense inferencing strategy would require the storage of and reasoning with a vast amount of background knowledge. In this paper we hope to demonstrate that the challenge in developing a commonsense inferencing strategy is in the discovery of the relevant commonsense data and in a proper formulation of the inferencing strategy itself, and that a massive amount of background knowledge is not always required. In particular, we present a very effective procedure for resolving quantifier scope ambiguities at the pragmatic level using simple 'quantitative' data that is readily available in most database environments.
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ISSN:0039-3215
1572-8730
DOI:10.1023/A:1010503321412