Examples
Time flies like an arrow.
Interpretations
More Examples
Syntax vs. semantics
*Little a has Mary lamb
- Syntactically wrong, markd as *
?Colorless green idea sleeps furiously
- Syntactically right, but semantically wrong, marked as ?
- idea doesn’t sleep
- sleep furiously?
- colorless green?
- green idea?
Ambiguous words
- ball, board, plant
- meaning
- fly, rent, tape
- part of speech
- address, resent, entrance, number, unionized
- different meanings
Ambiguity
- Not in computer language(by design)!
- Lojban
- Noun-noun phrase: (XY)Z vs. X(YZ)
- science fiction writer
- state chess tournament
Types of ambiguity
- Morphological
- Phonetic
- Part of speech
- Syntactic
- PP attachment
- Sense
- Modality
- Subjectivity
- CC(coordinating conjunction) attachment
- Negation
- Referential
- Reflexive
- Ellipsis and parallelism
- Metonymy
Other sources of difficulties
- Non-standard, slang, novel words and usages
- Inconsistensies
- Typos and grammatical errors
- Parsing problems
- Complex sentences
- Counterfactural sentences
- Humor and sacarsm
- Implicature/inference/world knowledge
- Semantics and pragmatics
- Language is even hard for humans