A Case for Rule-Driven Semantic Processing

Sectloo One o f thls paper gives an overview of a generally accepted approach to semantic processing that goes through several levels o f representation to achieve this mapping. Although somewhat inflexible a n d cumbersome, the different levels succeed in preservln S the context sensitive information p r o v i d e d by v e r b semantics. Section Two p r e s e n t s t h e a u t h o r ' s r u l e d r i v e n a p p r o a c h which is more uniform and flexible yet still accommodates context senslClve constraints. This approach is based on general underlying principles for syntactic methods of Incroduclns semantic arguments a n d has interesting implications for linguistic theories about case. These implications are dicuesed in Section Three. A system that implements this approach has been designed for and tested on pulley problem statements gathered from several physics text b o o k s . [ P a l m e r ]