The preference semantics family

Erkenntnis, 1989

A possible world semantics for preference is developed. The remainder operator (_1.) is used to give precision to the notion that two states of the world are as similar as possible, given a specified difference between them. A general structure is introduced for preference relations between states of affairs, and three types of such preference relations are defined. It is argued that one of them, "actual preference", corresponds closely to the concept of preference in informal discourse. Its logical properties are studied and shown to be plausible.

Scientific and Technical Information Processing, 2020

This paper discusses the basic aspects of the modern understanding of semantic computations, semantic technologies, and semantic applications in the field of artificial intelligence. The basic terminology accepted in the work is introduced and specific examples of semantic applications, including industrial-level ones, are given. The paper demonstrates that the basic components of semantic technologies of artificial intelligence are ontologies and semantic models of their use, semantic resources, and the semantic component of the technology. The semantic resources contain information about the semantics of words and other entities, as well as means of refinement of these semantics. The semantic component is used to create formal descriptions of the meanings of natural language entities and numerically evaluate their pairwise semantic similarity. The available semantic resources are discussed and a comparative analysis of them is given. Information on natural language entity types (primitives) is given and then used for the practical purposes of building models of formal description of the meaning of texts in various semantic applications. The latter components of description of text semantics constitute the contents of the second part of this paper.

Computer Languages, 1998

Preference logic grammars (PLGs) are introduced in this paper as a declarative means of resolving ambiguity in logic grammars. Preference logic grammars can be thought as extensions of de nite clause grammars (DCGs) and de nite-clause translation grammars (DCTGs). Just as DCGs and DCTGs can be directly translated into logic programs, PLGs can be translated into preference logic programs (PLPs), which we introduced in our earlier work. We discuss two applications of PLGs, optimal parsing and ambiguity resolution in programming-language and natural-language grammars. Optimal parsing is an extension of parsing wherein costs are associated with the di erent (ambiguous) parses of a string and the preferred parse is the one with least cost. Many problems can be viewed as optimal parsing problems, e.g., code generation, document layout, etc. In the area of natural language parsing, we illustrate the use of preference clauses for resolution of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities.

2020

First things first: What kind of book is this? Well, this is a textbook, an introduction to linguistic semantics; but it is an advanced introduction to the field, and it requires a certain degree of application on the part of the reader. (However, as we shall see, it is structured in a way that makes it easier to navigate than it might seem at first.) Apart from this, the book has the following two main "distinctive features": • It adopts a view of semantics as a component, or module, of the linguistic system, whose functioning is simulated by a corresponding linguistic model. Language is considered to be a set of rules that establish correspondences between meanings and their possible expressions, and the lion's share of this correspondence is taken care of by the semantic module. This is the approach put forward by the Meaning-Text linguistic theory and its language models, called, predictably, Meaning-Text models. • It is organized around a system of rigorous notions, specified by about eighty mathematical-like definitions. (Some of the notions that will be introduced are semanteme, semantic actant, communicative dominance, lexical function.) This system is deductive, consistent and formal; therefore, our exposition is also deductive and (strives to be) logically consistent. Four salient characteristics of the Meaning-Text approach, reflected in the way the present textbook is organized, need to be mentioned.

2010

This paper examines the framework of preference structures for the general treatment of information. First some fuzzy preference structures are introduced and then, by means of ambiguity and coherence measures, certain attributes of information can be explicitly identified and studied. This investigation is also relevant for a general discussion on fuzzy preference semantics.