Advances in the Logical Representation of Lexical Semantics
This work addresses foundational issues in computational linguistics for researchers in formal semantics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing Montague-based frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating lexical semantics and pragmatics into natural language meaning analysis by proposing an expanded framework ΛTYn, which replaces atomic types with a rich typing system for many-facetted lexical items, resulting in advances in logical formalisms such as constraints on lexical transformations and polymorphic quantifiers.
The integration of lexical semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of the meaning of natural lan- guage has prompted changes to the global framework derived from Montague. In those works, the original lexicon, in which words were assigned an atomic type of a single-sorted logic, has been re- placed by a set of many-facetted lexical items that can compose their meaning with salient contextual properties using a rich typing system as a guide. Having related our proposal for such an expanded framework \LambdaTYn, we present some recent advances in the logical formalisms associated, including constraints on lexical transformations and polymorphic quantifiers, and ongoing discussions and research on the granularity of the type system and the limits of transitivity.