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<Paper uid="P92-1005">
  <Title>MONOTONIC SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The monotonicity property of unification based grammar formalisms is perhaps the most important factor in their widespread use for grammatical description and parsing. Monotonicity guarantees that the grammatical analysis of a sentence can proceed incrementally by combining information from rules and lexical entries in a nondestructive way. By contrast, aspects of semantic interpretation, such as reference and quantifier scope resolution, are often realised by non-monotonic operations involving loss of information and destructive manipulation of semantic representations. A 'twolevel' approach to semantic interpretation tends to result (Bronneberg el al. 1980), where an initial, underspecified representation is transformed into a separate, specified, representation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The goal of the work described here is to provide a model for semantic interpretation that is fully monotonic in both linguistic and contextual aspects of interpretation, and which employs just one level of semantic representation -- Quasi Logical Form (QLF). Contextual resolution of under*This work on the Core Language Engine was carried out under CLARE, a collaborative project involving BP Research, British Aerospace, British Telecom, Cambridge University, SRI International and the UK Defence Research Agency. The project is funded in part by the UK Department of Trade and Industry.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> specified QLF expressions involves the instantiation of QLF meta-variables. The semantics for the QLF formalism makes the denotation of a QLF formula a partial function to truth-values, with resolution leading to a monotonic extension of the denotation function. We believe that there are several advantages to the approach taken, including: null  The QLF formalism is a development of Alshawi 1990. As before, underspecified QLFs are produced on the basis of a unification grammar. Previously, QLF resolution was only partially monotonic; full monotonicity required changes to the original QLF formalism and the resolution and scoping processes. These changes have been implemented in a further development of the Core Language Engine (Alshawi 1992), although we will ignore most implementation issues in the present paper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the syntax of the QLF language and Section 3 gives some illustrative examples of monotonic QLF resolution. Sections 4 and 5 present the semantics of the QLF formalism. Section 6 discusses the relationship between monotonic interpretation, Pereira's categorial semantics (Pereira 1990), and context change approaches to semantics. Section 7 mentions some benefits of using QLF-like representations in implementing natural language systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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