Intra-sentential context effects on the interpretation of logical metonymy

✍ Scribed by Mirella Lapata; Frank Keller; Christoph Scheepers

• Publisher: Wiley (Blackwell Publishing)
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 139 KB
• Volume: 27
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0364-0213
• DOI: 10.1016/s0364-0213(03)00035-1

✦ Synopsis

Verbs such as enjoy in the student enjoyed the book exhibit logical metonymy: enjoy is interpreted as enjoy reading. Theoretical work [Computational Linguistics 17 (4) (1991) 409; The Generative Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995] predicts that this interpretation can be influenced by intra-sentential context, e.g., by the subject of enjoy. In this article, we test this prediction using a completion experiment and find that the interpretation of a metonymic verb is influenced by the semantic role of its subject. We present a Bayesian model that accounts for the interpretation of logical metonymy and achieves a good fit on our experimental data. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated from completion data or from corpus data.