Rapport technique du projet OGRE

This repport concerns automatic understanding of (french) iterative sentences, i.e. sentences where one single verb has to be interpreted by a more or less regular plurality of events. A linguistic analysis is proposed along an extension of Reichenbach's theory, several formal representations are considered and a corpus of 18000 newspaper extracts is described.

The role of time in considering collections

The paper concerns the understanding of plurals in the framework of Artificial Intelligence and emphasizes the role of time. The construction of collection(s) and their evolution across time is often crucial and has to be accounted for. The paper contrasts a "de dicto" collection where the collection can be considered as persisting over these situations even if its members change with a "de re" collection whose composition does not vary through time. It expresses different criteria of choice between the two interpretations (de re and de dicto) depending on the context of enunciation.

Challenging the principle of compositionality in interpreting natural language texts

The paper aims at emphasizing that, even relaxed, the hypothesis of compositionality has to face many problems when used for interpreting natural language texts. Rather than fixing these problems within the compositional framework, we believe that a more radical change is necessary, and propose another approach.