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A look at the emerging general picture of how to translate 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:
Three Tasks
Specify a reasonable syntax for the natural language fragment of interest.
Specify semantic representations for the lexical items.
Specify the translation of complex expressions (i.e. phrases and sentences) compositionally (see also Section 3.1.3). That is, we need to systematically 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.
All of our three tasks need to be carried out in a way that naturally leads to computational implementation. Because this is a course on computational semantics, 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.
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