From English to logic: context-free computation of "conventional" logical translation
Computational Linguistics
Translating English into logical form
ACL '82 Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Chart parsing and rule schemata in PSG
ACL '81 Proceedings of the 19th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Detecting article errors based on the mass count distinction
IJCNLP'05 Proceedings of the Second international joint conference on Natural Language Processing
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There are various difficulties in accomodating the traditional mass/count distinction into a grammar for English which has a goal the production of "logical form" semantic translations of the initial English sentences. The present paper surveys some of these difficulties. One puzzle is whether the distinction is a syntactic one or a semantic one, i.e., whether it is a well-formedness constraint or whether it is a description of the semantic translations produced. Another puzzle is whether it should be applied to simple words (as they occur in the lexicon) or whether it should apply only to longer units (such as entire NPs). Of the wide variety of possible theories, only two seem to produce the required results (having to do with plausible inferences and intuitively satisfying semantic representations). These two theories are developed and compared.