From compositional to systematic semantics
By Wlodek W. Zadrozny. 1994
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semanties, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is required to be “systematic” (that is, the meaning function cannot be arbitrary, but must belong to some class), it is possible to distinguish between compositional and noncompositional semantics. As a result, we believe that the paper clarifies the concept of compositionality and opens the possibility of making systematic formal comparisons of different systems of grammar.
Subfields: Natural Language Processing
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Natural Language Processing
- Klaus Greff
- Dieuwke Hupkes
- Sjoerd van Steenkiste
- Elia Bruni
- Verna Dankers
- J. Urgen Schmidhuber
- Mathijs Mul
- Francis Jeffry Pelletier
Citations in the corpus
- Compositionality Decomposed: How do Neural Networks Generalise? (2019, background): “As a consequence, the interpretation of the principle of compositionality depends on the type of constraints that are put on the semantic and syntactic theories involved (see e.g. [Janssen, 1983; Zadrozny, 1994]).”
- On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks (2020, background): “On the one hand, Zadrozny (1994) demonstrates how a function can be constructed that maps arbitrary meaning to any expression without violating compositionality.”
- The Principle of Semantic Compositionality (1994, background): “1997), and other proofs with much the same import can be found in van Benthem (1984) and Zadrozny (1994) .”