In this paper I introduce a formalism for natural language understandingbased on a computational implementation of Discourse RepresentationTheory. The formalism covers a wide variety of semantic phenomena(including scope and lexical ambiguities, anaphora and presupposition),is computationally attractive, and has a genuine inference component. Itcombines a well-established linguistic formalism (DRT) with advancedtechniques to deal with ambiguity (underspecification), and isinnovative in the use of first-order theorem proving techniques.The architecture of the formalism for natural language understandingthat I advocate consists of three levels of processing:underspecification, (...) resolution, andinference. Each of these levels has a distinct function andtherefore employs a different kind of semantic representation. Themappings between these different representations define the interfacesbetween the levels. (shrink)

This book presents novel formalizations of three of the most important medieval logical theories: supposition, consequence and obligations. In an additional fourth part, an in-depth analysis of the concept of formalization is presented - a crucial concept in the current logical panorama, which as such receives surprisingly little attention.Although formalizations of medieval logical theories have been proposed earlier in the literature, the formalizations presented here are all based on innovative vantage points: supposition theories as algorithmic hermeneutics, theories of consequence analyzed (...) with tools borrowed from model-theory and two-dimensional semantics, and obligations as logical games. For this reason, this is perhaps the first time that these medieval logical theories are made fully accessible to the modern philosopher and logician who wishes to obtain a better grasp of them, but who has always been held back by the lack of appropriate ‘translations' into modern terms.Moreover, the book offers a reflection on the very nature of logic, a reflection that is prompted by the comparisons between medieval and modern logic, their similarities and dissimilarities. It is thus a contribution not only to the history of logic, but also to the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language and semantics.The analysis of medieval logic is also relevant for the modern philosopher and logician in that, being the unifying methodology used across all disciplines at that time, logic really provided unity to science. It thus presents a unified model of scientific investigation, where logic plays the aggregating role. (shrink)

Semantic analysis, – inference on the basis of semantic information and world knowledge – still is largely uncharted territory in dy- (3) namic semantics. It is needed, among other things, for the reconstruction of linguistically unspecified parts of the discourse or for restricting ambiguities introduced by prior analysis processes, i.e.

In this article we discuss what constitutes a good choice of semantic representation, compare different approaches of constructing semantic representations for fragments of natural language, and give an overview of recent methods for employing inference engines for natural language understanding tasks.

This thesis is on the history and philosophy of logic and semantics. Logic can be described as the ‘science of reasoning’, as it deals primarily with correct patterns of reasoning. However, logic as a discipline has undergone dramatic changes in the last two centuries: while for ancient and medieval philosophers it belonged essentially to the realm of language studies, it has currently become a sub-branch of mathematics. This thesis attempts to establish a dialogue between the modern and the medieval traditions (...) in logic, by means of ‘translations’ of the medieval logical theories into the modern framework of symbolic logic, i.e. formalizations. One of its conclusions is that, when properly understood within their own framework, the interest of medieval logical theories for modern investigations go beyond mere historical interest, but that a thorough conceptual analysis of such theories must be undertaken in order to avoid conceptual misprojections. While such translations of medieval into modern logic have been attempted before, the approach presented here is innovative in that attention is paid to the similarities as well as to the dissimilarities between the two traditions, and to what can be learned from the medieval masters for modern investigations in logic and semantics. (shrink)