Section: Overall Objectives

Common basic resources

Even if our research primarily focuses on semantics and pragmatics, we nevertheless need syntax. More precisely, we need syntactic trees to start with. We consequently need grammars, lexicons and parsing algorithms to produce such trees. During the last years, we have developed the notion of interaction grammar [2] as a model of natural language syntax. This includes the development of a grammar for French [53], together with morpho-syntactic lexicons. We intend to continue this line of research and development. In particular, we want to increase the coverage of our French grammar, and provide our parser with more robust algorithms.

Further primary resources are needed in order to put at work a computational semantic analysis of utterances and discourses. As we want our approach to be as compositional as possible, we must develop lexicons annotated with semantic information. This opens the quite wide research area of lexical semantics.

Finally, when dealing with logical representations of utterance interpretations, the need for inference facilities is ubiquitous. Inference is needed in the course of the interpretation process, but also to exploit the result of the interpretation. Indeed, an advantage of using formal logic for semantic representations is the possibility of using logical inference to derive new information. From a computational point of view, however, logical inference may be highly complex. Consequently, we need to investigate which logical fragments can be used efficiently for natural language oriented inference.