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The Expressive Power of Restricted Fragments of English

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3492))

Abstract

Taking the notion of expressive power of a language to mean its ability to distinguish different situations, we define four simple fragments of English based on the syntactic constructions they contain, and characterise their expressive power via translation into first-order logic. We also describe the circumstances under which an arbitrary first-order formula can be translated back into an English sentence of each fragment. This work is an extension of the semantic complexity results of Pratt-Hartmann [2] and Pratt-Hartmann [3].

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References

  1. Blackburn, P., de Rijke, M., Venema, Y.: Modal logic. In: Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2001)

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  2. Pratt-Hartmann, I.: Fragments of language. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13, 207–223 (2004)

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  3. Pratt-Hartmann, I., Third, A.: More fragments of language. Notre-Dame Journal of Formal Logic (2004) (submitted.)

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  4. van Benthem, J.: Exploring logical dynamics. CSLI Publications, Stanford (1996)

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Third, A. (2005). The Expressive Power of Restricted Fragments of English. In: Blache, P., Stabler, E., Busquets, J., Moot, R. (eds) Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. LACL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3492. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11422532_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11422532_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25783-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31953-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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