Coping with modifiers in a restricted domain

Abstract

The role played by the adjectival and adverbial phrases in a sentence is generally considered as a minor one. Nevertheless some of them have a strong influence in the information carried by the phrases they modify, and — in some domains or applications — they carry the main information. For example in a diagnostic domain an adjectival modifier in a NP as funzionamento non molto corretto (literally “working not very correct”) carries the main information. Moreover this kind of modifiers may introduce vague and subjective expressions that have to be formalized in some ways. In this paper we introduce an approach to the compositional treatment of their meaning that reduces the complexity of the expressions they are involved in, and allows to formalize their vagueness. The treatment is particular to our approach to knowledge extraction from texts and to the domain we are working on, but it can be extended to other contexts or applications.

Grantee of Centro Ricerche Fiat.