Type-theoretical natural language semantics: on the system F for meaning assembly
This work addresses semantic modeling challenges in computational linguistics, but it appears incremental as it builds on an existing framework with extensions.
The paper tackles the problem of compositional natural language semantics with lexical features like coercions and copredication by extending a type-theoretical framework based on second-order typed lambda calculus, introducing predefined types and coercive subtyping to make these constructs more natural and exemplifying linguistic applications.
This paper presents and extends our type theoretical framework for a compositional treatment of natural language semantics with some lexical features like coercions (e.g. of a town into a football club) and copredication (e.g. on a town as a set of people and as a location). The second order typed lambda calculus was shown to be a good framework, and here we discuss how to introduced predefined types and coercive subtyping which are much more natural than internally coded similar constructs. Linguistic applications of these new features are also exemplified.