Attributed Translation and the Semantics of Natural Language

When Knuth introduced attribute grammars, he observed that although "oriented primarily towards programming languages, the same methods appear to be relevant also in the study of natural languages". We demonstrate that his intuition is computationally justifiable, based on the algebraic equivalence of attribute grammars and Montague's theory of Universal Grammar. We discuss the relationship between attribute grammars, axiomatic theories and logic programming. We find that attribute grammars can be used to encode an algebraic specification of a natural language, attributed translation used to compute representations of the `meaning' of a sentence at different levels of abstraction, and that the specifications can be implemented as logic programs. We illustrate the application of non-deterministic attributed translation to natural language by the specification of a subset of Montague's ptq, including a treatment of some semantic ambiguities. 1 Introduction When Knuth introduced Attribut..