Generation of first-order expressions from a broad coverage HPSG grammar

This paper describes an application for computing first-order semantic representations of English texts. It is based on a combination of hybrid shallow-deep components arranged within the middleware framework Heart of Gold. The shallow-deep semantic analysis employs Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics (RMRS) as a common semantic underspecification formalism for natural language processing components. In order to compute efficiently first-order representations of the input text, the intermediate RMRS results of the shallow-deep analysis are transformed into the dominance constraints formalism and resolved by the underspecification resolver UTool. First-order expressions can serve as a formal knowledge representation of natural text and thus can be utilized in knowledge engineering or textual reasoning. At the end of this paper, we describe their application for recognizing textual entailment.