Semantic approach for solving the decision problem in natural language

Abstract

Every language, whether formal or natural, has a corresponding decision problem, the problem of whether a statement is well-formed and a valid sentence of the language. While compilers usually solve the decision problem for a computer language during compilation, there is no mathematical method to solve the decision problem in natural language. Although a human can use natural language grammar to reason whether a sentence is correct, computers have problems with this because natural language grammar is not a closed theory. We show that the decision problem for the German language can not be solved entirely by phrase structure grammar, dependency parsing or grammar checkers and develop a parser for the German language, which solves the decision problem for that language using a new semantic approach.