Until now, most discourse researchers have assumed that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents the first serious attempt to construct automatically and use nonsemantic computational structures for text summarization. Daniel Marcu develops a semantics-free theoretical framework that is both general enough to be applicable to naturally occurring texts and concise enough to facilitate an algorithmic approach to discourse analysis.
Natural language (NL) refers to human language--complex, irregular, diverse, with all its philosophical problems of meaning and context. Setting a new direction in AI research, this book explores the development of knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) systems that simulate the role of NL in human information and knowledge processing.Traditionally, KRR systems have incorporated NL as an interface to an expert system or knowledge base that performed tasks separate from NL processing.
A new, deductive approach to the syntax-semantics interface integrates two mature and successful lines of research: logical deduction for semantic composition and the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) approach to the analysis of linguistic structure. It is often referred to as the "glue" approach because of the role of logic in "gluing" meanings together.
Based on an introductory course on natural-language semantics, this book provides an introduction to type-logical grammar and the range of linguistic phenomena that can be handled in categorial grammar. It also contains a great deal of original work on categorial grammar and its application to natural-language semantics. The author chose the type-logical categorial grammar as his grammatical basis because of its broad syntactic coverage and its strong linkage of syntax and semantics.
The Generative Lexicon presents a novel and exciting theory of lexical semantics that addresses the problem of the "multiplicity of word meaning"; that is, how we are able to give an infinite number of senses to words with finite means. The first formally elaborated theory of a generative approach to word meaning, it lays the foundation for an implemented computational treatment of word meaning that connects explicitly to a compositional semantics.
In Elementary Operations and Optimal Derivations, Hisatsugu Kitahara advances Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program (1995) with a number of innovative proposals. The analysis is primarily concerned with the elementary operations of the computational system for human language and with the principles of Universal Grammar that constrain derivations generated by that system. Many conditions previously assumed to be axiomatic are deduced from the interaction of more fundamental principles of Universal Grammar.
