<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="J83-3004">
  <Title>Preference Semantics, III-Formedness, and Metaphor</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
0. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We use the term &amp;quot;Preference Semantics&amp;quot; (PS) to indicate not programs that have parsed English into a semantic representation, nor the details of that semantic representation (all of which could have been different), but rather the underlying principles. The main principles or claims are as follows (and underlie the sequence of papers Wilks 1968, 1973, 1975, 1978).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The last two will be of most concern to us here: a) It is possible to pass from English to a semantic representation without a module devoted explicitly to syntactic analysis, and without traditional syntactic classification of words or sentence components (for example, N, NP, VP). The necessary generalisations for parsing can all be expressed in the terms needed for the semantic representation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Moreover, these need not result in any kind of text &amp;quot;skimming&amp;quot; that misses essential features of the text and its content.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> b) The representation need not be of the model theoretic type, and the classic problems of quantification, etc., can be dealt with by special procedures. null c) The description of the representation and the procedures that generate it should all be procedural and, most important, the representation should be the product of a few, general, and autonomous (not content-dependent) procedures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Moreover, the procedures should be consistent with a Least Effort principle of language understanding (Wilks 1975).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> d) The representation is based on a set of semantic primitives, of differing types (actions, substantives, qualities, etc.), but no claims are made that the set is universal: there could be many alternative sets for special tasks, domains, or cultures. All that is required is there be some privileged set to generate a representation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> e) The representation emphasises the linear, rather than the recursive, properties of language: its structure therefore emphasizes linear boundaries of clauses and phrases (but with no special role for sentences) as a basis for a surface representation from which progressively deeper representations can be obtained by inference. The repre-Copyright 1984 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made for direct commercial advantage and the Journal reference and this copyright notice are included on the first page. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. 0362-613X/83/030178-10503.00 178 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 9, Numbers 3-4, July-December 1983 Dan Fass and Yorick Wilks Preference Semantics, III-Formedness, and Metaphor sentational item corresponding to the piece of language between two such boundaries (whether a word or a sentence) we call a template, which is a complex structure (see below) having no associations with the term as used to denote a string of surface items, as in vision analysis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> f) The representation is formed upon a principle of preference for the &amp;quot;best fit&amp;quot;: thus, there is no single correct representation (except in special circumstances) for a text string, but the best, most internally coherent representation, chosen from among competing representations. Representational structures can be seen as &amp;quot;preferring&amp;quot; other associated representations, and an overall representation for a text is produced by allowing maximal satisfaction of such preferences, which will mean (as in the political analogy on which the notion is based) that some constituent representations do not have their local preferences satisfied. null g) The last representational principle has a correlate at the level of text relationships: ill-formedness (and, we shall claim below, metaphor) is not a binary, yes-no, matter but a function of representational satisfaction, which includes being a function of the state of the dictionary for the words and higher level items constituting the text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> To put it crudely, ill-formedness is a matter of what the analysis system believes the dictionary and state of the world to be, and how far it can be extended by rule with the aid of the knowledge structures available. To use an example from Wilks (1978) (1) The car drank gasoline will be ill-formed or not, depending on what you believe about drinking and about cars (thus crossing what would be, for many, a semantic-pragmatic boundary), and similarly for (2) John ran a mile depending on beliefs about running and distance (and so similarly for the so-called syntax-semantics distinction and the class of &amp;quot;intransitive verbs&amp;quot;).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> It is part of principle (a) above that preference is a syntactic notion as well as a semantic notion in that one general rule can deal with both sorts of conventionally distinguished phenomena. Thus (2) is ill-formed just because \[run\] prefers no object, just as \[believe\] prefers a propositional object (a full template in the terms set out below) but will accept a human object nevertheless. However, in this short paper we arbitrarily restrict ourselves to phenomena that would conventionally be considered matters of word-sense semantics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> On this view, much of what has often been thought of as ill-formed - particularly violations of Katzian selection restrictions (Katz and Postal 1964) - is not only not ill-formed but is typical of normal usage, and must not be rejected if it can be accommodated by the procedures of PS. The emphasis here is rather different from the standard one: on the PS view, the violation of preferences (such as those of drink for an animate agent or a liquid object) is the norm, and must not be treated as an exceptional matter, outside the core of English. Such locutions are statistically so normal and understood even when wholly novel, that their representation and processing must he performed as part of the central processes of a language understander. null Some of the above points can be found incorporated in other language understanding systems, for example Schank and his associates (Schank 1975) for (a) except for their predilection for NPs - (b), (d) - except for their insistence on a universal set of primitives - and more recently (e). For (b) almost any classical example semantic net system (Simmons 1973, Hendrix 1975). What we shall do here is develop the last two principles towards a general theory of the understanding of ill-formed and metaphorical language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> The concrete setting of our current research is the construction of a semantics/knowledge-based spelling corrector, but we shall not emphasise that here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12">  1. A Brief Resume of the Preference Semantics</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
System
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The following terminology will be useful: a semantic formula is a representation of a word-sense; it contains a head, which represents the &amp;quot;main element&amp;quot; in the sense - for example, whether a noun refers to a MAN or a THING, or whether a verb denotes an act of THINKing, or of DOing. Its internal structure is of left-right dependency.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> The following is a simplified semantic formula for the action drink:</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>