Computational Linguistics And Formal Semantics

This 1992 collection explores the syntax/semantics interface, introducing the disciplines of computational linguistics and formal semantics.

This book provides a systematic study of three foundational issues in the semantics of natural language that have been relatively neglected in the past few decades. focuses on the formal characterization of intensions, the nature of an adequate type system for natural language semantics, and the formal power of the semantic representation language proposes a theory that offers a promising framework for developing a computational semantic system sufficiently expressive to capture the properties of natural language meaning while remaining computationally tractable written by two leading researchers and of interest to students and researchers in formal semantics, computational linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of language

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the intersection of fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and Cognitive Psychology. This book presents in four chapters the state of the art and fundamental concepts of key NLP areas. Are presented in the first chapter the fundamental concepts in lexical semantics, lexical databases, knowledge representation paradigms, and ontologies. The second chapter is about combinatorial and formal semantics. Discourse and text representation as well as automatic discourse segmentation and interpretation, and anaphora resolution are the subject of the third chapter. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I will cover some aspects of large scale applications of NLP such as software architecture and their relations to cognitive models of NLP as well as the evaluation paradigms of NLP software. Furthermore, I will present in this chapter the main NLP applications such as Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR), as well as Big Data and Information Extraction such as event extraction, sentiment analysis and opinion mining.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics (LACL 2014) held in Toulouse, France, in June 2014. On the broadly syntactic side, there are papers on the logical and computational foundations of context free grammars, pregroup grammars, on the Lambek calculus and on formalizations of aspects of minimalism. There is also a paper on Abstract Categorical Grammar, as well as papers on issues at the syntax/semantics interface. On the semantic side, the volume's papers address monotonicity reasoning and the semantics of adverbs in type theory, proof theoretical semantics and predicate and argument invariance.

This book is a collective volume that reports the state of the art in the applications of type theory to linguistic semantics. The volume fills a 20 year gap from the last published book on the issue and aspires to bring researchers closer to cutting edge alternatives in formal semantics research. It consists of unpublished work by some key researchers on various issues related to the type theoretical study of formal semantics and further exemplifies the advantages of using modern type theoretical approaches to linguistic semantics. Themes that are covered include modern developments of type theories in formal semantics, foundational issues in linguistic semantics like anaphora, modality and plurals, innovational interdisciplinary research like the introduction of probability theory to type theories as well as computational implementations of type theoretical approaches. This volume will be of great interest to formal semanticists that are looking for alternative ways to study linguistic semantics, but will also be of interest to theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians that are interested in the applications of type theory.

Computational semantics is the art and science of computing meaning in natural language. The meaning of a sentence is derived from the meanings of the individual words in it, and this process can be made so precise that it can be implemented on a computer. Designed for students of linguistics, computer science, logic and philosophy, this comprehensive text shows how to compute meaning using the functional programming language Haskell. It deals with both denotational meaning (where meaning comes from knowing the conditions of truth in situations), and operational meaning (where meaning is an instruction for performing cognitive action). Including a discussion of recent developments in logic, it will be invaluable to linguistics students wanting to apply logic to their studies, logic students wishing to learn how their subject can be applied to linguistics, and functional programmers interested in natural language processing as a new application area.

This open access book introduces a general framework that allows natural language researchers to enhance existing competence theories with fully specified performance and processing components. Gradually developing increasingly complex and cognitively realistic competence-performance models, it provides running code for these models and shows how to fit them to real-time experimental data. This computational cognitive modeling approach opens up exciting new directions for research in formal semantics, and linguistics more generally, and offers new ways of (re)connecting semantics and the broader field of cognitive science. The approach of this book is novel in more ways than one. Assuming the mental architecture and procedural modalities of Anderson's ACT-R framework, it presents fine-grained computational models of human language processing tasks which make detailed quantitative predictions that can be checked against the results of self-paced reading and other psycho-linguistic experiments. All models are presented as computer programs that readers can run on their own computer and on inputs of their choice, thereby learning to design, program and run their own models. But even for readers who won't do all that, the book will show how such detailed, quantitatively predicting modeling of linguistic processes is possible. A methodological breakthrough and a must for anyone concerned about the future of linguistics! (Hans Kamp) This book constitutes a major step forward in linguistics and psycholinguistics. It constitutes a unique synthesis of several different research traditions: computational models of psycholinguistic processes, and formal models of semantics and discourse processing. The work also introduces a sophisticated python-based software environment for modeling linguistic processes. This book has the potential to revolutionize not only formal models of linguistics, but also models of language processing more generally. (Shravan Vasishth) .

A comprehensive theory-based approach to the treatment of text meaning in natural language processing applications.