tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "AN IMPROPER TREATMENT OF QUANTIFICATION IN ORDINARY"

In most democratic countries most politicians can fool most of the people on almost every issue most of the time. In the currently standard ways of representing quantification in logical form, this sentence has 120 different readings, or quantifier scopings. Moreover, they are truly distinct, in the sense that for any two readings, there is a model that satisfies one and not the other. With the standard logical forms produced by the syntactic and semantic translation components of current theoretical frameworks and implemented systems, it would seem that an inferencing component must process each of these 120 readings in. | AN IMPROPER TREATMENT OF QUANTIFICATION IN ORDINARY ENGLISH Jerry R. Hobbs SRI International Menlo Park California 1. The Problem Consider the sentence In most democratic countries most politicians can fool most of the people on almost every Issue most of the time. In the currently standard ways of representing quantification in logical form this sentence has 120 different readings or quantifier scopings. Moreover they are truly distinct In the sense that for any two readings there Is a model that satisfies one and not the other. With the standard logical forms produced by the syntactic and semantic translation components of current theoretical frameworks and Implemented systems It would seem that an inferencing component must process each of these 120 readings In turn In order to produce a best reading. Yet it Is obvious that people do not entertain all 120 possibilities and people really do understand the sentence. The problem is not Just that Inferenclng Is required for disambiguation. It Is that people never do disambiguate completely. A single quantifier scoping is never chosen. Van Lehn 1978 and Bobrow and Webber 1980 have also made this point. In the currently standard logical notations It Is not clear how this vagueness can be represented. What is needed Is a logical form for such sentences that Is neutral with respect to the various scoping possibilities. It should be a notation that can be used easily by an Inferencing component. That is it should be easy to define deductive operations on It and the logical forms of typical sentences should not be unwieldy. Moreover when the inferenclng component discovers further Information about dependencies among sets of entitles it should entail only a minor modification In the logical form such as conjoining a new proposition rather than a major restructuring. Finally since the notion of scope Is a powerful tool in semantic analysis there should be a fairly transparent relationship between dependency Information In