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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS

Markus Egg and Valia Kordoni

The last decades have seen considerable progress and increasing interest in Computational Semantics (CS). Several semantic formalisms have been successfully implemented and integrated in large-scale NLP systems. At the same time, there is a increasing tendency for different approaches to CS to converge.

We use a suitable semantic formalism to introduce the central issues of CS and to outline the ideas and insights behind the implementations. After discussing the derivation of expressions of such formalisms by appropriate syntax-semantics interfaces we focus on the integration of CS formalisms in real-life applications and their evaluation.

TUTORIAL OUTLINE

1. Introduction to the field of Compuational Semantics
   • Motivation of CS systems: efficient handling of ambiguity by underspecified representations
   • Central issues of CS (in particular, scope, ellipsis, anaphora and their interaction)
2. Syntax-Semantics Interface
   • Efficient derivation of semantic representations
   • Portability of CS modules to different systems
3. Formalisms in real life
   • CS components of large-scale, large-coverage grammars
   • CS for QA systems, Information Retrieval, Information Management, and Hyperlinking
   • CS for hybrid (deep and shallow) processing
   • Evaluation of and translatability between CS systems

MARKUS EGG works as a Reader at the University of Groningen. He is interested in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with an emphasis on the question of how meaning is first constructed on the basis of surface-oriented, tractable syntax formalisms, and then augmented to a fully-fledged utterance meaning through the application of pragmatic and encyclopaedic knowledge. He works on the theoretical development of these areas as well as on their implementation in NLP systems.

VALIA KORDONI is a Senior Researcher at Saarland University and the LT Lab of DFKI GmbH. She is interested in syntax, semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. She has worked on the theoretical development of the aforementioned, as well as on their implementation in NLP systems.


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