Extending a set-theoretic implementation of Montague Semantics to accommodate n-ary transitive verbs.

Natural-language querying of databases remains an important and challenging area. Many approaches have been proposed over many years yet none of them has provided a comprehensive fully-compositional denotational semantics for a large sub-set of natural language, even for querying first-order non-intentional, non-modal, relational databases. One approach, which has made significant progress, is that which is based on Montague Semantics. Various researchers have helped to develop this approach and have demonstrated its viability. However, none have yet shown how to accommodate transitive verbs of arity greater than two. Our thesis is that existing approaches to the implementation of Montague Semantics in modern functional programming languages can be extended to solve this problem. This thesis is proven through the development of a compositional semantics for n-ary transitive verbs (n ≥ 2) and implementation in the Miranda programming environment. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .R69. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1413. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Two set-theoretic approaches to the semantics of adjective-noun combinations

This work addresses the problem of adjective-noun combinations. Conventionally, adjectives belong to a hierarchy. This has the consequence that a uniform treatment of adjectives is unattainable---without resorting to notions such as possible worlds, which are difficult to map into competent computer programs. In this work, we propose two set-theoretic approaches to the semantics of adjective-noun combinations. The first hypothesizes that an adjective-noun compound is a subset of its constituent noun. The second hypothesizes that the adjective-noun combinations can semantically be thought of as a set intersection involving the adjective(s) and the head noun of the compound. This work argues that the class of adjectives known as privative can be accommodated within an existing class in the adjective hierarchy, known as subsective . This step is important for the provision of uniform treatments of adjective-noun combinations. The two approaches make use of types, both for gaining a finer granularity of analysis and for imposing structure on the problem domain. It is shown that the mixture of a typing system with set theory provides promising results that are manifested in the provision of compositional solutions to the adjective-noun combinations. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .A24. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0229. Adviser: Richard Frost. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Accommodating Complex Chained Prepositional Phrases in Natural Language Query Interface to an Event-Based Triplestore

Building Natural language query interfaces (NLI) to databases is one the most interesting and challenging fields of study for computer scientists and researchers. There have been many advancements and achievements in this area that enables NLIs to operate more efficiently and have wide NL coverage. However, there exists some shortcomings in query interface to semantic web triplestores. Some researchers have attempted to extend the range of queries that can be answered. However, only a few techniques can handle queries containing complex chained prepositional phrases. This thesis involves extending an existing method that can accommodate prepositional phrases to also be able to handle when..., where..., and with what... type queries. The approach developed is implemented in the Miranda programing environment