The Semantic Representation of Natural Language. M. Levison, G. Lessard, C. Thomas, and M. Donald.
C. Unger · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 2013
As the title promises, The Semantic Representation of Natural Language sets out to develop a formalism for representing natural language meaning. After an enjoyable journey through the world of meaning from words to texts, touching upon ancient Rome, fairy tales, and dungeons, it reaches its targeted goal—however not without leaving the impression of not having tapped its full potential, lacking consistent formal rigour and unfortunately having left some of the most interesting questions unanswered or even unasked. The Semantic Representation of Natural Language is anchored most broadly in the area of language and computation, focusing on meaning as a very important yet often neglected part of that area. In doing so, the main concern of the book is not the question what an utterance means but how its meaning can be represented. The goal of the book is to develop a formalism for representing meanings that is able to capture the full variety of communicative aspects on different levels of granularity, and that is intuitive to understand and use for people of different backgrounds and expertise. In order to meet those requirements, a functional representation of meaning is developed and applied to a wide range of diverse semantic phenomena.