10.3.3 Three Tasks

How do we translate simple sentences such as ``John loves Mary'' and ``A woman walks'' into first-order logic?

Let us have a look at the general picture that's emerging. How do we translate simple sentences such as ``John loves Mary'' and ``A woman walks'' into first-order logic? Although we still don't have a specific method at hand, we can formulate a plausible strategy for finding one. We need to fulfill three tasks:

Task 1

Specify a reasonable syntax for the natural language fragment of interest.

Task 2

Specify semantic representations for the lexical items.

Task 3

Specify the translation of complex expressions (i.e. phrases and sentences) compositionally. That is, we need to specify the translation of such expressions in terms of the translation of their parts, parts here referring to the substructure given to us by the syntax.

Of course all three tasks should be carried out in a way that naturally leads to computational implementation. Because this chapter is on semantic construction, tasks 2 and 3 are where our real interests lie, and most of our attention will be devoted to them. But we also need a way of handling task 1.