Discourse representation theory

In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract mental representations (discourse representation structures, DRS) within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to handle meaning across sentence boundaries. DRT was created by Hans Kamp in 1981.[1] A very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim in 1982, under the name of File Change Semantics (FCS).[2] Discourse representation theories have been used to implement semantic parsers[3] and natural language understanding systems.[4][5][6]

  1. ^ Kamp, Hans and Reyle, U. 1993. From Discourse to Logic. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
  2. ^ Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach (2003). Semantics: Noun phrase classes. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-26635-2.
  3. ^ Guzmán, Francisco, et al. "Using discourse structure improves machine translation evaluation." Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Vol. 1. 2014.
  4. ^ Ahrenberg, Lars, Arne Jönsson, and Nils Dahlbäck. Discourse representation and discourse management for a natural language dialogue system. Universitetet i Linköping/Tekniska Högskolan i Linköping. Institutionen för Datavetenskap, 1991.
  5. ^ Rapaport, William J. "Syntactic semantics: Foundations of computational natural-language understanding." Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons. 1994. 225-273.
  6. ^ Juan Carlos Augusto; Reiner Wichert; Rem Collier; David Keyson, Albert A. Salah and Ah-Hwee Tan (23 November 2013). Ambient Intelligence: 4th International Joint Conference, AmI 2013, Dublin, Ireland, December 3–5, 2013. Proceedings. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-03647-2.