A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics
This work addresses the challenge of semantic expressiveness in computational linguistics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing denotational and functional approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of representing semantic differences in natural language by developing a functional programming model with a category-based type and effect system, resulting in a diagrammatic calculus that efficiently computes sentence denotations.
In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions. We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.