Preface

The most central fact about natural language is that it has meaning. Semantics is the study of meaning. In formal semantics, we conduct this study in a formal manner. In computational semantics, we're additionally interested in using the results of our study when we implement programs that process natural language. This is what we will be concerned with in this course.

This material is part of a one semester course that has been developed within the project "MiLCA" ([BWP04]), funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. The material was generated using the OzDoc-Tool ([Duc]). The full course including exercises and Prolog code is available at [BWKP03].

Parts of this reader are loosely based on an early version of the course on computational semantics by Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos [BB04] and materials contributed by Michael Kohlhase. All errors are our own.