Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning in linguistic expressions, including how words, phrases, and sentences convey and combine meanings.
Compositionality: The principle that the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts and how they are combined. It explains how sentence meaning can be built from word meanings and grammatical structure.
Montague grammar: A formal approach that applies tools from logic to the syntax and semantics of natural language. It gives a precise compositional account of how English sentences receive meanings.
Pragmatics: The study of how context, intention, and conversational practice shape language interpretation. It examines communicated meanings that are not fully determined by linguistic expressions alone.
Named-entity recognition: The identification and classification of names for people, places, organizations, and other entities in text. It applies reference-sensitive language analysis to locate and classify expressions in documents.
Gottlob Frege: A German mathematician and philosopher whose work founded modern logic and shaped theories of meaning and reference. His distinction between sense and reference remains central to analyses of linguistic meaning.
Lexical semantics: The study of word meaning and relations among words, including synonymy, ambiguity, and hyponymy. It focuses semantic analysis on individual words and their relations.
Lambda calculus: A formal system for expressing functions and their application through abstraction and substitution. It represents the functions that combine meanings in compositional semantic analyses.
Speech act theory: The study of actions performed through utterances, such as promising, requesting, and declaring. It shifts attention from sentence content to what speakers do by saying it.
Word-sense disambiguation: The task of selecting which meaning of an ambiguous word is intended in a particular context. It uses surrounding linguistic information to distinguish a word's possible lexical meanings.
Bertrand Russell: A British philosopher and logician whose work developed influential theories of descriptions, reference, and logic. His analysis of definite descriptions addressed how expressions refer and contribute to propositions.