Subject: fracas project ( computational semantics ) - deliverables , www home page

we would like to announce the world wide web page of the fracas project , at url : http : / / www . cogsci . ed . ac . uk / ~ fracas / fracas - a framework for computational semantics - is a two-year , lre - funded project studying theories of semantic interpretation and their application in natural language processing . the participants in the project are cwi amsterdam , sri cambridge , and the universities of edinburgh , saarbruecken , and stuttgart . the deliverables produced in the first year of the project are available : from our www site ; by ftp at ftp . cogsci . ed . ac . uk , directory pub / fracas ; or by sending mail to fracas @ cogsci . ed . ac . uk . ( a list of the deliverables is enclosed below . ) our www site includes pointers to the deliverables , to the www pages of the participating sites , to other projects in computational semantics , and to sites involved in research in natural language processing . for more information on the fracas project , contact : the fracas project administrator university of edinburgh centre for cognitive science 2 buccleuch place edinburgh eh8 9lw , scotland , uk fracas @ cogsci . ed . ac . uk the members of the fracas consortium . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - recent fracas deliverables - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - deliverable d7 , december 1994 : harmonizing the approaches our preliminary work towards harmonizing the approaches to semantics that are studied in fracas has led , on the one hand , to the compilation of a list of basic linguistic phenomena that a semantic theory has to account for ; this list has been used to arrive at the in-depth comparison among the semantic theories under study presented in deliverable 8 . on the other hand , we identified a set of basic semantic tools such as generalised quantifiers theory or abstraction that all of the theories under discussion make use of , although very often these tools are interpreted in different ways in the theories under discussion ( e . g . , although all theories have a notion of abstraction , the actual properties of the abstraction operation in these theories differ widely ) . both the list of basic linguistic phenomena and the set of basic semantic tools are discussed in this deliverable . we also address the issue of whether the problems that are important from a technical point of view are also important from the point of view of natural language processing applications , by identifying a set of forms of natural language use that one could reasonably expect an nlp system will have to deal with , and by verifying whether the technically challenging data can be encountered in these forms of text . - - - - - deliverable d8 , december 1994 : describing the approaches this deliverable contains a detailed discussion of the semantic tools used by the five semantic theories studied in the fracas project - discourse representation theory , update and dynamic logic , monotonic semantics , property theory , and situation theory - together with a presentation of the syntax / semantics interface adopted by each theory . - - - - - deliverable d9 , december 1994 : the state of the art in computational semantics : evaluating the descriptive capabilities of semantic theories in this deliverable we discuss the analyses of the linguistic phenomena discussed in deliverables d7 proposed by the five semantic theories studied in the fracas project and presented in deliverable d8 . - - - - - deliverable d10 , january 1994 : evaluating the state of the art in this deliverable we discuss the themes of the interface to semantics , underspecification , contextual reasoning , inference , and lexical semantics . we present a brief survey of some implemented systems that are based at least in part on some of the approaches to semantics that we have described in deliverables d8 and d9 . in order to ground discussion of the various themes and approaches in this deliverable we include an annotated text ( " eurodisney " ) that illustrates the range and variety of semantic phenomena to be found even in the simplest newspaper article . we classify the phenomena illustrated by this text so as to give some idea of what is within the state of the art , and what areas still require a good deal of research . the final section amplifies this latter theme , trying to summarise the future directions that computational semantics might need to take in order to achieve some of the goals sketched out earlier in the document .
