New Generation Computing

, Volume 9, Issue 1, pp 39–68 | Cite as

Logic-based processing of semantically complex natural language discourse

  • John Dinsmore
Regular Papers
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Abstract

A logic-based system of knowledge representation for natural language discourse has three primary advantages:

  • • It has adequate expressive power,

  • • it has a well-defined semantics, and

  • • it uses simple, sound, general rules of inference.

On the other hand, a standard logic-based system has the following disadvantages:

  • • It supports only an exceedingly complex mapping from surface discourse sentences to internal representations, and

  • • reasoning about the content of semantically complex discourses is difficult because of the incommodious complexity of the internalized formulas.

Spaceprobe5) is a non-standard logic-based system that supports a powerful model of discourse processing in which discourse content is distributed appropriately over multiplespaces, each representing some aspect of (a possible) reality, in accordance with the principles ofpartitioned representations.6,12) It retains the advantages of the standard logic-based representation, while overcoming the disadvantages. In addition, it can be used to account for a large number of discourse-level phenomena in a simple and uniform way. Among these are presupposition and the semantics of temporal expressions. This paper illustrates the superiority of the partitioned representations model over a standard logic-based model in processing semantically complex discourse.

Keywords

Natural Language Processing Knowledge Representation Partitioned Representations Context-Dependence 
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Copyright information

© Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer 1991

Authors and Affiliations

  • John Dinsmore
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceSouthern Illinois University at CarbondaleCarbondaleUSA

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