Reading(7):Second Part-Semantic Interpretation

This part had so much information I had not known. I'd like to read it in detail.

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Pages: 179~188 of Natural Language Understanding, second edition, by James F. Allen, 1995

In the introduction, there was a useful sentence which indicated the basic idea of this part. That was there were two main steps for judging the meaning of a sentence. Firstly, context-free form, namely logical form should be calculated. Then, final semantic form generated by interpretation logic form in context. The research on context-free meaning was named as semantics. At same time, context-sensitive language research was named as pragmatics.

In this forthcoming content of this book there were two terms. Meaning meant context-free. Usage was related to context-sensitive.

Without question, ambiguity was the most serious problem of semantic interpretation. If a word could represented more than two meanings, we called it had semantically ambiguous.

Phases referring objects were context-sensitive. But some sentence structure would produce some referring bind.
For example, the object was different obviously in "Jack saw him in the mirror" and "Jack saw himself in the mirror." The most important task of Semantic Interpretation was reducing candidate senses of each word by bindings.

When objects described in context, we could use some discourse variables. When there was a new discourse variable occurred in context, it was named as a unique name. In common instance, the posterior sentences would point to it.
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