Formal Semantics:
A Type-Driven Interval Semantics for Interpreting Temporal Annotation
Professor Kiyong Lee
Korea University
Date: April 1, 2009 (Wednesday)Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: AG 507, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Abstract:
This presentation proposes a type-driven interval semantics for interpreting temporal annotation. Despite many great efforts to treat all of the semantic phenomena in language in realistic terms, partial modeling has been considered more successful in accounting for robust descriptive coverage of such phenomena. As part of such partial modeling, temporal annotation focusing on temporal expressions, eventualties, and their orderings has motivated a linguistically rich and descriptive markup language like ISO-TimeML. The specification of ISO-TimeML captures all syntactic and morphological features implicated in the interpretation of tense, aspect and orderings. However, ISO-TimeML does not provide an actual intepretation model, thus necessitating the formulation of a formally adequate semantics. A partial presentation of such a semantics is the aim of today's work.
About the speaker:
Kiyong Lee, Professor Emeritus of Korea University, was President of the Linguistic Society of Korea (1990-1992) and President of the Korea Society for Cognitive Science (1989-1990). He received his PhD in linguistics from University of Texas at Austin in 1974. He received a number of awards including Fulbright Senior (1986-7), DAAD Senior (1994), the Korean National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the Eugen Wuester Award from Vienna (2006). He is the author of numerous publications, including the books On Montague Grammar (1985), Formal Semantics: Language and the World (1998), Possible-Worlds Semantics: Tense and Modality (1998), Situation Semantics: Situation and Information (1998), and Computational Morphology (1999).
