Some uses of higher-order logic in computational linguistics

Dale A. Miller, Gopalan Nadathur

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

Consideration of the question of meaning in the framework of linguistics often requires an allusion to sets and other higher-order notions. The traditional approach to representing and reasoning about meaning in a computational setting has been to use knowledge representation sys 7 tems that are either based on first-order logic or that use mechanisms whose formal justifications are to be provided after the fact. In this paper we shall consider the use of a higher-order logic for this task. We first present a version of definite clauses (positive Horn clauses) that is based on this logic. Predicate and function variables may occur in such clauses and the terms in the language are the typed h-terms. Such term structures have a richness that may be exploited in representing meanings. We also describe a higher-order logic programming language, called ~Prolog, which represents programs as higher-order definite clauses and interprets them using a depth-first interpreter. A virtue of this language is that it is possible to write programs in it that integrate syntactic and semantic analyses into one computational paradigm. This is to be contrasted with the more common practice of using two entirely different computation paradigms, such as DCGs or ATNs for parsing and frames or semantic nets for semantic processing. We illustrate such an integration in this language by considering a simple example, and we claim that its use makes the task of providing formal justifications for the computations specified much more direct.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)247-256
Number of pages10
JournalProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1986-July
StatePublished - 1986
Externally publishedYes
Event24th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1986 - New York, United States
Duration: Jul 10 1986Jul 13 1986

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 1986 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. All Rights Reserved.

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