Towards a Computable Model of Meaning-Text Relations Within a Natural Sublanguage

Abstract

A computable linguistic model is proposed for relating texts to their meanings within a natural sublanguage of English (stock market reports). Oriented networks are used to represent meanings which are first established by a linguistic analysis of the paraphrase sets found in the sublanguage. Several types of correspondence rules map fragments of the semantic network onto portions of deep syntactic dependency trees in a recursive process which does not consume the network, but rather uses it as a kind of blueprint. Additional representation levels (not illustrated) are required to relate these trees to final texts through surface syntactic and morphological stages. Important features of this model are (1) its capacity to represent the full paraphrastic power of language within an interesting natural sublanguage, and (2) Its bidirectionality, allowing the modelling of both analysis and synthesis of texts. Implementation is planned first as a device for synthesizing stock market reports (SMRAD system), but later possible applications include translation or paraphrasing of texts from this natural domain.