Why do we ask questions? Because we want to have some information. But why this particular kind of information? Because only information of this particular kind is helpful to resolve the decision problem that the agent faces. In this paper I argue that questions are asked because their answers help to resolve the questioner’s decision problem, and that this assumption helps us to interpret inte...

We demonstrate how the type-theoretical approach to integrating syntax and semantics provides a straightforward, coherent and empirically accurate account of the basic facts of German word order. We focus on the order of adjuncts and arguments in the clause core for a representative range of German construction types: subordinate verb-nal, interrogative verb-initial, declarative verb-second, an...

In order to train machines to ‘understand’ natural language, we propose a meaning representation mechanism called E-HowNet to encode lexical senses. In this paper, we take interrogatives as examples to demonstrate the mechanisms of semantic representation and composition of interrogative constructions under the framework of E-HowNet. We classify the interrogative words into five classes accordi...