Abstract:Our decision to perform semantic construction with the aid of an abstract "glue" language (namely,
λ-calculus) has pleasant consequences for grammar writing, so we would like to make the key combinatorial mechanisms (functional application and
β-conversion), available as black boxes to the grammar writer. From a grammar engineering perspective, this is a sensible thing to do: when writing fragments we should be free to concentrate on linguistic issues.In this section we build the required black box. With such a black box available, we will be able to use a little DCG for semantic construction. We will decorate a slightly extended version of our
dCGExample.pl (known from
» Context Free Grammars) with extremely natural semantic construction code and start building representations.
Running the ProgramWe've already seen a first run of our semantically annotated DCG, and we've now implemented a module for
β-conversion. So let's plug them together in a driver predicate
go/0 to get our first real semantic construction system.