Abstract
A semantic parser is presented which aims at the attainment of a high linguistic coverage and an extendibility to many languages. To this end, a frequency distionary for Italian has been classified following LFG theoretical framework and a general decoder has been implemented to pass from the syntactic. to the semantic and conceptual levels. Syntactic structural derivation is produced by complete lexical froms, lexical redundancy rules and an extended phrase structure grammar which has been implemented in Prolog using XGs. Semantic and conceptual representation are produced following Jackendoff's system of conceptual representations plus a number of additions to compute time reference mainly inspired by J. Allen's system (1983a, b). We believe that a text rethorical organizations is mainly governed by linguistic principles like the alternation of FOCUS and TOPIC, the use of definiteness to qualify referring expressions, etc. We describe two algorithm to analyse the level of text: Logical Form, which provides scope assignment to quantified expressions; an algorithm for anaphora resolution which incorporates linguistic information and a number of psycholinguistic heuristic. Finally, we briefly describe how the inference engine provided by KL-ONE is integrated into the previous modules to produce semantic entailment and linguistic inferences.
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Rodolfo Delmonte is associate professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Venice. He received his doctoral degree in 1973 in Venice: he was then granted the Australian-European Award and studied in Melbourne where he received the Ph.D. degree in 1978 from Monash University. At the beginning, he worked in quantitative linguistics mainly in literary research; he was then involved in a number of major projects transferring prosodic and phonological rules of Italian into implementations for synthetic speech. Since 1983 he has been more interested in parsing both syntactic and semantic: he is lately working on an EUREKA man-machine interface project for the automatic generation of linguistic descriptions.
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Delmonte, R. Semantic parsing with LFG and conceptual representations. Comput Hum 24, 461–488 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00186491
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00186491