Computational semantics
In this article we are going to explore the fascinating world of Computational semantics, a topic that has captured the attention of millions of people around the world. From its impact on society to its possible future implications, Computational semantics has generated debates, research and endless conflicting opinions. Throughout these pages, we will delve into its history, explore its different facets, and examine its relevance today. Whether you are familiar with Computational semantics or are discovering its importance for the first time, this article invites you to reflect on a topic that undoubtedly continues to leave its mark on our society.
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Computational semantics is a subfield of computational linguistics.[1] Its goal is to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms supporting the generation and interpretation of meaning in humans. It usually involves the creation of computational models that simulate particular semantic phenomena, and the evaluation of those models against data from human participants. While computational semantics is a scientific field, it has many applications in real-world settings and substantially overlaps with Artificial Intelligence.
Broadly speaking, the discipline can be subdivided into areas that mirror the internal organization of linguistics. For example, lexical semantics and frame semantics have active research communities within computational linguistics.[2] Some popular methodologies are also strongly inspired by traditional linguistics. Most prominently, the area of distributional semantics, which underpins investigations into embeddings and the internals of Large Language Models, has roots in the work of Zellig Harris.[3]
Some traditional topics of interest in computational semantics are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, anaphora resolution,[4] presupposition projection, and quantifier scope resolution. Methods employed usually draw from formal semantics or statistical semantics. Computational semantics has points of contact with the areas of lexical semantics (word-sense disambiguation and semantic role labeling), discourse semantics, knowledge representation and automated reasoning (in particular, automated theorem proving). Since 1999 there has been an ACL special interest group on computational semantics, SIGSEM.
See also
- Discourse representation theory
- Formal semantics (natural language)
- Minimal recursion semantics
- Natural-language understanding
- Semantic compression
- Semantic parsing
- Semantic Web
- SemEval
- WordNet
Further reading
- Blackburn, P., and Bos, J. (2005), Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, CSLI Publications. ISBN 1-57586-496-7.
- Bunt, H., and Muskens, R. (1999), Computing Meaning, Volume 1, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0290-4.
- Bunt, H., Muskens, R., and Thijsse, E. (2001), Computing Meaning, Volume 2, Kluwer Publishing, Dordrecht. ISBN 1-4020-0175-4.
- Copestake, A., Flickinger, D. P., Sag, I. A., & Pollard, C. (2005). Minimal Recursion Semantics. An introduction. In Research on Language and Computation. 3:281–332.
- Eijck, J. van, and C. Unger (2010): Computational Semantics with Functional Programming. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-75760-7
- Wilks, Y., and Charniak, E. (1976), Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding, North-Holland, Amsterdam. ISBN 0-444-11110-7.
References
- ^ Blackburn, Patrick, and Johan Bos. "Computational semantics." Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science (2003): 27–45.
- ^ Events of the ACL's Special Interest Group on Lexical Semantics "https://aclanthology.org/sigs/siglex/"
- ^ Boleda, Gemma. 2020. Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory. In Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 6:213-234. "https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030303"
- ^ Basile, Valerio, et al. "Developing a large semantically annotated corpus." LREC 2012, Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 2012.
External links
- Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- IWCS - International Workshop on Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM)
- ICoS - Inference in Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM)
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