Abstract not found

We present a system to translate natural language sentences to formulas in a formal or a knowledge representation language. Our system uses two inverse λ-calculus operators and using them can take as input the semantic representation of some words, phrases and sentences and from that derive the semantic representation of other words and phrases. Our inverse λ operator works on many formal languages including first order logic, database query languages and answer set programming. Our system uses a syntactic combinatorial categorial parser to parse natural language sentences and also to construct the semantic meaning of the sentences as directed by their parsing. The same parser is used for both. In addition to the inverse λ-calculus operators, our system uses a notion of generalization to learn semantic representation of words from the semantic representation of other words that are of the same category. Together with this, we use an existing statistical learning approach to assign weights to deal with multiple meanings of words. Our system produces improved results on standard corpora on natural language interfaces for robot command and control and database queries. 1

Abstract: Hintikka claimed in the 1970s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to 'branching readings ' that can only be handled by a 'game-theoretic ' semantics as expressive as a logic with (a limited form of) quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistic literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that branching readings and the island-escaping behavior of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of 'functional quantification ' (Winter 2004) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka's, and which predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, we suggest that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behavior of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behavior and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them. 0