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Extending Montague Semantics for Use in Natural-Language Database-Query Processing

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Book cover Advances in Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3060))

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Abstract

Montague’s semantics has been used in the past for constructing natural-language processors in higher-order functional languages. This paper describes the work done and progress so far in extending a Montague-like compositional semantics in constructing natural-language processors to accommodate n-ary transitive verbs for n>2. In the early seventies, Richard Montague [5] developed an approach to the interpretation of natural language in which he claimed that we could precisely define syntax and semantics for natural languages such as English. Montague was one of the first to develop a compositional semantics for a substantial part of English. By compositional semantics we indicate that the meaning of a compound sentence is determined by the meanings of its constituents and the way they are put together to form sentences. In order to build natural-language query processors, Montague’s approach is suitable as it is highly orthogonal. However, it is necessary to extend Montague Semantics in order to build natural-language interfaces that can accommodate more complex language structures.

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References

  1. Dowty, D.R., Wall, R.E., Peters, S.: Introduction to Montague Semantics. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht (1981)

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  3. Frost, R.A., Boulos, P.: An Efficient Compositional Semantics for Natural Language Database Queries with Arbitrarily-Nested Quantification and Negation. In: 15th Conf. Of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, AI 2002, pp. 252–268 (2002)

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Roy, M., Frost, R. (2004). Extending Montague Semantics for Use in Natural-Language Database-Query Processing. In: Tawfik, A.Y., Goodwin, S.D. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3060. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24840-8_60

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24840-8_60

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22004-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24840-8

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