Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, II: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, Vancouver, Canada, 17-19 August, 1987

Natural language semantics and pragmatics are now two major fields in linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. With the development of large and efficient Prolog interpreters and compilers and with the expansion of the theoretical aspects of logic programming, the study of natural language semantics and related pragmatic aspects is now becoming a very attractive topic. The proceedings of this workshop reflect these trends. The papers cover almost all the current research fields in natural language, including: morphology, syntax, parser design, generation, feature checking and specification, semantic representations and construction of cooperative responses. Articles on syntax deal with constraints to parsing and generation, rule pruning and comparison of logic-based language systems. The material on the compilers involves functional logic grammars and unification-based grammars. The work on semantics investigates logico-semantic induction, data semantics, comparatives, conceptual graphs, discourse representation, and graphs. Papers on pragmatics discuss disambiguation, cooperation with the user through integrity constraints, and question interpretation through epistemic reasoning. Panel discussions are centered around future directions of research as well as comparisons between different points of view about actual research projects.