A short guide to Blackburn

1
Semantic Grammar

• A short guide to Blackburns Grammar of English

2
Outline

• Blackburns Grammar
• Syntactic Rules
• Lexical Rules
• Word Lexicon
• Semantic Lexicon
• See englishGrammar.pl in BB1 folder

3
Coordination

• Coordinated consitutents are those that are
  combined with a coordinator (e.g. coordinating
  conjunction such as and)
• Vincent and Mia
• Issues with coordination include
• Category of coordinated constituents
• Agreement of coordinated constituent in
  particular number
• Left recursion

4
Coordination

• The natural way to write a coordination rule is
  thisX -gt X coordinator X e.g.
• NP -gt NP and NP
• This is left recursive because the first LH
  category is identical to the LHS category of the
  rule
• Left recursion causes problems in Prolog

5
Syntax Rules

• s(coordno,semSem)--gt
• np(coord_,numNum,gap,semNP),
• vp(coord_,inffin,numNum,gap,semVP),
• combine(sSem,npNP,vpVP).
• Standard CF skeleton
• Features of the form attributevalue
• Semantic operations

6
Lexical Rules

• noun(semSem)--gt
• lexEntry(noun,symbolSym,syntaxWord),
• Word,
• semLex(noun,symbolSym,semSem).
• The rule makes reference to two externally
  defined predicates (in curly brackets).
• lexEntry the predicate for lexical entries
• semLex semantic macro which constructs the
  semantic representation

7
Semantic Rules

• .... rewrite part of rule .... combine(sSem,np
  NP,vpVP).
• Here, using the rule, combine simply applies the
  semantic representation NP to the semantic
  representation VP by
• creating the term app(NP,VP)
• betaConverting that term

8
The Lexicon (see englishLexicon.pl)

• The general format of every lexical entry is
  this
• lexEntry(Cat,Features) where
• Cat is a syntactic category and
• Features are a collection of attributevalue
  pairs
• Example
• lexEntry(noun,symbolcar,syntaxcar).
• lexEntry(pn,symbolmia,syntaxmia).

9
The Semantic Lexicon 1

• semLex(pn,M)-
• M symbolSym,
• semlam(P,app(P,Sym)).
• semLex(noun,M)-
• M symbolSym,
• semlam(X,Formula),
• compose(Formula,Sym,X).

10
The Semantic Lexicon 2

• semLex(iv,M)-
• M symbolSym,
• semlam(X,Formula),
• compose(Formula,Sym,X).
• semLex(tv,M)-
• M symbolSym,
• semlam(K,lam(Y,app(K,lam(X,Formula)))),
  
• compose(Formula,Sym,Y,X).