This thesis is about the problem of representing sentential meaning in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics obtains the meanings of words through their usage, based on the hypothesis that words occurring in similar contexts will have similar meanings. In this framework, words are modeled as distributions over contexts and are represented as vectors in high dimensional space. Compo...

Since Paul Broca’s discovery (1861) of an association between fluent, articulate speech and the left frontal operculum, research into the neural bases of language has uncovered a complex brain network substrate for the phonological, lexical, semantic, and syntactic functions of normal language comprehension and production (for a review, see Martin, 2003). A particularly salient feature of this ...

In a series of recent papers (Cristea and Webber, 1997; Webber and Joshi, 1998; Webber et al., 1999a; Webber et al., 1999b), we have argued for starting the analysis of discourse in the same way as one starts the analysis of a clause, looking at how its syntax and semantics project from the lexicon. This is complementary to the issue of discourse pragmatics – how these small syntactic units of ...

In this paper we present a logical system able to compute the semantics of both declarative and interrogative sentences. Our proposed analysis takes place at both the sentential and at the discourse level. We use syntactic inference on the sentential level for declarative sentences, while the discourse level comes into play for our treatment of questions. Our formalisation uses a type logic sen...

A syntactic machinery is developed for π-institutions based on the notion of a category of natural transformations on their sentence functors. Rules of inference, similar to the ones traditionally used in the sentential logic framework to define the best known sentential logics, are, then, introduced for π-institutions. A π-institution is said to be rule-based if its closure system is induced b...