[Review of the book Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, by Plackburn, & Jos]

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Pelletier, Francis J.

• Introduction: Computational semantics is the study of how to represent meaning in a way that computers can use. For the authors of this textbook, this study includes the representation of the meaning of natural language in logic formalisms, the recognition of certain relations that hold within this formalization (such as synonymy, consistency, and implication), and the computational implementation of all this. I think that, while there probably are not many courses devoted to computational semantics, this book could profitably be incorporated into more traditional computational linguistics courses, especially when two courses are offered serially. The material here could be spread out and integrated into parts of a more standard pair of these courses, and it would result in a substantial widening of the knowledge that students come away with from these courses.

• Date created

  2006

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Book Reviews
  • Computational Semantics
  • Natural Language
  • Logic

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3474760M

• License

  © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.