Representing the Semantics of Natural Language as Constraint Expressions

Abstract

The issue of how to represent the "meaning" of an utterance is central to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. Rather than relying on ad-hoc structures or forcing the complexities of natural language into mathematically elegant but computationally cumbersome representations (such as first-order logic), this paper presents a novel representation which has many desirable computational and logical properties. It is proposed to use this representation to structure the "world knowledge" of a natural-language understanding system.