INTRODUCTION

Computational semantics lies at the intersection of three disciplines: linguistics, logic and computer science. A natural language system should provide a coherent framework for relating linguistic form and semantic content, and the relationship must be algorithmic.

There have been several important pairwise interactions, as detailed below, between linguistics and computer science, linguistics and logic, and logic and computer science. The point of computational semantics is the insistence on relating all three simultaneously. This is necessary from a cognitive as well as a knowledge engineering point of view.

LINGUISTICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

N. Chomsky's Syntactic Structures [34] signalled a renewal of theoretical linguistics, which for some of its theoretical tools drew upon automata and formal language theory. A link was soon established with the emerging computer science, leading to a vigorous field of computational linguistics, focusing on questions of linguistic form, i.e. syntax and morphology. This has proved to be of lasting value for the study of both natural and programming languages.

LINGUISTICS AND LOGIC

Language is more than linguistic form. R. Montague, in a series of papers starting from 1967 (see Thomason [219]), showed how to use the insights from logical semantics to ‘tame’ the meaning component of a natural language. Montague's tool was the model theory of higher order intensional logic. And he convincingly demonstrated how the use of this model theory could explain a wide range of linguistic phenomena.