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<Paper uid="W91-0204">
  <Title>Interpretation without Semantics</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="34" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, I attempt to relate the NLP issue of the relationship between lexical semantics and knowledge representation to the claims made by Geoffrey Nunberg in The Pragmatics of Reference \[1\]. His basic claim is that interpretation of lexical items in an utterance is almost entirely a pragmatic matter and not one related to language-specific semantics. He uses a theory of referring functions to account for the variety of uses to which any one lexical item may be put.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Though phrased in linguistic terminology, the corollary of this thesis for NLP is that purely linguistic lexical information is quite limited (perhaps only syntactic part of speech and phonological information), with encyclopedic and world-knowledge information constituting most of the knowledge base of the system. In addition, Nunberg claims that the connection between these linguistic symbols and the information in the knowledge base must be quite flexible (and, perhaps unspecified).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The first claim echoes those viewpoints which see no justification for differentiating lexical semantics and world knowledge. It is the second claim that differentiates what might be called a &amp;quot;radical semantics&amp;quot; position from a &amp;quot;radical pragmatics&amp;quot; approach. In both cases, lexical knowledge is treated identically with world knowledge. In the first case, however, this information is regarded as &amp;quot;semantics&amp;quot;, knowledge about the meaning of the lexical items. (Langacker \[2\], Lakoff \[3\], Martin \[4\] and Pustejovsky \[5\] can be seen as typical of this approach.) In the second, it is regarded purely as information about the world and the connection between the use of lexical items in language and this world knowledge is the result of pragmatic interpretation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Since it is this second claim that would require the most radical change in NLP systems, I shall concentrate on this aspect of Nunberg's approach. In the remainder of this position paper I will first restate some of the arguments of Nunberg for such a pragmatic approach to lexical interpretation. Then I shall set out in brief the approach I take in formalizing this approach within a typical Montague Grammar.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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