Natural Logic and Semantics
By Larry Moss. 2009
25 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Two of the main motivations for logic and (model-theoretic) semantics overlap in the sense that both subjects are concerned with representing features of natural language meaning and inference. At the same time, the two subjects have other motivations and so are largely separate enterprises. This paper returns to the topic of language and logic, presenting to semanticists natural logic, the study of logics for reasoning with sentences close to their surface form. My goal is to show that the subject already has some results that natural language semanticists should find interesting. At the same time it leads to problems and perspectives that I hope will interest the community. One leading idea is that the target logics for translations should have a decidable validity problem, ruling out full first-order logic. I also will present a fairly new result based on the transitivity of comparative adjective phrases that suggests that in addition to ‘meaning postulates’ in semantics, we will also need to posit ‘proof principles’.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics, 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 Artificial Intelligence
- Kyle Richardson
- Peter Clark
- Oyvind Tafjord
- Ashish Sabharwal
- Lasha Abzianidze
- Tushar Khot
- Mohit Bansal
- Hannaneh Hajishirzi
In Computational Theory and Mathematics
In Natural Language Processing
- Kyle Richardson
- Peter Clark
- Oyvind Tafjord
- Ashish Sabharwal
- Lasha Abzianidze
- Tushar Khot
- Mohit Bansal
- Jonathan Berant
Citations in the corpus
- Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language (2020, methodology): “Our work can be seen as evaluating transformers for (a subset of) Natural Logic [ MacCartney and Manning, 2014; Moss, 2010 ] , i.e., formal inference over statements expressed in language.”
- A Natural Proof System for Natural Language (2017, background): “Research presented in Moss (2010a) and references therein departed from syllogistic logic and moved towards natural logic by extending the formal system with certain linguistic constructions and class of words.”