Semantic Interpretation as Constrained Deduction

Some recent approaches to semantic interpretation for natural language involve the use of specialized deductive systems to specify how the meaning of a phrase is built from the meanings of its constituents. These systems extend the notion of compositionality in important ways needed for proper treatments of quantification, bound anaphora and certain interactions between semantic and pragmatic phenomena. I will discuss two particular instantiations of these ideas and relate them to categorial semantics, systems of type-checking rules for functional programs and semantic rules for programming languages. Part of this work was done at SRI International with Martha Pollack.