Logical Semantics and Commonsense Knowledge: Where Did we Go Wrong, and How to Go Forward, Again
This work addresses foundational issues in natural language semantics for AI and linguistics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing logical frameworks.
The paper argues that logical semantics has struggled because it conflates ontological and logical concepts, and proposes integrating lexical and compositional semantics within a strongly-typed ontology to address challenges in natural language semantics.
We argue that logical semantics might have faltered due to its failure in distinguishing between two fundamentally very different types of concepts: ontological concepts, that should be types in a strongly-typed ontology, and logical concepts, that are predicates corresponding to properties of and relations between objects of various ontological types. We will then show that accounting for these differences amounts to the integration of lexical and compositional semantics in one coherent framework, and to an embedding in our logical semantics of a strongly-typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. We will show that in such a framework a number of challenges in natural language semantics can be adequately and systematically treated.