AIC Seminar Series

In this talk I will deal with the issue of the semantic complexity of controlled fragments of English. Controlled fragments are ambiguity-free subsets of a natural language, designed mainly (but not exclusively) for authoring and querying ontologies. I define, following I. Pratt-Hartmann, their semantic complexity as the computational complexity of reasoning with their formal semantics first- and higher-order meaning representations. I will present several families of declarative and interrogative fragments and discuss their semantic complexity. I will conclude by generalizing the results to combinations of English constructs that give rise to tractable and intractable semantic complexity, and by pointing out possible lines of further research.

Camilo Thorne is currently a postdoctoral research assistant at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy, where he successfully defended his PhD in 2010. His interests lie in the computational semantics of natural language and in particular in applying computational logic to the study of semantic complexity in natural languages and their fragments.

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