Modeling context information for computational semantics with the language of acyclic recursion

Abstract

The paper explores the expressiveness of the Lλar language for richly informative lexical semantics. It introduces an extended version of the language Lλar to represent semantic information associated with lexemes that have denotations dependent on context information such as space and time locations, "speaker" or "listener" agents, and other potential context components. The technique is demonstrated by rendering referential lexical items such as demonstratives, deictic pronouns, and definite descriptions. It is applicable to any language with richly informative inflection structure. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.