This course was part of a tutorial focusing on the state of computational semantics, i.e., the state of work on natural language within the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm. The discussion in the course centered on the philosophers Richard Montague and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The course was divided into three sections: (1)…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

This paper examines and criticizes Lakoff's notions of a natural logic and of a generative semantics described in terms of logic. The author argues that the relationship of these notions to logic as normally understood is unclear but suggests a number of possible interpretations of the thesis of generative semantics. Further, on these…

There is a need for a new kind of linguistic theory which, while being concerned with both generation and analysis, must include the roles of memory, non-linguistic knowledge, and inference. The role of logic is diminished according to such a theory because inference has no real logical content. Meaning must be studied with respect to the actual…