Coupling Grammar and Knowledge Base: Range Concatenation Grammars and Description Logics

In this paper we introduce a novel framework to compute jointly syntactic parses and semantic representations of a written sentence. To achieve this goal, we couple a syntactico-semantic grammar and a knowledge base. The knowledge base is implemented in Description Logics, in a polynomial variant. The grammar is a Range Concatenation Grammar, which combines expressive power and polynomial parsing time, and allows external predicate calls. These external calls are sent to the knowledge base, which is able either to answer these calls or to learn new information, this process taking place during parsing. Thus, only semantically acceptable parses are built, avoiding the costly a posteriori semantic check of all syntactically correct parses.