Scaling Cognitive Linguistics: Formalisms for Language Understanding

Research in cognitive linguistics has yielded valuable semantic and pragmatic insights that should be incorporated by language understanding systems. These insights have not been expressed in a rigorous enough form to be implemented. We provide a unified formalism for representing four conceptual primitives: schemas, constructions, mental spaces, and maps. These primitives are motivated by the cognitive linguistics literature and can serve as the basis for scalable deep understanding systems.