A compositional DRS-based formalism for NLP applications

Abstract

This paper describes and discusses the formalism which forms the backbone of semantic processing in the Verbmobil spoken dialogue translation project. In the first part, the theoretical core of the formalism is presented: lambda-DRT, a compositional version of Discourse Representation Theory. The main part describes the implementation of lambda-DRT, as a worked out semantic representation language for the Verbmobil project, which is designed to meet the special requirements of the application. Finally, we discuss future extensions and modications of the formalism.