voula@utcsrgv.UUCP (Voula Vanneli) (02/01/85)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** ACTIVITIES FOR THE WEEK COMMENCING FEBRUARY 11, 1985 (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road) Dept. of Computer Science University of Toronto Artificial Intelligence Seminar - Tuesday, February 12, 3 p.m., SF 1105 Toyoaki Nishida Department of Information Science, Kyoto University and Artificial Intelligence Project, Yale University "The Application of Montague Semantics to Natural Language Processing" Abstract: Many natural language processing systems have been constructed in Artificial Intelligence or Computational Linguistics. However, it is not always clear exactly what sort of logical operations are involved in solving linguis- tic problems. The theory exists implicitly behind a complex program or grammar. This opacity prevents us from under- standing, improving, or building a new system on top of pre- vious systems. Montague semantics gives a clear view of the process of interpreting linguistic expressions in terms of abstractly defined world models. However, it is also true that this theory should be improved both linguistically and computa- tionally. I will present our approach to adapting Montague semantics to natural language processing by taking computational con- sideration into account. I will concentrate on two particu- lar research efforts conducted by our group: generating semantic networks from English and English-Japanese machine translation. Based on these experiences, I will talk about the future development of a more powerful and clean computa- tional formalism.