Polymorphism as a Model for Ambiguity in Natural Language

We suggest modeling concepts as types in a strongly-typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. In such a framework, certain types of ambiguities in natural language are explained by the notion of polymorphism. In this paper we suggest such a typed compositional semantics for nominal compounds of the form (Adj Noun) where adjectives are modeled as higher-order polymorphic functions. In addition to (Adj Noun) compounds our proposal seems also to suggest a plausible explanation for well known adjective ordering restrictions.