Computational Semantics

Introduction

Computational Semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. Some traditional topics of interest are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, anaphora resolution, presupposition projection, and quantifier scope resolution. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of lexical semantics (word sense disambiguation and role labelling), discourse semantics, formal semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning. Since 1999 there is an ACL special interest group on computational semantics SIGSEM.

Books

• Blackburn, P. and J. Bos (2005): Representation and Inference for Natural Language. A First Course in Computational Semantics. CSLI publications. ISBN 1575864967.
• Bunt, H. and R. Muskens (1999): Computing Meaning Volume 1. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 1402002904.
• Bunt, H., Muskens, R. and E. Thijsse (2001): Computing Meaning Volume 2. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 1402001754.
• Wilks, Y. and E. Charniak (1976): Computational Semantics. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding. Amsterdam: North-Holland. ISBN 0444111107.

Conferences

• IWCS - International Workshop on Computational Semantics
• ICoS - Inference in Computational Semantics

Software

• Boxer - wide-coverage semantics based on DRT (Discourse Representation Theory)
• utool - scope underspecification