scholarly journals Varieties of Logical Form

Disputatio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (58) ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
Mark Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Representation Theory ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Discourse Representation ◽  
Discourse Representation Theory ◽  
Empirical Hypothesis

Abstract The paper reviews some conceptions of logical form in the light of Andrea Iacona’s book Logical Form. I distinguish the following: logical form as schematization of natural language, provided by, for example, Aristotle’s syllogistic; the relevance to logical form of formal languages like those used by Frege and Russell to express and prove mathematical theorems; Russell’s mid-period conception of logical form as the structural cement binding propositions; the conceptions of logical form discussed by Iacona; and logical form regarded as an empirical hypothesis about the psychology of language processing, as in the Discourse Representation Theory tradition. Whereas neither schematization, nor the use of special languages for mathematics, raise general methodological or empirical difficulties, other conceptions of logical form raise at least apparent problems.

scholarly journals Anaphora

Linguistics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Reuland ◽  
Martin Everaert ◽  
Anna Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Representation Theory ◽  
Computational Linguistics ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Discourse Representation ◽  
Linguistic Typology ◽  
Discourse Representation Theory ◽  
Subsequent Reference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Centering Theory

Anaphora can be generally defined as “subsequent reference to an entity already introduced in discourse” (Safir 2004a; see Representing Anaphoric Dependencies). The study of anaphora spans various fields of linguistics, from formal syntax and semantics to linguistic typology and pragmatics, and from computational linguistics to language processing and language acquisition. A major divide in this field is that between intrasentential anaphora—more specifically, binding relations—and intersentential, or discourse, anaphora. The former attracted attention in the 1960s and is one of the central topics in generative syntax and semantics, but also in current typological studies. The latter has been studied extensively since the early 1990s within computational linguistics, discourse representation theory, and functional approaches such as centering theory.

Semantics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beaver ◽  
Joey Frazee
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Representation Theory ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Discourse Representation ◽  
Discourse Representation Theory ◽  
Hybrid Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

Formal semantics is the study of linguistic meaning using precise mathematical characterizations; this chapter introduces formal semantics to scholars and students of natural-language processing. We give simple logical representations of English sentences, and show how meanings are composed in a grammar. We then consider two more advanced issues that arise in processing texts, anaphora and temporality, using Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Finally we discuss the relationship between deep logic-based methods for semantic analysis and shallower distributional methods that have been used in much recent NLP work, introducing some limitations of distributional methods, and hence motivating deeper or hybrid approaches.

scholarly journals Locating adverbials in discourse

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURE VIEU ◽  
MYRIAM BRAS ◽  
NICHOLAS ASHER ◽  
MICHEL AURNAGUE
Keyword(s):  
Representation Theory ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Discourse Representation ◽  
Discourse Representation Theory ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Discourse Connectives

This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as un peu plus tard, ce matin, deux kilomètres plus loin (‘a little later’, ‘this morning’, ‘two kilometers further’) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING WITHIN A SLOT GRAMMAR FRAMEWORK

1992 ◽  
Vol 01 (02) ◽  
pp. 229-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL MCCORD ◽  
ARENDSE BERNTH ◽  
SHALOM LAPPIN ◽  
WLODEK ZADROZNY
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Inference System ◽  
Linguistic Rules ◽  
Machine Translation System ◽  
Single Structure ◽  
Grammar Analysis

This paper contains brief descriptions of the latest form of Slot Grammar and four natural language processing systems developed in this framework. Slot Grammar is a lexicalist, dependency-oriented grammatical system, based on the systematic expression of linguistic rules and data in terms of slots (essentially grammatical relations) and slot frames. The exposition focuses on the kinds of analysis structures produced by the Slot Grammar parser. These structures offer convenient input to post-syntactic processing (in particular to the applications dealt with in the paper); they contain in a single structure a useful combination of surface structure and logical form. The four applications discussed are: (1) An anaphora resolution system dealing with both NP anaphora and VP anaphora (and combinations of the two). (2) A meaning postulate based inference system for natural language, in which inference is done directly with Slot Grammar analysis structures. (3) A new transfer system for the machine translation system LMT, based on a new representation for Slot Grammar analyses which allows more convenient tree exploration. (4) A parser of "constructions", viewed as an extension of the core grammar allowing one to handle some linguistic phenomena that are often labeled "extragrammatical", and to assign a semantics to them.

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