Semantic Structures

Focusing on text rather than on isolated sentences, this collection examines recent computer programs designed to aid in understanding natural language generation. All the systems concentrate on the semantics, pragmatics, and common sense knowledge necessary to understand, summarize, and learn new word and phrase definitions from text. Special emphasis is given to generating linguistic descriptions from perceptual inputs. Issues covered include the representation of episodic and semantic knowledge to support text understanding; the generation and verification of inferences from text; story understanding and the production of narrative summaries; and the interactions of syntax with semantic and common sense.