Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with
meaning representations of
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
expressions. It consequently plays an important role in
natural-language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
and
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...
.
Some traditional topics of interest are:
construction of meaning representations, semantic
underspecification
In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlying representations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their values are predicta ...
,
anaphora resolution,
[Basile, Valerio, et al.]
Developing a large semantically annotated corpus
" LREC 2012, Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 2012. presupposition
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include ...
projection, and
quantifier scope resolution. Methods employed usually draw from
formal semantics or
statistical semantics
In linguistics, statistical semantics applies the methods of statistics to the problem of determining the meaning of words or phrases, ideally through unsupervised learning, to a degree of precision at least sufficient for the purpose of informat ...
. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of
lexical semantics
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings.Pustejovsky, J. (2005) Lexical Semantics: Overview' in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition, Volumes 1-14Ta ...
(
word-sense disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consci ...
and
semantic role labeling In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of a ...
), discourse semantics,
knowledge representation
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
and
automated reasoning
In computer science, in particular in knowledge representation and reasoning and metalogic, the area of automated reasoning is dedicated to understanding different aspects of reasoning. The study of automated reasoning helps produce computer progra ...
(in particular,
automated theorem proving
Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a maj ...
). Since 1999 there has been an
ACL special interest group on computational semantics, SIGSEM.
See also
*
Discourse representation theory
In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT inclu ...
*
Formal semantics (natural language)
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of lang ...
*
Minimal recursion semantics Minimal recursion semantics (MRS) is a framework for computational semantics. It can be implemented in typed feature structure formalisms such as head-driven phrase structure grammar and lexical functional grammar. It is suitable for computational ...
*
Natural-language understanding
Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an A ...
*
Semantic compression In natural language processing, semantic compression is a process of compacting a lexicon used to build
a textual document (or a set of documents) by reducing language heterogeneity, while maintaining text semantics.
As a result, the same ideas ca ...
*
Semantic parsing Semantic parsing is the task of converting a natural language utterance to a logical form: a machine-understandable representation of its meaning. Semantic parsing can thus be understood as extracting the precise meaning of an utterance. Application ...
*
Semantic Web
*
SemEval
SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. ...
*
WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...
Further reading
* Blackburn, P., and Bos, J. (2005), ''Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics'', CSLI Publications. .
* Bunt, H., and Muskens, R. (1999), ''Computing Meaning, Volume 1'', Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. .
* Bunt, H., Muskens, R., and Thijsse, E. (2001), ''Computing Meaning, Volume 2'', Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. .
* Copestake, A., Flickinger, D. P., Sag, I. A., & Pollard, C. (2005)
Minimal Recursion Semantics. An introduction In Research on Language and Computation. 3:281–332.
* Eijck, J. van, and C. Unger (2010): Computational Semantics with Functional Programming. Cambridge University Press.
* Wilks, Y., and
Charniak, E. (1976), ''Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding'', North-Holland, Amsterdam. .
References
External links
Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM)of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
IWCS- International Workshop on Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM)
ICoS- Inference in Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM)
Computational linguistics
Natural language processing
Semantics
Computational fields of study
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