Formal semantics of Chinese discourse based on compositional discourse representation theory

Abstract

To obtain formal semantics of Chinese discourse, compositional discourse representation theory was adopted to compose semantics from Chinese word to sentence and to discourse. According to syntactic rules and λ-box expressions of word categories, sentential logic expression could be created by translating from child nodes to father node in syntactic tree, then the formal representation of Chinese discourse could be further obtained by using construction procedure of DRT to resolve cross-sentential demonstrates and merge sentential DRSs. A rough prototype system was given to depict the implementment process, which will benefit establishing machine-inside representation of discourse semantics of contemporary Chinese. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.