The Semantic Representation of Natural Language

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Levison et al. present a useful meaning representation framework ... superior in both human-readability (especially by non-specialists) and in its representation of discourse structures beyond the sentence-level. These are important features and ... contribute to the greater usefulness of this framework for non-computational linguists. * Studies in Language * [This book] provides a practical formal representation of the meaning of expressions of natural language, from basic semantic units to texts, which, commendably, relies closely on recent results within various contemporary theories and applications within lexical semantics, such as componential analysis, conceptual structures ... as well as various truth-conditional approaches to sentence meaning. * The Year's Work in English Studies * At last a book on natural language semantics that tackles semantics all the way up to texts of considerable length and fictional statements. The proposed formalism brings together well tried solutions for specific linguistic phenomena with a structural approach based on programming languages that makes it user friendly and gives it tremendous expressive power. A very useful contribution for natural language generation and the representation of narrative. Semantic Representations of Natural Language provides a highly suggestive survey of the multiple relationships between semantic analysis and computational formalization of natural language and narratives, offering a vivid, nearly kaleidoscopic, theoretically comprehensive and strongly argued synthesis of a long lasting team approach. Even literature researchers concerned with the digital analysis of textuality will read this monograph with the greatest interest. Genuine interdisciplinary research between linguistics, literary studies and computational approaches is rare. The research detailed here is an example of such interdisciplinary collaboration at its best. Technical, but enjoyable, this is a book to be read and thought about as it opens many new vistas.