Structured Meanings in Computational Linguistics
نویسنده
چکیده
Many natural language processing systems employ t ruth conditional knowledge representations (%ret)resentations' , etc.) to represent meanings of nata rm language expressions. T-representations have their strong and their weak sides. A strong side is logic: a relation of logical consequence can be de-. fined between such representations. A weak side is e x p r e s s i v e p o w e r : the capacity of t-representations to convey the subtleties of natural language is limited. For instance, let SL be a sentence that is true on purely logical grounds; then it is predicted ttmt any sentence S is synonymous with "S and SL". This deficiency comes out clearest in propositional attitude constructions, i.e. constructions of the form 'x V that S'; where V is an epistemic verb ('knows', ~believes') and S a sentence. Truth conditional accounts of nleaning (including intensional ones such an [Montague 1974]) predict wrongly ~hat anybody who knows that S is bound to also know that :'S and SL", since t;he two sentences are t-indistinguishable ([Peters and Saarinen 1982]). The same lack of expressive power dooms, for example, automatic translation on the basis of t-representations to failure: trepresentations contain only information that is relevant for the truth or falsity of a sentence, dismissing all other information, such an mood, topic-con:merit ,,,tructure, etc. ([van Deemter-89]).
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