Semantics

• The standard linguistic hierachy (natural not formal) is syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
• Semantics is about the meaning of a sentence, or other linguistic entity.
• One simple way to represent the meaning of a sentence is a verb frame. For example (see (actor I) (object girl) (instrument telescope)).
• However, it's not complete.
• What is girl? Reference resolution and symbol grounding.
• Schank proposed that there were a small number of primitive actions (verbs). (R. Schank and R. Abelson (1977) Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum)
• That's not widely agreed, though is frequently used.
• Still what about nouns.
• Even more what about sentences, paragraphs and books.
• Meaning is not really understood.
• A good approximation is the bag of words technique. For example Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) uses a bag of words.
• I'm trying to address this symbol grounding problem with my work in Cell Assemblies