Abstract
Formal methods for the analysis of the meaning of natural language expressions have long been restricted to the ivory tower built by semanticists, logicians, and philosophers of language. It is only in exceptional cases that these methods make their way straight into open-domain natural language processing tools. Recently, however, this situation has changed. Thanks to (i) the development of treebanks, i.e., large collections of texts annotated with syntactic structures, (ii) robust statistical parsers trained on such treebanks, and (iii) the development of large-scale semantic lexica such as WordNet [1], VerbNet [2], PropBank [3], and FrameNet [4], we now have witnessed the development of wide-coverage systems that are able to produce formal semantic representations for open-domain texts.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Fellbaum, C. (ed.): WordNet. An Electronic Lexical Database. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., Palmer, M.: A large-scale classification of english verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1), 21–40 (2008)
Kingsbury, P., Palmer, M.: From treebank to propbank. In: Proceedings of the 3rd LREC, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain (2002)
Baker, C.F., Fillmore, C.J., Lowe, J.B.: The Berkeley FrameNet project. In: 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Proceedings of the Conference, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (1998)
Bos, J.: Towards wide-coverage semantic interpretation. In: Proceedings of Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics IWCS-6, pp. 42–53 (2005)
Curran, J., Clark, S., Bos, J.: Linguistically motivated large-scale nlp with c&c and boxer. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Companion Volume Proceedings of the Demo and Poster Sessions, Prague, Czech Republic, Association for Computational Linguistics, June 2007, pp. 33–36 (2007)
Kamp, H.: A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. In: Groenendijk, J., Janssen, T.M., Stokhof, M. (eds.) Formal Methods in the Study of Language, pp. 277–322. Mathematical Centre, Amsterdam (1981)
Kamp, H., Reyle, U.: From Discourse to Logic; An Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and DRT. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1993)
Asher, N.: Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1993)
Van der Sandt, R.: Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics 9, 333–377 (1992)
Steedman, M.: The Syntactic Process. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)
Blackburn, P., Bos, J.: Representation and Inference for Natural Language. A First Course in Computational Semantics. CSLI (2005)
Hockenmaier, J.: Data and Models for Statistical Parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh (2003)
Clark, S., Curran, J.: Parsing the WSJ using CCG and Log-Linear Models. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2004), Barcelona, Spain (2004)
Marcus, M.P., Santorini, B., Marcinkiewicz, M.A.: Building a large annotated corpus of english: The penn treebank. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 313–330 (1993)
Bos, J., Markert, K.: Recognising textual entailment with logical inference techniques. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2005) (2005)
Bos, J.: The “La Sapienza” Question Answering System at TREC 2006. In: Voorhees., et al. (ed.): Proceeding of the Fifteenth Text RETrieval Conference, TREC-2006, Gaithersburg, MD (2006)
Pulman, S.: Formal and computational semantics: a case study. In: Proceedings of Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics IWCS-7 (2007)
Cooper, R., Crouch, D., Van Eijck, J., Fox, C., Van Genabith, J., Jaspars, J., Kamp, H., Pinkal, M., Milward, D., Poesio, M., Pulman, S.: Using the Framework. Technical report, FraCaS: A Framework for Computational Semantics, FraCaS deliverable D16 (1996)
Monz, C., de Rijke, M.: Light-weight inference for computational semantics. In: Blackburn, P., Kohlhase, M. (eds.) Workshop Proceedings ICoS-3, pp. 95–72 (2001)
Dagan, I., Glickman, O., Magnini, B.: The pascal recognising textual entailment challenge. In: Quiñonero-Candela, J., Dagan, I., Magnini, B., d’Alché-Buc, F. (eds.) MLCW 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3944, pp. 177–190. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Bar-Haim, R., Dagan, I., Dolan, B., Ferro, L., Giampiccolo, D.: The second pascal recognising textual entailment challenge. In: Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognising Textual Entailment, Venice, Italy (2006)
Sekine, S., Inui, K., Dagan, I., Dolan, B., Giampiccolo, D., Magnini, B., eds.: Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing. Association for Computational Linguistics, Prague (June 2007)
Bos, J.: Let’s not argue about semantics. In: Proceedings of the 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bos, J. (2008). Formal Semantics in the Real World. In: Nordström, B., Ranta, A. (eds) Advances in Natural Language Processing. GoTAL 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5221. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85287-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85287-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85286-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85287-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)