A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diagrammatic calculus for a functional model of natural language semantics, enhancing expressiveness and providing an efficient method for semantic computation using category theory and effect systems.

Contribution

It develops a novel diagrammatic calculus and formalizes a category-based type and effect system for natural language semantics, improving semantic modeling and computation.

Findings

The calculus effectively models parsing and effects handling.

The formal system distinguishes semantic differences between expressions.

The approach increases expressiveness over traditional denotation models.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions. We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.