tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A FOUNDATION FOR SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION "

Research on semantic interpretation in artificial intelligence goes back to Woods's dissertation (1967, 1968), which introduced procedural semantics in a natural-language front-end for an airline reservation system. Woods's system had rules with patterns that, when they matched part of the parsed input sentence, contributed a string to the semantic representation of the sentence. This string was usually constructed from the terminals of the matched parse tree fragment. | A FOUNDATION FOR SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION Graeme Hirst Department of Computer Science Brown University Providence RI 02912 Abstract Traditionally translation from the parse tree representing a sentence to a semantic representation such as frames or procedural semantics has always been the most ad hoc part of natural language understanding NLU systems. However recent advances in linguistics most notably the system of formal semantics known as Montague semantics suggest ways of putting NLU semantics onto a cleaner and Srmer foundation. We are using a Montague-inspired approach to semantics in an integrated NLU and problem-solving system that we are building. Like Montague s our semantics are compositional by design and strongly typed with semantic rules in one-to-one correspondence with the meaning-affecting rules of a Marcus-sty e parser. We have replaced Montague s semantic objects functors and truth conditions with the elements of the frame language Frail and added a word sense and case slot disambiguation system. The result is a foundation for semantic interpretation that we believe to be superior to previous approaches. 1. Introduction By semantic interpretation we mean the process of mapping from a syntactically analyzed sentence of natural language to a representation of its meaning. We exclude from semantic interpretation any consideration of discourse pragmatics rather discourse pragmatics operate upon the output of the semantic interpreter. We also exclude syntactic analysis the integration of syntactic and semantic analysis becomes very messy when complex syntactic constructions are considered and moreover it is our observation that those who argue for the integration of the two are usually arguing for subordinating the role of syntax a position we reject. This is not to say that parsing can get by without semantic help indirect object finding Thia work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under contract number N00014 79 C-0592. and prepositional .