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Contributed talk
in
Workshop: Meaning in Context: Pragmatic Communication in Humans and Machines

Lexical Pragmatics in the Wild: The Case of Complement Coercion

Frederick Gietz · Barend Beekhuizen


Abstract:

We inspect complement coercion sentences (she finished the coffee or he started a book) as a case study for modeling open-ended pragmatic interpretation. Existing computational work treats complement coercion interpretation as a task of choosing a single best-fit verb (she finished drinking the coffee). We instead present crowdsourcing and modeling data that supports broadening the predicted classes to better capture naturalistic interpretation.