Computational semantics

{{Confuse|Semantics (computer science)}} {{Short description|Meaning represented by natural language}} {{Semantics}} '''Computational semantics''' is a subfield of computational linguistics.<ref>Blackburn, Patrick, and Johan Bos. "[https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/499187.pdf Computational semantics]." Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science (2003): 27–45.</ref> 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.<ref>Events of the ACL's Special Interest Group on Lexical Semantics "https://aclanthology.org/sigs/siglex/"</ref> 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.<ref>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"</ref>

Some traditional topics of interest in computational semantics are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification, anaphora resolution,<ref>Basile, Valerio, et al. "[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22meaning+representation%22+%22computational+semantics%22+%22underspecification%22+%22anaphora%22+%22scope+resolution%22&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47# Developing a large semantically annotated corpus]." LREC 2012, Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 2012.</ref> 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.

==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). [https://web.archive.org/web/20120717034844/http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/copestake.pdf 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== {{reflist}}

== External links == * [http://www.sigsem.org/ Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM)] of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) * [https://archive.today/20130222210222/http://let.uvt.nl/research/ti/sigsem/iwcs/ IWCS] - International Workshop on Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM) * [https://web.archive.org/web/20070119150136/http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Emdr/ICoS/ ICoS] - Inference in Computational Semantics (endorsed by SIGSEM)

Category:Computational linguistics Category:Natural language processing Category:Semantics Category:Computational fields of study