A General Reasoning Scheme for Underspecified Representations

Underspecified semantic representations have attracted increasing interest within computational linguistics. Several formalisms have been developed that allow to represent sentence or text meanings with that degree of specificity that is determined by the context of interpretation. As the context changes they must allow for (partial) disambiguation steps performed by a process of refinement that goes hand in hand with the construction algorithm. And as the interpretation of phrases often1 relies on deductive principles and thus any construction algorithm must be able to integrate the results of deductive processes, any semantic formalism should be equipped with a deductive component that operates directly on its semantic forms.