The Causal Structure of Semantic Ambiguities
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06807v3
- Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:42:28 GMT
- Title: The Causal Structure of Semantic Ambiguities
- Authors: Daphne Wang (University College London), Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh
(University College London)
- Abstract summary: We identify two features: (1) joint plausibility degrees of different possible interpretations, and (2) causal structures according to which certain words play a more substantial role in the processes.
We applied this theory to a dataset of ambiguous phrases extracted from Psycholinguistics literature and their human plausibility collected by us.
- Score: 0.0
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Ambiguity is a natural language phenomenon occurring at different levels of
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It is widely studied; in Psycholinguistics,
for instance, we have a variety of competing studies for the human
disambiguation processes. These studies are empirical and based on eye-tracking
measurements. Here we take first steps towards formalizing these processes for
semantic ambiguities where we identified the presence of two features: (1)
joint plausibility degrees of different possible interpretations, (2) causal
structures according to which certain words play a more substantial role in the
processes. The novel sheaf-theoretic model of definite causality developed by
Gogioso and Pinzani in QPL 2021 offers tools to model and reason about these
features. We applied this theory to a dataset of ambiguous phrases extracted
from Psycholinguistics literature and their human plausibility judgements
collected by us using the Amazon Mechanical Turk engine. We measured the causal
fractions of different disambiguation orders within the phrases and discovered
two prominent orders: from subject to verb in the subject-verb and from object
to verb in the verb object phrases. We also found evidence for delay in the
disambiguation of polysemous vs homonymous verbs, again compatible with
Psycholinguistic findings.
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