Recommended References

Formal Semantics

  1. Bob Carpenter, “Type-Logical Semantics”, 1998. link, and also available here. This textbook gives a comprehensive introduction to formal semantics and how to actually calculate the semantic formulas from the sentences. There is also an implementation.
  2. L.T.F. Gamut, “Logic, Language, and Meaning: Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar”, 1991. link. This textbook gives an introduction to the important issues of linguistic semantics and the philosophy of language.
  3. Hand Kamp and Uwe Reyle, “From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory”, 1993. link. An intorudction to formal semantics taking into account a discourse of more than one sentence, using DRT.
  4. Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, “Handbook of Logic and Language”, 1997. link. A survey of advanced topics in semantics.

Computational Semantics

  1. Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos, Courses in Computational Semantics:
    • “Representation and Inference for Natural Language”, CSLI publications ,2005. link. Here is a previous version to lecture notes, 2nd North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information. 
    • Their paper “Computational Semantics“, Theoria 18(1): 27-45, 2003.
    • “Working with Discourse Representation Theory”, available at www.blackburnbos.org.These textbooks show explicitly how to get from surface sentences to final FOL representations of their meaning, taking into account scope ambiguity (of quantifiers and operators), anaphora resolution, and some conversational maxims. The book comes with an implementation in prolog. 
      An extended implementation: DORIS 2001.
  2. Another online course on computational semantics along the same lines: link.
  3. The Core Language Engine, 1992, edited by Hiyan Alshawi. link.
    This is a description of a large scale domain independent NLP engine which takes into account many linguistic phenomena. However, the system developed is proprietary and is unavailiable.
  4. A Framework for Computational Semantics (FraCaS), 1996. link1, link2.
    A most extensive survey of work in formal and computational semantics done by a consortium of researchers in the field. Includes attempts to integrate all the approaches, and a set of tools (still not available for distribution). A very important effort and achievement in the field.

Other Sources

Other important frameworks (syntax + semantics) to know about:

  1. LFG and Glue Semantics and the XLE project.
    • Glue Semantics bibliography.
    • Comprehensive overview of LFG: Mary Dalrymple, “Lexical Functional Grammar”, Volume 34 in the Syntax and Semantics Series, Academic Press, 2001. link.
  2. HPSG and the Lingo project.

Conferences and Groups

  • Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Automated Reasoning (NLPAR2013 @ LPNMR2013). link.
  • The ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM). link.
  • The Association for Logic, Language and Information. link. And their summer school ESSLLI.
  • International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS). link.
  • Inference in Computational Semantics conference (ICoS). link.
  • Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics conference. link.
  • Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference. link.
  • West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. link.
  • Amsterdam Colloquium. link.
  • International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications (CLAW). link.