Ontology Driven Contextual Best Fit in Embodied Construction Grammar

Constraint satisfaction has been central to the ICSI/UC Berkeley Neural Theory of Language NTL project, but this aspect has not previously been emphasized. The ECG Analysis program combines constraints from several aspects of the formalism: deep semantic schemas, embodied constructions and ontological knowledge. In this chapter we focus on some applications of deep semantic constraints that extend the Embodied Construction Grammar formalism ECG and Analyzer. The first example is a shallow reference resolution method that is based on the combination of the recency principle with syntactic and semantic compatibility between the anaphor and the referent. The method has been implemented and tested as part of a system capable of understanding Solitaire card-game instructions, with promising results. Similar deep ontology-driven constraint satisfaction techniques can be exploited to handle many cases of Noun-Noun compounds and metaphorical constructions. Implemented examples of these are also presented.

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