The other syntax: Approaching natural language semantics through logical form composition

This paper presents a comprehensive, constraint-based formalism for natural language syntax that supports genuinely semantic interpretation. It does so by carefully distinguishing the semantically referential parts of constituency in phrase structure from those that reason about word order and contiguity, by assigning logical expressions to phrases that are drawn from the common semantic language of two-sorted type theory (Ty2), by defining an extension of typed feature logic (TFL) for making underspecified descriptions of these semantic terms, and by allowing for general inference to take place over these logical expressions. Both well-formedness in the underspecified semantic description language and real-world inference among the fully resolved Ty2 terms denoted by those descriptions can be conducted by closure over algebras of Constraint Handling Rules [1] in a logic programming implementation.