Formal methods for the analysis of the meaning of natural language expressions have long been restricted to the ivory tower built by semanticists, logicians, and philosophers of language. It is only in exceptional cases that these methods make their way straight into open-domain natural language processing tools. Recently, however, this situation has changed. Thanks to (ⅰ) the development of treebanks, i.e., large collections of texts annotated with syntactic structures, (ⅱ) robust statistical parsers trained on such treebanks, and (ⅲ) the development of large-scale semantic lexica such as WordNet [1], VerbNet [2], PropBank [3], and FrameNet [4], we now have witnessed the development of wide-coverage systems that are able to produce formal semantic representations for open-domain texts.
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