![]() Here’s one expressed in a news headline:įigure 2. This is why ambiguity in language is a rich source of jokes and puns, intentional or not. The second effect that the expectations about the roles that words play have on our interpretation is that we tend to notice when these roles are ambiguous or somehow violated, because such violations create a discordance. Finally, in “the frumious Bandersnatch” the only possible role for “frumious” is some quality because this is how it typically works in language: e.g. Another clue is given away by the word “the” which normally attaches itself to objects (like “ the car”) or creatures (like “ the dog”), and we arrive at an interpretation of “Jabberwock” and “Bandersnatch” being creatures. We expect to see this someone or something, and here comes “Jabberwock”. It’s an action, and as an action it requires some participants: one doesn’t normally “beware”, one needs to beware of someone or something. How do we make such guesses? You might notice that the context for these words gives us some clues: for example, we know what “beware” means. One can say with high certainty that “Jabberwock” and “Bandersnatch” are some sort of creatures, and “frumious” is some sort of quality. Some of the words here are familiar to anyone, but what do “Jabberwock”, “Bandersnatch” and “frumious” mean? It’s impossible to give a precise definition for any of them because these words don’t exist in English or any other language, and their meaning is anybody’s guess. An example of text where the word meaning can only be guessed Here’s an excerpt from “Jabberwocky”, a famous nonsensical poem by Lewis Carroll: įigure 1. Even if you are a native speaker of English and never tried learning a different language, you can still try playing a guessing game, for example, with nonsensical poetry. This “guessing game” is familiar to anyone who has ever tried learning a foreign language and had to interpret a few unknown words based on other, familiar words in the context. ![]() Our expectations about how words are combined in sentences and what roles they play are strong, and when we don’t know what a word means such expectations readily suggest what it might mean: e.g., we might not be able to exactly pin it down, but we can still say that an unknown word means some sort of an object or some sort of an action. Funnily enough, this applies even when we don’t know the meaning of the words. This recognition of word types has two major effects: the first effect is that the straightforward unambiguous use of words in their traditional functions helps us interpret the message. This helps us get at the essence of the message quickly: we read “Harry met Sally” and we understand. When we humans read text like this, we subconsciously determine the roles each word or expression plays along those lines: to us, words like “Harry” and “Sally” can only represent participants of an action but can’t denote an action itself, and words like “met” can only denote an action. The first fact to notice is that there‘s a conceptual difference between the bits of the expression like “ ”: “Harry” and “Sally” both refer to people participating in the event, and “met” represents an action. Take 40% off Getting Started with Natural Language Processing by entering fcckochmar into the discount code box at checkout at. Let’s first look into why identifying roles is important. This article shows you how to extract the meaningful bits of information from raw text and how to identify their roles. From Getting Started with Natural Language Processing by Ekaterina Kochmar
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