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Learning for Semantic Interpretation: Scaling Up without Dumbing Down

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Learning Language in Logic (LLL 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1925))

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Abstract

Most recent research in learning approaches to natural language have studied fairly “low-level” tasks such as morphology, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing. However, I believe that logical approaches may have the most relevance and impact at the level of semantic interpretation, where a logical representation of sentence meaning is important and useful. We have explored the use of inductive logic programming for learning parsers that map natural-language database queries into executable logical form. This work goes against the growing trend in computational linguistics of focusing on shallow but broad-coverage natural language tasks (“scaling up by dumbing down”) and instead concerns using logic-based learning to develop narrower, domain-specific systems that perform relatively deep processing. I first present a historical view of the shifting emphasis of research on various tasks in natural language processing and then briefly review our own work on learning for semantic interpretation. I will then attempt to encourage others to study such problems and explain why I believe logical approaches have the most to offer at the level of producing semantic interpretations of complete sentences.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas, TX 78712-1188, Austin, USA

    Raymond J. Mooney

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  1. Raymond J. Mooney
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of York, YO10 5DD, Heslington, York, UK

    James Cussens

  2. Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Sašo Džeroski

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Mooney, R.J. (2000). Learning for Semantic Interpretation: Scaling Up without Dumbing Down. In: Cussens, J., Džeroski, S. (eds) Learning Language in Logic. LLL 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1925. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40030-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40030-3_4

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