Computer Interpretation of Chinese Declarative Sentences Based on Situation Semantics

In this paper, we present a method for interpreting Chinese declarative sentences by Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), which is a unification-based grammatical formalisms with situation semantics as its semantic theory. The primary reasons for using such an approach are that HPSG performs syntactic and semantic analysis in an integrated way and that situation semantics provides a realistic and sound theoretic foundation. There are two kinds of feature structures used in the semantic representations of words, phrases and sentences. The first type of feature structures is the basic type which consists of quantifier, indexed-object, circumstance, and description types. They are used to represent the meanings of lexical signs and unquantified phrasal signs. The second type of feature structure is the complex type, which is are composed of quantified-object types and quantified-circumstance types. They are applied to represent quantified phrasal signs. The process of semantic interpretation is carried out by combining the semantic representations of heads and complements/adjuncts according to their types and then generating a new semantic representation for the larger phrase. A practical system is designed with a set of examples.