1 Semantic Construction

In this chapter, the central question we're going to look at is the following: ``Given a sentence, how do we get to its meaning?'' And, being programmers, the next thing that interests us is: ``How can we automate this process?'' This is, we're going to look at the task of meaning or semantic construction . But one of the first things we're going to see is that syntactic structure plays a crucial role in meaning construction.

• 1.1 Introduction

• 1.2 First-Order Logic: Basic Concepts
  • 1.2.1 Vocabularies
  • 1.2.2 First-Order Languages
  • 1.2.3 Building Formulas
  • 1.2.4 Bound and Free Variables
  • 1.2.5 Notation
  • 1.2.6 Representing formulas in Prolog

• 1.3 Building Meaning Representations
  • 1.3.1 Being Systematic
  • 1.3.2 Being Systematic (II)
  • 1.3.3 Three Tasks
  • 1.3.4 From Syntax to Semantics

• 1.4 The Lambda Calculus
  • 1.4.1 Lambda-Abstraction
  • 1.4.2 Reducing Complex Expressions
  • 1.4.3 Using Lambdas
  • 1.4.4 Advanced Topics: Proper Names and Transitive Verbs
  • 1.4.5 The Moral
  • 1.4.6 What's next
  • 1.4.7 [Sidetrack:] Accidental Bindings
  • 1.4.8 [Sidetrack:] Alpha-Conversion

• 1.5 Implementing Lambda Calculus
  • 1.5.1 Representations
  • 1.5.2 Extending the DCG
  • 1.5.3 The Lexicon
  • 1.5.4 A First Run
  • 1.5.5 Beta-Conversion
  • 1.5.6 Beta-Conversion Continued
  • 1.5.7 Running the Program