Introduction This paper is concerned with reconciling the views of two prominent schools of meaning ascription: Logical compositional semantics in the Montague tradition, characterized by a reduction to set-theoretic constructs, and the cognitive semantics tradition as embodied in Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces. This is achieved by adapting model-theoretic, Fregean compositional semantics to an ...

This paper presents a novel model{theoretic account of Harel, Pnueli and Shalev's original step semantics of the visual speciication language Statecharts. The graphical syntax of a Statechart is read, directly and structurally, as a formula in propositional logic. This proposition completely captures all the logical constraints imposed by the diagram on the Statecharts's semantics, i.e., the po...

The Rule Interchange Format Production Rule Dialect (RIFPRD) is a W3C Recommendation to define production rules for the Semantic Web, whose semantics is defined operationally via labeled terminal transition systems. In this paper, we introduce a declarative logical characterization of the full default semantics of RIF-PRD based on Answer Set Programming (ASP), including matching, conflict resol...

We present a logic language with encapsulation based on an object-oriented data model. We give a formal account of the semantics of this language by deening a proof theory, a model theory and a xed point theory. We also show that the diierent characterizations of the semantics are equivalent. We then study the logical foundations of encapsulation by introducing a mapping from our language to a ...

The title of this book, Categorial Grammar: Logical Syntax, Semantics, and Processing, indicates that this will be a book about categorial grammar. In the preface, however, several strains of categorial grammar are discussed, including combinatory categorial grammar (Steedman 2000), pregroup grammar (Lambek 1999), and abstract categorial grammar (de Groote 2001), and it is clarified that the bo...

Order is essential for XML query processing. Efficient XML processing with order consideration over relational storage is non-trivial, especially for complex nested XQuery expressions. The order semantics may impede efficient query rewriting for nested query blocks. We propose a general order-sensitive XQuery processing approach involving three steps. First an algorithm is proposed for inferenc...

The modelling of the semantics of adjectives is notoriously challenging. We consider this problem in the context of the so called ontology-lexicon interface, which attempts to capture the semantics of words by reference to an ontology in description logics or some other, typically first-order, logical formalism. The use of first order logic (hence also description logics), while effective for n...

In recent papers a new semantics, called Local Models Semantics, was presented and used to provide a foundation to reasoning with contexts. Local Models Semantics captures and makes precise the two main principles underlying contextual reasoning: the, so-called, Principle of Locality and Principle of Compatibility. In this chapter we aim at explaining the main intuitions underlying Local Models...

Yoad Winter’s Elements of Formal Semantics is a lucid, well-organized, rather concise, and opinionated introductory textbook of formal natural language semantics. “Formal semantics” here refers to the study of sentence meaning and its tight connection to sentence structure, described with precision using mathematical methods. Elements introduces the central questions, concerns, and techniques o...

In view of the plethora of different argumentation semantics, we consider the question what the essential properties of a “reasonable” semantics are. We discuss three attempts of such a characterization, based on computational complexity, logical expressivity and invariance under partial duplication, which are satisfied by most, if not all, known semantics. We then challenge each of these propo...