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Association for Computing Machinery

Magazine: December 2008 | Volume 15, No. 2

Towards a user-friendly semantic formalism for natural language generation

Computational semantics has become an interesting and important branch of computational linguistics. Born from the fusion of formal semantics and computer science, it is concerned with the automated processing of meaning associated with natural language expressions [2]. Systems of semantic representation, hereafter referred to as semantic formalisms, exist to describe meaning underlying natural language expressions. To date, several formalisms have been defined by researchers from a number of diverse disciplines including philosophy, logic, psychology and linguistics. These formalisms have a number of different applications in the realm of computer science. For example, in machine translation a sentence could be parsed and translated into a series of semantic expressions, which could then be used to generate an utterance with the same meaning in a different language [14]. This paper presents two existing formalisms and examines their user-friendliness. Additionally, a new form of semantic representation is proposed with wide coverage and user-friendliness suitable for a computational linguist.

By Craig Thomas

HTML | In the Digital Library
Tags: Design, HCI design and evaluation methods, Human Factors, Management, Natural language generation, Natural language interfaces, Natural language processing, Performance, Semantic networks, User centered design