Abstract
We propose a simple extension of event semantics that naturally supports the compositional treatment of quantification. Our analyses require neither quantifier raising or other syntactic movements, nor type-lifting. Denotations are computed strictly compositionally, from lexical entries up, and quantifiers are analyzed in situ. We account for the universal, existential and counting quantification and the related distributive coordination, with the attendant quantifier ambiguity phenomena. The underlying machinery is not of lambda-calculus but of much simpler relational algebra, with straightforward set-theoretic interpretation.
The source of quantifier ambiguity in our approach lies in two possible analyses for the existential (and counting) quantification. Their inherent ambiguity however becomes apparent only in the presence of another, non-existential quantification.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baader, F.: Description logics. In: Tessaris, S., et al. (eds.) Reasoning Web 2009. LNCS, vol. 5689, pp. 1–39. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03754-2_1
Butler, A.: The treebank semantics parsed corpus (2017). http://www.compling.jp/tspc/
Champollion, L.: The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics. Linguist. Philos. 38(1), 31–66 (2015)
Cooper, R., et al.: Using the framework. Deliverable D16, FraCaS Project (1996)
Dong, Y., Tian, R., Miyao, Y.: Encoding generalized quantifiers in dependency-based compositional semantics. In: Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 28, Cape Panwa Hotel, Phuket, Thailand, 12–14 December 2014, pp. 585–594 (2014), http://aclweb.org/anthology/Y/Y14/Y14-1067.pdf
de Groote, P., Winter, Y.: A type-logical account of quantification in event semantics. In: Murata, T., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D. (eds.) JSAI-isAI 2014. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 9067, pp. 53–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48119-6_5. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01102261
Gyawali, B., Shimorina, A., Gardent, C., Cruz-Lara, S., Mahfoudh, M.: Mapping natural language to description logic. In: Blomqvist, E., Maynard, D., Gangemi, A., Hoekstra, R., Hitzler, P., Hartig, O. (eds.) ESWC 2017, Part I. LNCS, vol. 10249, pp. 273–288. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58068-5_17
Kiselyov, O.: Transformational semantics on a tree bank. In: Arai, S., Kojima, K., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D., Satoh, K., Ohta, Y. (eds.) JSAI-isAI 2017. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10838, pp. 241–252. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93794-6_17
Krötzsch, M., Simancik, F., Horrocks, I.: A description logic primer. CoRR abs/1201.4089 (2013)
Rooth, M.: Alternative Semantics. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2016). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.19
Tian, R., Miyao, Y., Matsuzaki, T.: Logical inference on dependency-based compositional semantics. In: ACL, vol. 1, pp. 79–89. The Association for Computer Linguistics (2014). http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P14/
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and the pointers to related work. I thank Yu Izumi for an inspiring conversation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kiselyov, O. (2019). Polynomial Event Semantics. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31604-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31605-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)