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Towards Compositional Distributional Discourse Analysis

Bob Coecke‚ Giovanni de Felice‚ Dan Marsden and Alexis Toumi

Abstract

Categorical compositional distributional semantics provide a method to derive the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its individual words: the grammatical reduction of a sentence automatically induces a linear map for composing the word vectors obtained from distributional semantics. In this paper, we extend this passage from word-to-sentence to sentence-to-discourse composition. To achieve this we introduce a notion of basic anaphoric discourses as a mid-level representation between natural language discourse formalised in terms of basic discourse representation structures (DRS); and knowledge base queries over the Semantic Web as described by basic graph patterns in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This provides a high-level specification for compositional algorithms for question answering and anaphora resolution, and allows us to give a picture of natural language understanding as a process involving both statistical and logical resources.

ISSN
2075−2180
Journal
Electronic Proceedings of Theoretical Computer Science
Pages
1−12
Volume
283
Year
2018