Computational Semantics

This book analyzes the application of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in the semantics’ analysis for linguistics, classical studies, and philosophy. Similar techniques can be implemented to incorporate the fields of education, psychology, humanities, law, maritime, data science and business intelligence. The book is suitable for the broader audience interested in the emerging scientific field of formal and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

by Emily M Bender (Author), Alex Lascarides (Author), Graeme Hirst (Editor)
Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the tasks of both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG).

Everyday life would be easier if we could simply talk with machines instead of having to program them. Before such talking robots can be built, however, there must be a theory of how communicating with natural language works. This requires not only a grammatical analysis of the language signs, but also a model of the cognitive agent, with interfaces for recognition and action, an internal database, and an algorithm for reading content in and out. In Database Semantics, these ingredients are used for reconstructing natural language communication as a mechanism for transferring content from the database of the speaker to the database of the hearer.