Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
<|reference_start|>Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity: I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed.<|reference_end|>
@article{poesio1995semantic,
    title={Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity},
    author={Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science)},
    journal={K. van Deemter and S. Peters (eds.), Semantic ambiguity and
  Underspecification, CSLI, 1995},
    year={1995},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cmp-lg/9505034},
    primaryClass={cmp-lg cs.CL}
}