A Semantic Interface for Logic Grammars

Abstract

We introduce a semantic interface into logic grammars to give a natural link to the semantic component of natural language understanding systems. The semantic interface contains five parameters, i.e. input, semantic information, new devices, generator, and output. These parameters specify the procedure of compiling a desired semantic theory into its corresponding logic programs. The semantic interface can thus achieve a meta-level representation of required semantic theories using a meta-programming technique. We sketch how Montague semantics and discourse representation theory can be simulated in a logic-based natural language understanding system.