P. Terenziani, INTEGRATING WORLD KNOWLEDGE AND LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS IN THE TEMPORAL INTERPRETATION OF WHEN SENTENCES, International journal of intelligent systems, 11(6), 1996, pp. 367-408
Citations number
60
Categorie Soggetti
System Science","Controlo Theory & Cybernetics","Computer Sciences, Special Topics","Computer Science Artificial Intelligence
This article focuses on the problem of determining the qualitative tem
poral constraints between the eventualities described by ''when'' sent
ences. It faces the problem of integrating the purely linguistic tempo
ral constraints provided by the anchoring of aspect and aktionsart of
the ''when'' clause and of the main clause with the temporal constrain
ts provided by the causal connections constituting the world knowledge
. The modular approach we propose is based on the consideration that w
orld knowledge and linguistic tools such as aspect and aktionsart work
independently of each other: The former conveys temporal constraints
between related eventualities, while the latter provide the temporal p
erspectives selected by the speaker. Thus, independent modules are pro
posed which: (1) represent the causal information and reason with it,
extracting the qualitative temporal constraints between the eventualit
ies regardless of the temporal perspectives introduced by the descript
ions of the speaker; (2) determine (considering aspect and aktionsart)
the temporal content of the clauses considered in isolation (and, in
particular, the temporal perspectives introduced by the speaker); (3)
anchor the temporal perspectives of the main clause and of the ''when'
' clause; and (4) integrate the qualitative temporal constraints deter
mined by (1), (2), and (3), to arrive at a single, integrated interpre
tation of the ''when'' sentence as a whole. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons
, Inc.