1,215 research outputs found
The Grail theorem prover: Type theory for syntax and semantics
As the name suggests, type-logical grammars are a grammar formalism based on
logic and type theory. From the prespective of grammar design, type-logical
grammars develop the syntactic and semantic aspects of linguistic phenomena
hand-in-hand, letting the desired semantics of an expression inform the
syntactic type and vice versa. Prototypical examples of the successful
application of type-logical grammars to the syntax-semantics interface include
coordination, quantifier scope and extraction.This chapter describes the Grail
theorem prover, a series of tools for designing and testing grammars in various
modern type-logical grammars which functions as a tool . All tools described in
this chapter are freely available
Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection
between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and
work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of
underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting
from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous
and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An
underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar
covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical
ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this
language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with
underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some
issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed.Comment: Latex, 47 pages. Uses tree-dvips.sty, lingmacros.sty, fullname.st
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
Constraint-Based Categorial Grammar
We propose a generalization of Categorial Grammar in which lexical categories
are defined by means of recursive constraints. In particular, the introduction
of relational constraints allows one to capture the effects of (recursive)
lexical rules in a computationally attractive manner. We illustrate the
linguistic merits of the new approach by showing how it accounts for the syntax
of Dutch cross-serial dependencies and the position and scope of adjuncts in
such constructions. Delayed evaluation is used to process grammars containing
recursive constraints.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe
Feature-based and Model-based Semantics for English, French and German Verb Phrases
This paper considers the relative merits of using features and formal event models to characterise the semantics of English, French and German verb phrases, and con- siders the application of such semantics in machine translation. The feature-based ap- proach represents the semantics in terms of feature systems, which have been widely used in computational linguistics for representing complex syntactic structures. The paper shows how a simple intuitive semantics of verb phrases may be encoded as a feature system, and how this can be used to support modular construction of au- tomatic translation systems through feature look-up tables. This is illustrated by automated translation of English into either French or German. The paper contin- ues to formalise the feature-based approach via a model-based, Montague semantics, which extends previous work on the semantics of English verb phrases. In so doing, repercussions of and to this framework in conducting a contrastive semantic study are considered. The model-based approach also promises to provide support for a more sophisticated approach to translation through logical proof; the paper indicates further work required for the fulfilment of this promise
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