Skip to main content

Formal Semantics in the Real World

  • Conference paper
Advances in Natural Language Processing (GoTAL 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5221))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 1491 Accesses

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Fellbaum, C. (ed.): WordNet. An Electronic Lexical Database. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., Palmer, M.: A large-scale classification of english verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1), 21–40 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Kingsbury, P., Palmer, M.: From treebank to propbank. In: Proceedings of the 3rd LREC, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  4. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bos, J.: Towards wide-coverage semantic interpretation. In: Proceedings of Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics IWCS-6, pp. 42–53 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  7. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Kamp, H., Reyle, U.: From Discourse to Logic; An Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and DRT. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Asher, N.: Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1993)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  10. Van der Sandt, R.: Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics 9, 333–377 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Steedman, M.: The Syntactic Process. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Blackburn, P., Bos, J.: Representation and Inference for Natural Language. A First Course in Computational Semantics. CSLI (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Hockenmaier, J.: Data and Models for Statistical Parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  14. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  15. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  16. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  17. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Pulman, S.: Formal and computational semantics: a case study. In: Proceedings of Seventh International Workshop on Computational Semantics IWCS-7 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  20. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  21. 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)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  23. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Bos, J.: Let’s not argue about semantics. In: Proceedings of the 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints 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)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics