Syntactic Semantics: Foundations of Computational Natural-Language Understanding

Abstract

In this essay, I consider how it is possible to understand natural language and whether a computer could do so. Briefly, my argument will be that although a certain kind of semantic interpretation is needed for understanding natural language, it is a kind that only involves syntactic symbol manipulation of precisely the sort of which computers are capable, so that it is possible in principle for computers to understand natural language. Along the way, I shall discuss recent arguments by John R. Searle and by Fred Dretske to the effect that computers can not understand natural language, and I shall present a prototype natural-language-understanding system to illustrate some of my claims.1