Abstract
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.462
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5170–5184
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.462
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.462
- Cite (ACL):
- Sean Trott, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Nancy Chang, and Nathan Schneider. 2020. (Re)construing Meaning in NLP. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5170–5184, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- (Re)construing Meaning in NLP (Trott et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.462.pdf