Realization of natural language interfaces using lazy functional programming
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Rethinking the Semantics of Complex Nominals
CAI '07 Proceedings of the 20th conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence on Advances in Artificial Intelligence
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Despite their simple syntactic form, adjective-noun combinations seem to have no straightforward semantic method that parallels the simplicity of the syntax This has led to the conventional belief that adjectives belong to a (semantically motivated) hierarchy This has the consequence that a uniform treatment of adjectives is unattainable—without resorting to notions such as possible worlds, which are difficult to map into competent computer programs Moreover, because of their seemingly “undisciplined” semantic behaviour, adjective-noun combinations have been used by some authors (e.g [5]) to further the argument of non-compositionality of natural-language expressions Contrary to such views, we believe that adjectives are more systematic in their behaviour than originally thought In support of this claim and based on typed sets, we propose a uniform approach to the semantics of adjective-noun combinations It hypothesizes that adjective-noun combinations can semantically be thought of as a set intersection involving the adjective(s) and the head noun of the compound.