In Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated language corpus is used as a
stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new input sentence is
constructed by combining sub-analyses from the corpus in the most probable way.
This approach has been succesfully used for syntactic analysis, using corpora
with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Treebank. If a corpus with
semantically annotated sentences is used, the same approach can also generate
the most probable semantic interpretation of an input sentence. The present
paper explains this semantic interpretation method, and summarizes the results
of a preliminary experiment. Semantic annotations were added to the syntactic
annotations of most of the sentences of the ATIS corpus. A data-oriented
semantic interpretation algorithm was succesfully tested on this semantically
enriched corpus.Comment: 10 pages, Postscript; to appear in Proceedings Workshop on
Corpus-Oriented Semantic Analysis, ECAI-96, Budapes