Abstract
The traditional approach to natural language understanding is to list all polysemous meanings of a word or idiom in the lexicon. For each word a choice is made between one of its lexical entries, and this choice is used to construct the meaning of the sentence. In this paper we will propose an alternative that derives the appropriate meaning by starting with a single more general lexical entry that is expanded to the appropriate polysemous meaning. The semantic details can be provided by the textual context, the background context, and pragmatic knowledge.In [Willems, 1993a] a model of natural language understanding was developed that constructed a syntax-semantics correspondence by joining (only) lexical entries. One of the principles underlying this construction was determinacy. Here, we will show that this determinacy principle is not ideal, and that one should join schematic expansions of the lexical entries instead to achieve the semantic graph of a sentence.
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