March 1, 16-17:30, Erasmusbuilding 14.01

Crit Cremers, Leiden

Abstract: The Leiden language machine Delilah tries to associate parsed and generated sentences of Dutch with formal semantic representations. It exploits a rigid categorial grammar to steer the unification of complex symbols. A demo-version of Delilah for Windows is downloadable at homepage.mac.com/ccremers/FileSharing2.html.
In the talk a few features, problems and perspectives of the syntax-semantic interface Delilah represents will be adressed. These include:

• the role of quasi logical form in Delilah and the consequences for compositionality
• the implementation of event semantics, in particular to nominalizations
• the computation of anaphora and the need for structure
• the construction and computation of larger lexical units