Computational semantics

Semantics
Linguistic Logical
Analysis Computational Lexical (lexis lexicology) Statistical Structural Prototype theory Force dynamics Unsolved linguistics problems Theory of descriptions
Computing
Types Action Algebraic Axiomatic Categorical Concurrency Denotational Game Operational Predicate transformational Theory Abstract interpretation Abstract semantic graph Semantic matching Analysis Latent Machine-learning Applications Semantic file system Semantic Web Semantic wiki
Language Linguistics

Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Some traditional topics of interest are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, anaphora resolution, presupposition 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 (word sense disambiguation and semantic role labeling), discourse semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning (in particular, automated theorem proving). Since 1999 there has been an ACL special interest group on computational semantics, SIGSEM.

See also

• Discourse representation theory
• Minimal recursion semantics
• Natural language understanding
• Semantic compression
• Semantic parsing
• Semantic Web
• SemEval
• WordNet

Further reading

• Blackburn, P., and Bos, J. (2005), Representation and Inference for Natural Language : A First Course in Computational Semantics, CSLI Publications. ISBN 1-57586-496-7.
• Bunt, H., and Muskens, R. (1999), Computing Meaning, Volume 1, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0290-4.
• Bunt, H., Muskens, R., and Thijsse, E. (2001), Computing Meaning, Volume 2, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0175-4.
• 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. ISBN 978-0-521-75760-7
• Wilks, Y., and Charniak, E. (1976), Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding, North-Holland, Amsterdam. ISBN 0-444-11110-7.

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)
• Wolfram Group - Semantic Representation of Pure Mathematics