This paper proposes an alternative to formal annotation for the representation of semantics. Drawing on the position of most of last century’s linguistics and interpretation theory, the article argues that meaning is not a property of a document, but an outcome of a contextualized and situated process of interpretation. The consequence of this position is that one should not quite try to repres...

The integration of spatial datasets from different sources is becoming an increasingly important issue. It is very desirable to have a rigorous approach to integration, as an ad hoc approach can easily lead to incorrect inferences. This paper takes a formal approach, giving the beginnings of a logical semantics framework which allows meaning to be defined mathematically for spatial datasets whi...

Illustrating the theoretical background of this chapter, I will rst make some preliminary remarks, covering referential and structural semantic theory in linguistics, before second I will sketch the course of my approach in analyzing and describing natural language meaning within the frame of a pragmatically based generative model of structural semantics. Finally and third I will give some exam...

The model of recursive functions in 1934-1936 was a deductive formal system. In 1936, Turing and in 1944, Post introduced more intuitive models of Turing machines and generational systems. When they both died prematurely in 1954, their informal approach was replaced again by the very formal Kleene T-predicate for another decade. By 1965, researchers could no longer read the papers. A second wav...

‘Two-dimensional semantics’ denotes a family of semantic theories rooted in intensional semantics, held together by shared general ideas, yet divided by deep divergences in semantic aims and philosophical aspiration. 2dtheorists agree that our sentences’ truth-values vary with what the facts are, as well as with what the sentences mean. To model this twofold dependence of truth on fact and mean...

Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory is a widely-used framework for constructive mathematics and computer programming. In its most popular form, type theory consists of a collection of inference rules inductively defining formal proofs. These rules are justified by Martin-Löf’s meaning explanations, which extend the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov interpretation of connectives to a rich collectio...

GRIOT is a computer program developed to implement systems that output interactive computational narratives. The first systems built in GRIOT allow improvisational generation of poetry in response to user input. The system is based on an approach to computational narrative that builds on research from cognitive linguistics on metaphor and conceptual blending, socio-linguistics on how humans str...

The semantic annotation of dialogue corpora permits building efficient language understanding applications for supporting enjoyable and effective human-machine interactions. Nevertheless, the annotation process could be costly, time-consuming and complicated, particularly the more expressive is the semantic formalism. In this work, we propose a bootstrapping architecture for the semantic annota...

We consider first order modal logic C firstly defined by Carnap in “Meaning and Necessity” [1]. We prove elimination of nested modalities for this logic, which gives additionally the Skolem-Löwenheim theorem for C. We also evaluate the degree of unsolvability for C, by showing that it is exactly 0′. We compare this logic with the logics of Henkin quantifiers, Σ1 logic, and SO. We also shortly d...

Although Barwise came from the model theoretic tradition in logic he was sceptical of the kind of model theoretic analysis of natural language that Montague proposed based on the notion of natural languages as sets of model theoretically interpreted sentences, i.e. as formal languages. Instead Barwise sought to build a mathematical approach to language which incorporated an Austinian view of la...