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Resolving Quasi Logical Forms

Paper · 1990 · Hiyan Alshawi

Summary

The paper addresses how a sentence's context-independent semantic analysis relates to its interpretation in context. It focuses on referring expressions and implicit relations. Working within SRI's Core Language Engine (CLE), Alshawi introduces Quasi Logical Form (QLF), an intermediate level produced by compositional morphological, syntactic and semantic rules. QLF leaves pronouns, reflexives, definite descriptions and implicit relations unresolved. It also leaves quantifier scope and collective/distributive readings unspecified.

A separate resolution stage turns QLFs into fully specified logical forms (LFs). An ordered, declarative set of reference resolution rules proposes candidate referents, quantifiers and relations. Linguistic and pragmatic plausibility constraints then filter the candidates, which are checked in an enriched "resolved QLF" (RQLF). Because the rules are kept apart from the general algorithm, rule sets can be rewritten for other languages or sublanguages without changing the mechanism.

The paper gives no quantitative evaluation. Its contribution is a modular architecture that covers a broad range of English reference phenomena. It shows that constraints such as binding conditions on reflexives can be stated cleanly at the logical-form level.

Key points

  • Three unresolved QLF constructs:
    • a_terms for anaphoric noun phrases
    • q_terms for quantified noun phrases
    • a_forms for implicit relations, such as compound nominals and genitives, and for ellipsis
  • Two declaration types:
    • refrule(QLF_expression, Method) declarations link unifying QLF patterns to Prolog resolution methods, which return ranked candidates by backtracking.
    • reflex lexical declarations supply predicates for relational nouns and determiners.
  • Representation chain:
    • QLF serves as the semantic analysis.
    • RQLF, which keeps the QLF information and adds resolutions in place, serves as the interpretation in context.
    • LF, a first-order extension with Woods-style four-part generalized quantifiers, serves as the truth conditions.
  • Reflexive constraint:
    • It is checked on predicate-argument structure, including infinitival complements, comparatives (more) and "representational" picture nouns.
    • A known weakness is that it depends on whether prepositional phrases are subcategorized.
  • Future work is planned within CLARE: ellipsis, temporal indices, and plausibility via inference and probabilistic reasoning. CLE development was funded by Alvey and the NATTIE consortium.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬SRI InternationalMenlo Park · United States23 works · 7,208 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semantic parsing & meaning representation · 185 works

Cite

Cite as Hiyan Alshawi. 1990. Resolving Quasi Logical Forms. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{alshawi1990resolving,
  title = {{Resolving Quasi Logical Forms}},
  author = {Hiyan Alshawi},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1990},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J90-3001/}
}

References

25 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Alshawi, H. 1987 Memory and Context for Language Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. find
  2. Alshawi, H. and van Eijck, J. 1989 Logical Forms in the Core Language Engine. 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, British Columbia. find
  3. Alshawi, H., Carter, D. M., van Eijck, J., Moore, R. C., Moran, D. B., Pereira, F. C. N., Pulman, S. G. and Smith, A. G. 1988 Interim Report on the SRI Core Language Engine. Technical Report CCSRC-5, SRI International, Cambridge Research Centre, Cambridge, England. find
  4. Carter, D. M. 1987 Interpreting Anaphors in Natural Language Texts. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, England. find
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  7. Grosz, B. J. 1977 The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding. (Ph.D. thesis), Technical Note No. 151, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA. find
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  15. Moore, R. C. 1981 Problems in Logical Form. 19th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 117-124. find
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  17. Partee, B. 1978 Bound Variables and Other Anaphors. In: Waltz, D., ed., Proceedings of TINLAP-2. University of Illinois-Urbana. 79-83. find
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  20. Reinhart, T. 1983 Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. Croom Helm, London, U.K. find
  21. Scha, R. J. H. 1981 Distributive, Collective and Cumulative Quantification. In: Groenendijk, J. A. G., Janssen, T. M. V., and Stokhof, M. B. J., eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. find
  22. Sidner, C. L. 1979 Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse. (Ph.D. thesis), Technical Report AI-TR-537, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, MA. find
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