CSCI 587 - Lecture 18 Semantics

• Semantics: meaning
• What does it mean to say "amble means to walk slowly"?
• How to we represent meaning?
• Representations
  • Logical forms
  • Semantic Nets
  • Conceptual Dependencies
  • Conceptual Graphs (Sowa)
• Semantic Interpretation: (parse tree +) -> logical form
• That kid is real fast.
• Mother baked for three hours.
  The pie baked for three hours.
• Do you have a watch?
• First Order Predicate Logic = Predicate Calculus
  • objects
  • predicates
  • AND, OR, NOT, ->
  • variables and quantifiers
• Contextual interpretation
• Referents or indexical terms
  • Bring it here.
  • The dog is sleepy.
  • George Rogers was well known at USC.
• The ball is red.
• situations and contextual intrepretation
• vagueness of terms: person, politician, Senator, Thurmond
• vagueness in verbs: kiss
• vaguness in quantifiers : All, none, the, some, many, a few, a
• Every boy loves a dog.
• FOPC: terms
• predicates: unary, binary, n-ary
• quantifiers: forall, there exists
• generalized quantifiers: (most d : (dog d) -> (barks d))
• predicate operators (The x: ((Plural dog) x) -> (barks x))
• distributed versus collective readings
• modal operators: believe, want, future, past, pres
• Handling Verbs
• John broke the window with the book.
• Meaning postulates
• events

  Readings

  Sections 8.1-8.5

  Reminder

  Test 2 April 10

  
  - Previous Lecture - - Next Lecture -
  URL = http://sourgum.cs.sc.edu/~matthews/Courses/587/Lectures/lecture17.html