Centre for Computational Linguistics: Projects

Formal Semantics for Discourse

Time Span: 1992 - 1993
Commission of the European Communities & Vlaamse Regering
F. Van Eynde, I. Schuurman, B. Bekker, A. Schoenmakers & P. Blok
Other participants: Gruppo Dima (Torino), Department of Modern Languages (Salford), Faculteit der Letteren (Groningen)

This was one of the six projects which the CEC is funding in the framework of its ET-10 programme, ``Linguistic Research of General Interest''.

The aim of the project was to create a starting point for the formal and computational processing of natural language texts. More specifically, it

• provides an in-depth survey of the state of the art in the field, covering a.o. text linguistics, rhetorical structure theory, discourse representation theory, argumentation theory, dynamic discourse semantics and knowledge representation languages in AI; special attention has been paid to the issue of whether and in how far the existing theories are useful for computational applications;
• proposes a conceptual framework and a notation for the syntactic and semantic representation of cross-sentential relations in texts, i.e. rhetorical relations between sentences, pronominal and temporal anaphora, a.o.;
• spells out the requirements which the notation imposes on a formalism for the implementation of the results.

The research is summarized in two reports, one on the state of the art and one which addresses the two other goals of the project. The former will be published soon (see below); the latter can be obtained on request from the CCL secretariat.

• F. Van Eynde & V. Allegranza (eds.), Semantics and discourse. An NLP perspective., Studies in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing. Luxembourg, in press

• F. Van Eynde, Temporal relations in discourse, In: P.I. Blok (ed.), J. Benjamins, in press

CCL

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Comments to the Author: Frank.VanEynde@ccl.kuleuven.ac.be

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