Natural Language Processing, Lexicon and Semantics

While the design of a fully general procedure for semantico-pragmatic interpretation of natural language texts does not seem to be feasible with current scientific knowledge and technology, the more practical microworld based approaches lack generality and portability. A compromise between generality and practicality might lie in the use of an intermediate level of presentation ("pseudo-semantics"), which can be derived from syntactic representations and lexical information by means of a general procedure. Domain-dependent rules for semantico-pragmatic interpretation can then be applied to these representations, insulating syntactic processing from details of the application domain.