Natural Language Processing with Python

The Semantics of English Sentences

Compositional Semantics in Feature-Based Grammar

At the beginning of the chapter we briefly illustrated a method of building semantic representations on the basis of a syntactic parse, using the grammar framework developed in Chapter 9. This time, rather than constructing an SQL query, we will build a logical form. One of our guiding ideas for designing such grammars is the Principle of Compositionality. (Also known as Frege’s Principle; see [Partee, 1995] for the formulation given.)

Principle of Compositionality: the meaning of a whole is a function of the meanings of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined.

We will assume that the semantically relevant parts of a complex expression are given by a theory of syntactic analysis. Within this chapter, we will take it for granted that expressions are parsed against a context-free grammar. However, this is not entailed by the Principle of Compositionality.

Our goal now is to integrate the construction of a semantic representation in a manner that can be smoothly with the process of parsing. Example 10-29 illustrates a first approximation to the kind of analyses we would like to build.

Example 10-29. 

In Example 10-29, the SEM value at the root node shows a semantic representation for the whole sentence, while the SEM values at lower nodes show semantic representations for constituents of the ...