Author: Dalrymple, Mary, John Lamping, and Vijay Saraswat

Year: 1993

Title: LFG Semantics via Constraints

Remarks: Proceedings of the 6th Meeting of the
European Association for Computational Linguistics, University of
Utrecht.

Abstract: Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings
with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for
determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their
parts.  Traditionally, meanings are combined via function composition,
which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide
semantic composition.  More recently, the functional structure of LFG
has been used to provide the syntactic information necessary for
constraining derivations of meaning in a cross-linguistically uniform
format.  It has been difficult, however, to reconcile this approach
with the combination of meanings by function composition.  In contrast
to compositional approaches, we present a deductive approach to
assembling meanings, based on reasoning with constraints, which meshes
well with the unordered nature of information in the functional
structure.  Our use of linear logic as a `glue' for assembling
meanings also allows for a coherent treatment of modification as well
as of the LFG requirements of completeness and coherence.