Andy Lücking


2023

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Referential Transparency and Inquisitiveness
Jonathan Ginzburg | Andy Lücking
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary

The paper extends a referentially transparent approach which has been successfully applied to the analysis of declarative quantified NPs to wh-phrases. This uses data from dialogical phenomena such as clarification interaction, anaphora, and incrementality as a guide to the design of wh-phrase meanings.

2021

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Unleashing annotations with TextAnnotator: Multimedia, multi-perspective document views for ubiquitous annotation
Giuseppe Abrami | Alexander Henlein | Andy Lücking | Attila Kett | Pascal Adeberg | Alexander Mehler
Proceedings of the 17th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

We argue that mainly due to technical innovation in the landscape of annotation tools, a conceptual change in annotation models and processes is also on the horizon. It is diagnosed that these changes are bound up with multi-media and multi-perspective facilities of annotation tools, in particular when considering virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications, their potential ubiquitous use, and the exploitation of externally trained natural language pre-processing methods. Such developments potentially lead to a dynamic and exploratory heuristic construction of the annotation process. With TextAnnotator an annotation suite is introduced which focuses on multi-mediality and multi-perspectivity with an interoperable set of task-specific annotation modules (e.g., for word classification, rhetorical structures, dependency trees, semantic roles, and more) and their linkage to VR and mobile implementations. The basic architecture and usage of TextAnnotator is described and related to the above mentioned shifts in the field.

2019

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Distribution is not enough: going Firther
Andy Lücking | Robin Cooper | Staffan Larsson | Jonathan Ginzburg
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Natural Language and Computer Science

Much work in contemporary computational semantics follows the distributional hypothesis (DH), which is understood as an approach to semantics according to which the meaning of a word is a function of its distribution over contexts which is represented as vectors (word embeddings) within a multi-dimensional semantic space. In practice, use is identified with occurrence in text corpora, though there are some efforts to use corpora containing multi-modal information. In this paper we argue that the distributional hypothesis is intrinsically misguided as a self-supporting basis for semantics, as Firth was entirely aware. We mention philosophical arguments concerning the lack of normativity within DH data. Furthermore, we point out the shortcomings of DH as a model of learning, by discussing a variety of linguistic classes that cannot be learnt on a distributional basis, including indexicals, proper names, and wh-phrases. Instead of pursuing DH, we sketch an account of the problematic learning cases by integrating a rich, Firthian notion of dialogue context with interactive learning in signalling games backed by in probabilistic Type Theory with Records. We conclude that the success of the DH in computational semantics rests on a post hoc effect: DS presupposes a referential semantics on the basis of which utterances can be produced, comprehended and analysed in the first place.

2018

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TreeAnnotator: Versatile Visual Annotation of Hierarchical Text Relations
Philipp Helfrich | Elias Rieb | Giuseppe Abrami | Andy Lücking | Alexander Mehler
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Indexicals as Weak Descriptors
Andy Lücking
Proceedings of the IWCS workshop on Foundations of Situated and Multimodal Communication