Negation and focus in man: machine communication

  • Authors:
  • Petr Sgall;Eva Hajicova

  • Affiliations:
  • Center of Numerical Mathematics, Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia;Center of Numerical Mathematics, Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'75 Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1975

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Abstract

A sketch of a programme for man-machine communication as being prepared by Prague linguists is presented, with a characterization of the scope of negation and of the nature of focus - two problems that appeared crucial with respect to the following isauesi (i) grammatical analysis of input texts, yielding unambiguous semantic representations (SR s) of subsequent sentences, (ii) algorithms translating the SR s into a logical language in the form of which the information gained from the natural language input is to be stored in the computer memory, (iii) form of the SR s, i.e. the language serving, among other purposes, as the output of (i) and input of (ii). It is shown especially that the logical impact of natural language negation can be accounted for only if the topic/focua dichotomy is duly analyzed.