Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.
Matthew Stone. Towards a Computational Account of Knowledge, Action and Inference in Instructions. To appear in Journal of Language and Computation, 2000.
I consider abstract instructions, which provide indirect descriptions of actions in cases where the speaker has key information that a hearer can use to identify the right action to perform, but the speaker alone cannot identify that action. The communicative effects of such instructions, that the hearer should know what to do, are in effect implicatures.
Computational semantics shares with formal semantics research in linguistics and philosophy an absolute commitment to formalizing the meanings of sentences and discourses exactly. The difference among these fields reflects their overall enterprises. Linguistic semantics, for example, is looking for an account of human knowledge of meaning that accounts for crosslinguistic variation and human language learnability. Philosophical semantics aims to situate knowledge of meaning within a general understanding of the intentionality of human mental states.
- Computational semantics (2009, March 09) In Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:50, March 31 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_semantics
- Computational Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Language (2002, August 1) In Matthew Stone’s Computational Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Language. Retrieved 16:04, March 31 from http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mdstone/compsem.html
- About computational semantics…. (2005, June 17) In Patrick Blackburmn About computational semantics…. Retrieved 16:00, March 31 from http://www.loria.fr/~blackbur/aboutComSem.html
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