Philosophy and Natural-Language Processing

Abstract

Natural-language processing (NLP) has made great progress in the computational treatment of syntactic analysis for natural languages in its roughly 30-year history. One superficial indication of this success is the relatively large number of books and papers with titles that have both the word ‘parsing’ and the term ‘natural language’ in them. Semantics and pragmatics, two studies concerned with the meaning and use of language, however, have not seen such forward movement in computational approaches. William Woods’s development of a computational model for natural-language semantic interpretation (Woods, 1979 (orig. 1967)) was the first truly significant work in the field, and only recently, with a stronger connection to philosophical work in semantics and pragmatics, has the field begun to move ahead. This volume is intended to be a bridge for the worker in NLP semantics to important antecedents and examples of current work being done in philosophical and linguistic semantics. The remainder of this first section will look at some of the roots of the current semantic scene.