Engineering Grammars with Prolog

Abstract

Within this chapter we explain how to write natural language grammars expressed in clausal logic. The notion of definite clause grammars (DCG’s) is behind this as a paradigm for organizing the knowledge required in understanding, which allows efficient parsing. In some exercises syntactic and semantic knowledge are applied concurrently to fill a logical structure that contains all the information for semantic interpretation. The syntax plays a guiding role in the processing, and the logical structure describes the meaning of the corresponding sentence by assembling well-formed formulae belonging to a logical system for representing a subset of the natural language considered.