Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the study of natural language understanding, the reductionist approach has been commonly used by A, I. researchers. Here we develop a technique for parsing based on this approach. W e use a set of semantic primitives to represent word meanings and utilize patterns of sentences for mapping sentences onto meaning structures. To assist the parsing process,w e develop semantic mappings for primitive sentences, semantic transformations for decomposing complex sentences using function word sand axioms that encode world knowledge. W e then explore the application of our approach to the word polysemy problem.