Linguistic Side Effects

在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，斯图尔特·谢伯（Stuart sheber）博士将对自然语言中的非组合性进行为期三年的跨学科研究。在自然语言中，短语的含义似乎不仅仅取决于其各部分的含义。本研究将编程语言中的计算副作用与自然语言中明显的非组合现象进行类比。研究人员假设，编程语言社区开发的技术可以用于指定副作用，例如各种“类型提升”操作，可以应用于自然语言中明显非组合性的建模问题。这些技术必须得到扩展，以适当地模拟副作用之间的相互作用，这是一个微妙的问题，在编程语言文献中还没有得到令人满意的解决，更不用说在自然语言中的应用了。这个项目将把语言解释与计算评估联系起来，产生一种更统一、更模块化的、更容易学习和教学的、经验上更优越的语言副作用处理方法。将开发采用新框架介绍自然语言语义的教材，并将其应用于课堂教学。将开发基于新框架的原型自然语言处理系统来验证其预测。通过免费提供这些材料，该项目将为教育基础设施作出贡献，并通过传播论文和软件，为语言学和计算机科学的研究基础设施作出贡献。该项目还将为本科生提供宝贵的研究经验，并为研究生提供高级培训。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Stuart Shieber will conduct three years of interdisciplinary research on noncompositionality in natural language, where the meaning of a phrase seems to depend on more than the meanings of its parts. This research is based on an analogy between computational side effects in programming languages and apparent noncompositional phenomena in natural languages. The investigators hypothesize that techniques developed in the programming language community to specify side effects, such as various "type lifting" operations, may be applied to the problem of modeling apparent noncompositionality in natural language. These techniques will have to be augmented to appropriately model interactions among side effects, a subtle problem that has not been satisfactorily addressed in the programming language literature, let alone in their application to natural language.This project will relate linguistic interpretation to computational evaluation, yielding an empirically superior treatment of linguistic side effects that is more uniform and modular and thus easier to study and teach. Educational materials introducing natural-language semantics with the new framework will be developed and deployed in classroom teaching. Prototype natural-language processing systems based on the new framework will be developed to verify its predictions. By making these materials freely available, the project will contribute to the educational infrastructure, and through dissemination of papers and software, to the research infrastructure in linguistics and computer science. The project will also provide valuable research experience for undergraduates and advanced training for graduate students.