Computing Meaning: Annotation, Representation, and Inference

Abstract

This chapter introduces the subsequent chapters in the book and how they are related, against the background of a discussion of the nature and the complexity of processes that compute the meanings of natural language expressions. The discussion focuses on three aspects of the computation of meanings that play an important part in later chapters: (1) the nature of meaning representations; (2) the integration of inferencing with compositional interpretation; and (3) the construction of semantically annotated corpora and their use in machine learning of meaning computation.