It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

The use of acronyms and abbreviations is increasing profoundly in the clinical domain in large part due to the greater adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems and increased electronic documentation within healthcare. A single acronym or abbreviation may have multiple different meanings or senses. Comprehending the proper meaning of an…

The proliferation of the Semantic Web depends on ontologies for knowledge sharing, semantic annotation, data fusion, and descriptions of data for machine interpretation. However, ontologies are difficult to create and maintain. In addition, their structure and content may vary depending on the application and domain. Several methods described in…

Coreference resolution (CR) and entity relation detection (ERD) aim at finding predefined relations between pairs of entities in text. CR focuses on resolving identity relations while ERD focuses on detecting non-identity relations. Both CR and ERD are important as they can potentially improve other natural language processing (NLP) related tasks…

One important task of any semantic theory of plurals is to account for the collective/distributive ambiguity. The goal of this dissertation is to achieve greater understanding of plurality and the collectivity/distributivity distinction from a cross-linguistic perspective by examining the phenomenon of distributivity in Mandarin Chinese. I show…