Knowledge Representation for Lexical Semantics: Is Standard First Order Logic Enough?

Natural language understanding applications such as interactive planning and face-to-face translation require extensive inferencing. Many of these inferences are based on the meaning of particular open class words. Providing a representation that can support such lexically-based inferences is a primary concern of lexical semantics. The representation language of first order logic has well-understood semantics and a multitude of inferencing systems have been implemented for it. Thus it is a prime candidate to serve as a lexical semantics representation. However, we argue that FOL, although a good starting point, needs to be extended before it can efficiently and concisely support all the lexically-based inferences needed.

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