tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Ontological Promiscuity"

To facilitate work in discourse interpretation, the logical form of English sentences should be both close to English and syntactically simple. In this paper i propose s logical notation which is first-order and uonintensional, sad for which semantic tnmslation can be naively compositional. The key move is to expand what kinds of entities one allows in one's ontology, rather than complicating the logical notation, the logical form of sentences, or the semantic translation process. Three classical problems opaque adverbials, the distinction between de re and de ditto belief reports, and the problem of identity in intensional contexts - are. | Ontological Promiscuity Jerry R. Hobbs Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International and Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University Abstract To facilitate work in discourse interpretation the logical form of English sentences should be both close to English and syntactically simple. In this paper I propose a logical notation which is first-order and nonintensional and for which semantic translation can be naively compositional. The key move is to expand what kinds of entities one allows in one s ontology rather than complicating the logical notation the logical form of sentences or the semantic translation process. Three classical problems -opaque adverbials the distinction between de re and de dicta belief reports and the problem of identity in intensional contexts - are examined for the difficulties they pose for this logical notation and it is shown that the difficulties can be overcome. The paper closes with a statement about the view of semantics that is presupposed by this approach. 1 Motivation The real problem in natural language processing is the interpretation of discourse. Therefore the other aspects of the total process should be in the service of discourse interpretation. This includes the semantic translation of sentences into a logical form and indeed the logical notation itself. Discourse interpretation processes as I see them are inferential processes that manipulate or perform deductions on logical expressions encoding the information in the text and on other logical expressions encoding the speaker s and hearer s background knowledge. These considerations lead to two principal criteria for a logical notation. Criterion I The notation should be as close to English as possible. This makes it easier to specify the rules for translation between English and the formal language and also makes it easier to encode in logical notation facts we normally think of in English. The ideal choice by this criterion is English itself .