Lihtlause semantika: teoreetiline kontseptsioon ja arvutianalüüsi võimalused
Semantics of Simple Sentences: A Theoretical Conception and Some Possibilities of Computer Analysis

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes and analyses the main theoretical aspects of the model underlying a computer program for semantic analysis of Estonian simple sentences. a follow-up presenting the main aspects of the formal-technical realization is under way. Sentence semantics is a relatively new but very intensively developing subject in theoretical linguistics as well as in computational linguistics. in our model we are trying to combine two theoretical conceptions: conceptual semantics (developed by ray Jackendoff) and frame semantics (originally proposed by Charles Fillmore). The themes discussed are as follows: argument structure of sentences and argument types; semantic roles of arguments; qualia structure (as a means for semantic representation of arguments); inferences as a means for determining the “whole” meaning of a sentence; the problems arising from the need to take into account, along with the “pure” linguistic meaning of language expressions, also world knowledge (domain ontology). We have restricted our subject area to the domain of motion (self-motion, e.g. walking or flying, as well as caused motion, e.g. throwing or bringing something somewhere). in the treatment of inferences we have so far restricted ourselves to the question “Which entities participating in the motion event do move, i.e. change places?” so that after the described event the program could answer the question “Where is X?”, where X is an entity participating in the motion event described in the sentence. For instance, in the case of a throwing event only the thrown object obligatorily changes its place, but in the case where an object is carried or brought somewhere by an agent the agent necessarily moves, too. The input to the semantic analysis module is the dependency tree of a sentence. The tree, in turn, is provided by the syntactic analysis module, where the arguments of the predicate have syntactic labels (Subject, Object, adverbials). Our program provides those arguments with semantic role labels (agent, Object, instrument, Locfrom, Locto etc.), and computes the inferences needed. The result of the analysis is represented in the form of a structure we call sentence frame.

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