The Semantic Representation of Natural Language [Hardcover]

Could a single semantic formalism be created which would allow for the representation of meaning at all levels from basic semantic units and relations to sentence-level and text-level meaning, while remaining practical and user-friendly?

This book showcases a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism such that representations of meaning can be created and understood by a wide range of users, including logicians, linguists, creative writers, and literary specialists without detailed technical knowledge.

In this monograph, the authors propose the formalism, showing its basic structure, applying it to the analysis of the semantics of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena in both English and French, and using it to generate the semantics of a variety of texts ranging from single sentences, to textual excepts, to a full story. By drawing on fundamental principles of program design, the proposed formalism is both easy to read and modify yet sufficiently powerful to allow for the representation of complex semantic phenomena.

Proposes robust onomasiological semantic formalism and applies it to a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

Craig Thomas is a doctoral student in Computational Linguistics at the School of Computing, Queen's University

As the title promises, The Semantic Representation of Natural Language sets out to develop a formalism for representing natural language meaning. After an enjoyable journey through the world of meaning from words to texts, touching upon ancient Rome, fairy tales, and dungeons, it reaches its targeted goal& Christina Unger, Bielefeld University, OUP Clippings

List of Figures \ List of Tables \ Preface \ Typographical Conventions \ 1. Introduction \ 2. Basic Concepts \ 3. Previous Approaches \ 4. Semantic Expressions: Introduction \ 5. Formal Issues \ 6. Semantic Expressions: Basic Features \ 7. Advanced Features \ 8. Applications: Capture \ 9. Three Little Pigs \ 10. Applications Creation \lƒi