Abstract
A central problem in computational linguistics is to find the meaning of sentences of natural language. We describe a computer program that implements the truth-conditional approach to the meaning of natural language sentences for a fragment of English. The program (1) defines interactively a possible worlds model of the universe, (2) reads in an English sentence and finds its syntactic structures, (3) finds the logical formula corresponding to each syntactic structure, and (4) evaluates the formula in the model. The system implements a logico-linguistic theory based on the work of R. Montague. The main computational contributions are an interactive system for defining a possible worlds model, a way of representing partially specified models, a parsing method for Montague grammars, a reduction algorithm for formulas of the intentional logic, and a program to evaluate arbitrary formulas in a model.
At the time this paper was written the authors were at the University of Michigan. The research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants BNS 76-23840 and MCS 76-04297. The paper is a revised version of our “Evaluating English Sentences with a Logical Model”, presented to the 7th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Bergen, Norway, August 1978.
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References
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Friedman, J., Moran, D.B., Warren, D.S. (1994). Evaluating English Sentences in a Logical Model. In: Zampolli, A., Calzolari, N., Palmer, M. (eds) Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker. Linguistica Computazionale, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_30
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