Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with
meaning representations of
natural language
A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...
expressions. It consequently plays an important role in
natural-language processing and
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...
.
Some traditional topics of interest are:
construction of meaning representations, semantic
underspecification,
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 linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition 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:
* ''Jane no longer writes ...
projection, and
quantifier scope resolution. Methods employed usually draw from
formal semantics or
statistical semantics. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of
lexical semantics
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistics, linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings.Pustejovsky, J. (2005) Lexical Semantics: Overview' in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition, V ...
(
word-sense disambiguation and
semantic role labeling), discourse semantics,
knowledge representation
Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...
and
automated reasoning (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 majo ...
). 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 inc ...
*
Formal semantics (natural language)
Formal semantics is the scientific study of linguistic meaning through formal tools from logic and mathematics. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. Formal semanticists r ...
*
Minimal recursion semantics
*
Natural-language understanding
*
Semantic compression
*
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. Applicat ...
*
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
To enable the encoding o ...
*
SemEval
*
WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into ''synsets'' with short definitions and usage examples. It can thu ...
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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