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Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property
of natural language. This monograph provides a comprehensive survey
of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness.
The book discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness,
which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer
science. It argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential
for further contextual specification, and proposes a unified
logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent
inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible
imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic
extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of
a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and
researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic,
philosophy of language, and NL- oriented AI. Although it makes
extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic
familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts since all
technical terms are carefully explained.
Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property
of natural language. This monograph provides a comprehensive survey
of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness.
The book discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness,
which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer
science. It argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential
for further contextual specification, and proposes a unified
logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent
inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible
imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic
extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of
a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and
researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic,
philosophy of language, and NL- oriented AI. Although it makes
extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic
familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts since all
technical terms are carefully explained.
On the basis of a semantic analysis of dimension terms, this book
develops a theory about knowledge of spatial objects, which is
significant for cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence.
This new approach to knowledge structure evolves in a three-step
process: - adoption of the linguistic theory with its elements,
principles and representational levels, - implementation of the
latter in a Prolog prototype, and - integration of the prototype
into a large natural language understanding system. The study
documents interdisciplinary research at work: the model of spatial
knowledge is the fruit of the cooperative efforts of linguists,
computational linguists, and knowledge engineers, undertaken in
that logical and chronological order. The book offers a two-level
approach to semantic interpretation and proves that it works by
means of a precise computer implementation, which in turn is
applied to support a task-independent knowledge representation
system. Each of these stages is described in detail, and the links
are made explicit, thus retracing the evolution from theory to
practice.
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