Conceptual Dependency and Montague Grammar: A Step Toward Conciliation

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Natural Language and Speech

In attempting to establish a common basis from which the approaches and results can be compared, we have taken a conciliatory attitude toward natural language research in the conceptual dependency (CD) paradigm and Montague Grammar (MG) formalism. Although these two approaches may seem to be strange bedfellows indeed with often noticeably different perspectives, we have observed many commonalities. We begin with a brief description of the problem view and ontology of each and then create a formulation of CD as logic. We then give "conceptual" MG translations for the words in an example sentence which we use in approximating a word-based parsing style. Finally, we make some suggestions regarding further extensions of logic to introduce higher level representations.