Centre for Computational Linguistics: Projects

Formal Semantics, Universals and Machine Translation

Time Span: 1988 - 1998
Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NFWO)
F. Van Eynde

The aim of this research is to contribute to the development of formal languages for the representation and model-theoretic interpretation of function words and affixes. The general framework for this research is Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (cf. Pollard & Sag 1994), mainly for the formalism and the syntax, and Discourse Representation Theory (cf. Kamp & Reyle 1993), mainly for the semantics. So far, the work has focussed on the function words and affixes with temporal meanings, such as the forms of tense and aspect, temporal adverbials and quantifiers, and temporal anaphora.

The perspective is multilingual and one of the main functions of the representation language is to serve as a conceptual framework for the systematic comparison of the semantics of different languages, esp. the Romance and Germanic ones. As such it is related to the search for semantic universals in linguistics and to the interlingual approach in machine translation.

Because of its emphasis on computational applicability, many of the results obtained so far have been integrated in systems for natural language processing, esp. machine translation.

A recent survey of this research is provided in `Auxiliaries and Verbal Affixes. A monostratal cross-linguistic analysis' (1994), a thesis submitted for obtaining the degree of `Geaggregeerde voor het Hoger Onderwijs' (see Publications). Publications which pay special attention to the link with natural language processing are given below.

• F. Van Eynde, The semantics of tense and aspect In: M. Filgueiras, L. Damas, N. Moreira & A.P. Tomas (eds.), Lecture notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 476, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1991, pp. 158-184

• Van Eynde F. (ed.), Linguistic Issues in Machine Translation, Pinter Publishers, London and New York, 1993

CCL

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