A Computational Model for the Influence of Cross-Modal Context upon Syntactic Parsing
Patrick McCrae · 2010
Ambiguity is an inherent property of natural language. Its most prominent mani-festations comprise syntactic ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, scope ambiguity and referential ambiguity. Considering the high frequency with which ambiguity occurs in unrestricted natural language, it is surprising how seldom ambiguity causes mis-understandings. Most linguistic ambiguities in inter-human communication even pass unnoticed, mainly because human cognition automatically and unconsciously attempts to resolve ambiguity. A central contribution to this automatic and un-conscious disambiguation is made by the integration of non-linguistic information from cognitively readily available sources such as world knowledge, discourse context or visual scene context. While a large body of behavioural investigations into the interactions between vision and language has been accumulated, comparatively few computational models of those interactions have been reported. The focus of this thesis is to motivate, specify and validate a computational model for the cross-modal influence of visual scene context upon natural language un-