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<Paper uid="C96-1024">
  <Title>Compositional Semantics in Verbmobil</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="131" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Contemporary syntactic theories are normally unification-based and commonly aim at specifying as much as possible of the peculiarities of specific language constructions in the lexicon rather than in the &amp;quot;traditional&amp;quot; grammar rules. When doing semantic interpretation within such a framework, we want a formalism which allows for  Compositionality may be defined rather strictly so that the interpretation of a phrase always should be the (logical) sum of the interpretations of its subphrases. A semantic formalism being compositional in this strict sense would also trivially be monotonic, since no destructive *This research was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Technology (BMBF) under grant number 01 IV 101 R.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> changes would need to be undertaken while building the interpretation of a phrase from those of its subphrases) However, compositionality is more commonly defined in a wider sense, allowing for other mappings from subphrase-to-phrase interpretation than the sum, as long as the mappings are such that the interpretation of the phrase still is a function of the interpretations of the subphrases. A common such mapping is to let the interpretation of the phrase be the interpretation of its (semantic) head modified by the interpretations of the adjuncts. If this modification is done by proper unification, the monotonicity of the formalism will still be guaranteed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In many applications for Computational Linguistics, for example when doing semantically based translation -- as in Verbmobil, the German national spoken language translation project described in Section 2 -- a complete interpretation of an utterance is not always needed or even desirable. Instead of trying to resolve ambiguities, for example the ones introduced by different possible scopings of quantifiers, the interpretation of the ambiguous part is left unresolved. The semantic formalism of such a system should thus allow for the underspecification of these unresolved ambiguities (but still allow for them to be resolved in a monotonic way, of course). An underspecified form representing an utterance is then the representation of a set of meanings, all the possible interpretations of the utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The rest of the paper is structured as follows.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Section 2 gives an overview of the Verbmobil Project. Section 3 introduces LUD (description Language for Underspecified Discourse 'representations), the semantic formalism we use. Section 4 compares our approach to that of others for simi1 More formally, a semantic representation is monotonic iff the interpretation of a category on the right side of a rule subsumes the interpretation of the left side of the nile.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  lar tasks. The actual implementation is described in Section 5, which also discusses coverage and points to some areas of further research. Finally, Section 6 sums up the previous discussion.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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