Inference and Word Meaning

Last week we saw that it is possible to construct an underspecified semantic representation of sentence meaning compositionally in (R)MRS. However, although much of this representation is motivated by work on formal semantics (e.g. generalized quantifiers), (R)MRS itself is not a logic with proof and model theory. Rather it describes sets of trees of well-formed formulas in a neo-Davidsonian version of FOL extended with generalized quantifiers. This implies that if you want to do inference and actual interpretation then it is still necessary to expand out the set of formulas and work with these. For instance, given the input (1a), a parser should produce a mostly resolved (R)MRS like (1b).