Section: Application Domains

Syntactic and semantic modeling

Participants : Lionel Clément, Renaud Marlet, Richard Moot [ correspondent ] , Sylvain Salvati.

The SIGNES team develops Grail, for multimodal categorial grammars, and XLFG, for Lexical-Functional Grammars as well as several different grammars with different levels of grammatical coverage for these formalisms, ranging from the specific - giving descriptions of linguistic phenomena such as French clitics and extraposition - to wide-coverage: a wide-coverage categorial grammar of Dutch has been developed while a similar wide-coverage grammar for French is currently is currently in the process of being constructed.

Categorial grammars have a transparent syntax-semantics interface by means of the Curry-Howard homomorphism, where a proof of the grammaticality of a sequence of typed words immediately gives us the way of combining the corresponding semantic expressions. It is our goal to develop this correspondence to allow for wide-coverage semantic analysis, using Pustejovsky's generative lexicon to help with semantic disambiguation.

A specific application we envisage, collaborating with researchers from Pau and Toulouse, is to perform syntactic, semantic and discourse analysis of a corpus reciting voyages through the region of the Pyrénées. Naturally, this chain of analysis will be specialized towards the application domain, benefiting from specific knowledge concerning the region, means of transport and the conventions of this style of literature.