Computational semantics

Not to be confused with Semantics (computer science).

Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions.^[1] It consequently plays an important role in natural-language processing and computational linguistics.

Some traditional topics of interest are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, anaphora resolution,^[2] presupposition projection, and quantifier scope resolution. Methods employed usually draw from formal semantics or statistical semantics. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of lexical semantics (word-sense disambiguation and semantic role labeling), discourse semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning (in particular, automated theorem proving). Since 1999 there has been an ACL special interest group on computational semantics, SIGSEM.

See also

• Discourse representation theory
• Formal semantics (natural language)
• Minimal recursion semantics
• Natural-language understanding
• Semantic compression
• Semantic parsing
• Semantic Web
• SemEval
• WordNet

Further reading

• Blackburn, P., and Bos, J. (2005), Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, CSLI Publications. ISBN 1-57586-496-7.
• Bunt, H., and Muskens, R. (1999), Computing Meaning, Volume 1, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0290-4.
• Bunt, H., Muskens, R., and Thijsse, E. (2001), Computing Meaning, Volume 2, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0175-4.
• Copestake, A., Flickinger, D. P., Sag, I. A., & Pollard, C. (2005). Minimal Recursion Semantics. An introduction. In Research on Language and Computation. 3:281–332.
• Eijck, J. van, and C. Unger (2010): Computational Semantics with Functional Programming. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-75760-7
• Wilks, Y., and Charniak, E. (1976), Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding, North-Holland, Amsterdam. ISBN 0-444-11110-7.