The Algebra of Lexical Semantics

The current generative theory of the lexicon relies primarily on tools from formal language theory and mathematical logic. Here we describe how a different formal apparatus, taken from algebra and automata theory, resolves many of the known problems with the generative lexicon. We develop a finite state theory of word meaning based on machines in the sense of Eilenberg [11], a formalism capable of describing discrepancies between syntactic type (lexical category) and semantic type (number of arguments). This mechanism is compared both to the standard linguistic approaches and to the formalisms developed in AI/KR.

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