Using a Computational Situation Theoretic Language to Investigate Contemporary Semantic Theories

One of the problems with contemporary semantic theories of natural language, such as Situation Semantics, Discourse Representation Theory and Dynamic Semantics, is that although they address similar semantic phenomena their widely diiering syntax and semantics make it diicult to compare their treatments of similar natural language semantic phenomena. It would be useful to describe these diierent semantic theories in a common framework so they could be more easily compared, and in the long run allow cross-pollination of their various treatments. In this extended abstract I will give a brief overview of a language called astl. Astl is based on fundamental aspects of situation theory. It is designed to be used as a metalanguage for describing aspects of natural language semantic theories, ooering a common framework for the description of semantic theories. Because astl has an implementation, descriptions in astl can be used directly to derive semantic translations of the theories they describe. Also because astl is given a situation theoretic semantics it ooers a semantics for any description written in it, which allows closer comparison of treatments in a theory. Apart from the advantages of close comparison of theories (e.g. DRT and Dynamic Semantics) that astl allows, we will also discuss what makes astl suitable as a framework and how it compares with other possible semantic meta-theories (e.g. Prolog, feature systems, etc.).