Abstract

This paper shows how a non-strict functional programming language with polymorphic typing can be used to define grammar rules and semantic evaluation along the lines of Montague. This approach provides a unified formalism needing no preprocessing or postprocessing to the functional language itself: parsing and semantics are declared naturally using function definition and evaluation is done by lambda application. We show that by changing only the model we can, after parsing, compute either the truth value of a sentence or its parse tree. Keywords: syntax, semantic, parsing, functional programming 1 Introduction One of the problems to be solved within natural language processing is a smooth integration of semantic and syntactic processing. Logic Programming formalisms like Metamorphosis Grammars or Definite Clause Grammars [20, 10, 23] have achieved a goal of a declarative definition of syntax while integrating an operative definition of semantics by means of "evaluable predicates" ...

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