The 39th Language Lunch
Date: 2013-10-17
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Descriptions which have grown capital letters
Brian,Rabern; PPLS; None
Almost entirely ignored in the linguistic theorising on names and descriptions is a hybrid form of expression which, like definite descriptions, begin with `the’ but which, like proper names, are capitalised and seem to lack descriptive content. These are expressions such as the following, `the Holy Roman Empire’, `The Mississippi River’, `the Space Needle’, etc. These capitalised descriptions are ubiquitous in natural language. But to which syntactic and semantic categories do capitalised descriptions belong? Are they proper names but with vestigial articles? Or are they genuine definite noun phrases but with unique orthography? Or are they something else entirely? This paper addresses this neglected set of questions. The primary goal is to lay the groundwork for a linguistic analysis of capitalised descriptions. Yet, the hope is that clearing the ground on capitalised descriptions may reveal useful insights for the ongoing research into the semantics and syntax of their lower-case or `the’-less relatives. In the end, we are left with a puzzle concerning capitalised descriptions: it seems that neither an assimilation to names nor descriptions is tenable. According to the traditional taxonomy, there is an important linguistic distinction between proper names and definite descriptions, but the analysis of capitalised descriptions suggests that this distinction is a philosophical myth that does not hold to sustained scrutiny.
Variable Bit Quantisation for LSH
Sean,Moran; None; None
We introduce a scheme for optimally allocating a variable number of bits per LSH hyperplane. Previous approaches assign a constant number of bits per hyperplane. This neglects the fact that a subset of hyperplanes may be more informative than others. Our method, dubbed Variable Bit Quantisation (VBQ), provides a data driven non-uniform bit allocation across hyperplanes. Despite only using a fraction of the available hyperplanes, VBQ outperforms uniform quantisation by up to 168% for retrieval across standard text and image datasets.
Is collaborative reference local? Forging semantic entities in dialogue
Eugene,Philalithis; PPLS; None
The familiar pragmatic description of reference in dialogue as a collaborative process invites an important semantic question: are terms of reference that are constructed in a collaborative manner (per Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986 and similar studies) semantically isolated to the context of their use (the conversation and/or its participants), or are they instead fed directly into a greater domain? If the latter is true, collaborative reference is also a process of far-reaching, dynamic semantic revision; and presently, I offer some early data suggesting terms generated in a collaborative setting may freely and immediately ‘intermingle’ with terms that were not.
