Computing Meaning

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

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2. From Lexical Item to Discourse Meaning: Computational and Representational Tools

   • Harry Bunt

   Pages 1-10

3. Inference and Computational Semantics

   • Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos, Michael Kohlhase, Hans De Nivelle

   Pages 11-28

4. Building a Semantic Lexicon: Structuring and Generating Concepts

   • Federica Busa, Nicoletta Calzolari, Alessandro Lenci, James Pustejovsky

   Pages 29-51

5. In Search Of The Semantic Value(S) Of An Occurrence: An Example And A Framework

   • Françoise Gayral, Daniel Kayser, Nathalie Pernelle

   Pages 53-69

6. Agent-Dependent Metonymy in a Context-Change Model of Communication

   • Harry Bunt, Leen Kievit

   Pages 71-95

7. Weak Lexical Semantics and Multiple Views

   • Allan Ramsay

   Pages 97-112

8. Underspecified Lexical Conceptual Structures For Sense Variations

   • Patrick Saint-Dizier

   Pages 113-128

9. The Availability of Partial Scopings in an Underspecified Semantic Representation

   • Alistair Willis, Suresh Manandhar

   Pages 129-145

10. Compositional Semantics With Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG): How Much Underspecification is Necessary?

    • Aravind K. Joshi, K. Vijay-Shanker

    Pages 147-163

11. Glue, Underspecification and Translation

    • Dick Crouch, Anette Frank, Josef Van Genabith

    Pages 165-184

12. Two Functional Approaches For Interpreting D-Tree Grammar Derivations

    • Mark Hepple

    Pages 185-204

13. Tree Descriptions, Constraints and Incrementality

    • Denys Duchier, Claire Gardent

    Pages 205-227

14. Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar For Discourse

    • Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Aravind Joshi

    Pages 229-245

15. Fragmenting Meaning: Clarification Ellipsis and Nominal Anaphora

    • Jonathan Ginzburg

    Pages 247-270

16. Event Coreference Between Two Sentences

    • Laurence Danlos

    Pages 271-288

17. Back Matter

    Pages 289-306

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This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not only to notoriously difficult aspects of interpreting linguistic objects, such as indexicals, anaphora, and metonymy, but also to establishing the precise reference of common nouns and the scopes of noun phrases. The central issue in computational semantics is how processes of finding and combining the relevant linguistic and contextual information into contextually appropriate meanings can be organised.
Traditional approaches of applying context information to disambiguated natural language expressions do not work well, due to the massive ambiguity in natural language. Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations. Underspecified representation and inference are therefore the key topics in this book.
The book is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who take an interest in the computation of meaning, and who want to know what is happening in this exciting field of research.

• communication
• grammar
• natural language
• semantic
• semantics

• Tilburg University, The Netherlands

  Harry Bunt, Reinhard Muskens, Elias Thijsse

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