In this paper we discuss the analysis of expressions such as John’s team, John’s brother, John’s favorite movie, Mary’s favorite chair, Mary’s former mansion. Before introducing the concrete problems, we briefly describe our theoretical perspective. Our theoretical concern is the integration of formal semantics and lexical semantics, especially but not exclusively in the traditions of Montague ...

It seems highly desirable to use a single representation of linguistic knowledge for both analysis and generation. We argue that the only part of the average NL system's knowledge that we can have any faith in is its vocabulary and, to a lesser extent , its syntactic rules, and we investigate the consequences of this for generation. 1 ANALYSIS Consider a typical NLU system. You give it a piece ...

The ability to create meaning from our environment is fundamental to the way in which we interact with our world. Research into human cognition and language has inspired the development of a class of computational models that induce meaning based on how words are associated in streams of natural language. These models represent semantic associations between words within a geometric space, hence...

The Meaning-Text Theory is a formal, dependency-based linguistic theory in which the lexicon plays a central role. Within this theory, the vocabulary of a language is described by an Explanatory-Combinatorial Dictionary [ECD]. Unlike most existing dictionaries, an ECD is oriented towards language generation rather than analysis. This orientation makes it especially useful for language learners ...

Submitting to the dualism of the rationalistic tradition of thought and its notions of some (objective) reality and the (subjective) conceptions of it, Barwise/Perry (1983) have presented a new approach to formal semantics which, essentially, can still be considered a mapping of this duality, mediated though by their notion of situation. Within their relational model of meaning , any language e...

This paper is concerned with the design of a processor capable of formalizing English language descriptions of problems in the sententlal calculus. The emphasis is on the design of a system with natural language processing capabilities, but the formal languages specified are oriented to the problem context. A series of automata are specified to carry out the necessary functions. The automata id...

This paper contains a proposal of an abstract syntax and a model theoretic semantics for NafNegDatalog, sublanguage of RuleML [9]. The model-theoretic semantics use the partial logic ([7], [10]) to provide an interpretation and a satisfaction relation, and provide a formal meaning for RuleML knowledge bases written in the abstract syntax.

The distribution and use of the Japanese particle yo is examined using a large annotated sentiment corpus. The data is shown to support a decision-theoretic account of yo’s meaning (Davis, 2009). A decision-theoretic approach to the analysis of sentiment corpora is proposed, by which empirical predictions of decision-theoretic formal analyses can be tested using large sets of naturalistic data.

Abstract This paper explores the idea that scalar implicatures are computed with respect to discourse referents . Given general consensus a proper account of pronominal anaphora in natural language requires separately from truth-conditional meaning, it is naturally expected anaphoric information carry play role computation implicatures, but literature has so far mostly exclusively focused on di...

In glue logic (Dalrymple 1999, 2001, Asudeh 2004), LFG has found a reasonably stable but developing method for connecting syntactic structures to formal semantic intepretation. However current formulations of glue logic make the rather unsatisfactory move of divorcing grammatical features from any intrinsic connection with what are usually regarded as their meanings. Rather than directly connec...