From TY_n to DRT: an implementation

Patrick Blackburn (1) , Sébastien Hinderer (1)

1 TALARIS - Natural Language Processing: representation, inference and semantics

Since the early 1990s, the semanticist Reinhard Muskens has advocated the use of the TY_n family of higher-order logics as a general framework for semantic representation; he has backed up his claim by treating a wide variety of semantic phenomena in the TY_n framework. Most interestingly of all, he has also shown that the central ideas of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) can be modeled in TY_n, thereby allowing a clean Montague-style treatment of discourse level phenomena. In this paper, we assess the significance for computational linguistics of his theoretical work. We do so by implementing the TY_n-based approach to DRT in \nessie, a generic framework for semantic construction that is implemented in the functional programming language OCaml.

Mots clés: Computational linguistics; lambda calculus; discourse representation theory; implementation

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Patrick Blackburn, Sébastien Hinderer. From TY_n to DRT: an implementation. 3rd International Language & Technology Conference - L&TC'07, Oct 2007, Poznam, Poland. pp.384-388. ⟨inria-00179297⟩