tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A PROLEGOMENON TO SITUATION SEMANTICS"

An attempt is made to prepare Linguistics for Situation Semantics. I INTRODUCTION Computational Situation Semantics (yet?). So what is there? Besides a few published papers, each of them containing at least one position since abandoned~ there is a book ~ Attitudes literally on the very verge of publication. This contains the philosophlcal/theoretlcal background of the program The Big Picture. It also contains a very brief treatment of a very simple fragment of ALIASS. And what, the reader may well ask is ALIASS? An Artificial Language for lliustratlng Aspects of ~Ituation ~emantlcs, that's what. . | A PROLEGOMENON TO SITUATION SEMANTICS David J. Israel Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. Cambridge MA 02238 ABSTRACT An attempt is made to prepare Computational Linguistics for Situation Semantics. I INTRODUCTION The editors of the Al Journal recently hit upon the nice notion of correspondents columns. The basic idea was to solicit experts in various fields both within and _outside of Artificial Intelligence to provide guidance to important interesting current literature in their fields. For Philosophy they made the happy choice of Dan Dennett for natural language processing the equally happy choice of Barbara Grosz. Each has so far contributed one column and these early contributions overlap In one and as It happens only one particular to wit Situation Semantics. Witness Dennett .gitPatian tggnantica is .the hottest new topic In philosophical logic. is In some ways a successor or rival to Montague semantics. And now Grosz In recent work Barwise and Perry address the problem of what Information from the context of an utterance affects which aspects of Interpretation and how in the context of a proposed model theory of natural language one that appears to be more compatible with the needs of AỊ than previous theories. I t is of interest to work in natural-language processing for the kind of compositional semantics it proposes and the way In which it allows the contexts In which in an utterance Is used to affect its interpretation. What is all the fuss about I want to address this question but rather Indirectly. I want to situate situation semantics In conceptual space and draw some comparisons and contrasts between it and accounts in the style of Richard Montague. To this end a few preliminary points are in order. A. Iha. eresent Situation First as to the state of the Situation Semantics literature. There is as yet no published piece of the scope and detail of either Ehgllsh as ã Formal Language or The -Proper Treatment of Quantification In Ordinary English . Nor. of .