{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/how-to-marry-a-star-probabilistic-constraints","title":"How to marry a star: probabilistic constraints for meaning in context","arxiv_id":"2009.07936","date":"2020-09-16","proceeding":"SCiL 2021 2","authors":["Katrin Erk","Aurelie Herbelot"],"abstract":"In this paper, we derive a notion of 'word meaning in context' that characterizes meaning as both intensional and conceptual. We introduce a framework for specifying local as well as global constraints on word meaning in context, together with their interactions, thus modelling the wide range of lexical shifts and ambiguities observed in utterance interpretation. We represent sentence meaning as a 'situation description system', a probabilistic model which takes utterance understanding to be the mental process of describing to oneself one or more situations that would account for an observed utterance. We show how the system can be implemented in practice, and apply it to examples containing various contextualisation phenomena.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07936v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.07936v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-to-marry-a-star-probabilistic-constraints","repo_url":"https://github.com/minimalparts/MeaningInContext","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2009.07936","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.07936","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}